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Author: Greg Swann (page 170 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

December 6, 2006

And then there were ten . . .

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Today we add a tenth member to our team of webloggers, Dan Green of The Mortgage Reports:

Dan Green is Certified Mortgage Planning Specialist working out of Chicago. In an industry too well known for its churn and burn methods, Dan and his team take a thoughtful, deliberative approach to mortgage lending.

We’re delighted to have Dan with us. If you’ve followed his weblog, you know that he writes in a way that makes arcane topics not just clear but fascinating. And he certainly plugs a gap in our line-up, bringing us an expertise in the lending side of the real estate transaction.

I was email-interviewed yesterday by Jim Cronin of The Real Estate Tomato. We went through the history of BloodhoundBlog and our goals for the future. The advent of Dan Green is hinted at, and it is by adding great webloggers like Dan that we will achieve those goals.

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December 5, 2006

Ask the Broker: Can buyers negotiate for the buyer’s agent’s commission to be paid to them instead . . . ?

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We have been focussing on new construction and have been meeting directly with builders and their agents. We have not been represented by a buyer’s agent up to now. Our strategy has been to save on commission by dealing with a single party.

We recently looked at several resales where we sought out the listing agents, with the same commission saving strategy. We found a home we like, but the seller is being relocated by his company. The seller will be reimbursed for a full commission paid to the seller’s realtor. The normal strategy of reducing the commission has disappeared as any reduction in commission will ultimately result in less money in the seller’s pocket.

First, I’d be curious where you learned your commission reducing strategy. Is it something you read somewhere or learned at a seminar, or did you work it out on your own? I ask, because, while it is not impossible, it seems to me to be very implausible.

A new home builder pays a buyer’s agent’s commission as a gratuity to that agent for making the introduction. In Arizona, licensees are expected to actually represent their new-home buyers, but the builder certainly doesn’t want or expect this. I can drop off a party just like dumping the kiddies off at day-care and still get paid. I do not endorse this way of working — just the opposite — but the builder would have no problem with it.

But: Because the builder is paying an agent to introduce the buyer to the builder, why would the builder pay you anything. You’re already there for free. The sine qua non event the builder might be willing to pay me to effect has already been effected without any need to pay a bribe. This is why builders won’t let me represent you if you show up at a new home subdivision without me: The introduction has already taken place. What do they need me for?

In fact, right now — and uniquely right now — you just might be able to get builders to cough up some extra coin to get your name on the Read more

December 4, 2006

Monday links: I’m from Missouri . . .

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Two of the posts in the Carnival of Real Estate really popped for me. Toby Boyce at Sadie’s Take on Delaware Ohio explores the reasons why a buyer’s market in real estate seems so bizarre. And Bryant Tutas at ActiveRain teaches sellers what they knew all along.

Have I mentioned that Kris Berg is a brilliant real estate weblogger? Steve Berg is no slouch, either, but he suffers Mercury’s misfortune. Mercury is an amazing planet. It was fascinating to Einstein. But just when you’re ready to take account of all of Mercury’s unique features, you catch a glimpse of its golden-haloed neighbor and all conversation stops. Unjustly eclipsed. It ain’t fair, it just is.

The Real Estate Bloggers wonder how the shift in power in Washington will affect real estate. Not my ideal state of affairs, but gridlock can effect the Metternichean stasis: “Govern and change nothing.” More freedom? Bring it on! Lower taxes? Even better! Likelihood? Zero. Absent those, few if any changes in the laws give people the opportunity to plan in a stable environment. We could have done better before this. The challenge now is not to do worse.

Kevin Boer at Three Oceans Real Estate is looking for shady agent stories. As rough as I can be on my fellow practitioners, in the abstract, I tend not to believe stories like these. They always seem to involve friend-of-a-friend transactions, the kind of Baconian distances that induce spontaneous telephone games. I’ve run into dumb Realtors and lazy Realtors. I’ve run into Realtors who thought I was a dumb Realtor. I’ve run into a lot of Realtors who have never discovered that it possible for Realtors to pay small sums of money to make trivial sticking points go away. And I have run into a very great many Realtors who were smart, honorable, efficient and a joy to work with. So: If you want to cry to me about abuse, show me the bruises, show me the scars, show me the hospital records, show me the police report, show me the trial transcript. Everybody has a sob story. I’m from Missouri…

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December 4, 2006

The Carnival of Real Estate…

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…is up at The Property Monger. Host Jon Ernest celebrates the Carnival’s twenty-first-iversary by awarding 21 winners, split across two days. Grand prize goes to Northern Michigan Real Estate Blog with an argument about last week’s NAR anti-trust ruling.

We entered Russell Shaw’s essay on The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if it made the second string at The Property Monger. That post was one of the selections for The Carnival of Marketing, though, hosted this week by The Real Estate Tomato.

Cathleen Collins is dictator-for-now in judging which BloodhoundBlog post to enter in The Carnivals of Real Estate, Marketing and Business. I stuck her with the job because I can trust her to judge fairly among our many very talented webloggers, without playing favorites in my direction. It’s more responsibility than I want to take on.

But we decided to have a second competition within the Bloodhound Pack, call it the Carnival of Bloodhound. Based on the votes of contributors, the first Carnival of Bloodhound winner is Richard Riccelli’s “Charmed, I’m sure”, a quick take on how to write listing copy that makes houses sell faster and for more money.

Finally, kudos to the brain-trust at CoRE Headquarters. Rather than get worked up about what is and is not a true real estate post, they simply added three categories: Investing, local real estate and real estate professionals.

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December 2, 2006

Praising Cain: Change the world forever by learning to love your life the way you actually live it . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.

One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.

For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.

Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.

Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!

This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.

Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.

The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.

Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:

If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.

If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more

December 1, 2006

Dave Liniger: The Power of Selling a Dream . . .

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This is an excerpt from Everybody Wins: The Story and Lessons Behind RE/MAX by Phil Harkins and Keith Hollihan. Jeff Brown and I were talking about this on the phone the other day, and I thought I’d share it. Don’t read this as an unlimited endorsement of the book. It’s a fun read, but it’s full of bogus charts that are imputed to mean something, but don’t. Even so, it’s a nice retelling of the RE/MAX legend.

The Power of Selling a Dream

If not for the price of a $20 ticket, that might have been the end of the story. But in the telling of any fairy tale or epic adventure, there are always those key moments when the naive hero stumbles across a piece of good luck. Jack, of Jack and the Beanstalk fame, for instance, came home with three magic beans for which he had traded the family’s last asset, a cow. His mother, crushed and beaten by Jack’s foolishness, tossed the three beans into the garden, and that should have been the end of it. But the beans were actually magic, and a giant beanstalk grew. Jack climbed the beanstalk, discovered a kingdom filled with riches, killed the giant who ruled the kingdom, and came home to a hero’s welcome, making his poor old mom proud of him after all.

In Dave Liniger’s case, a $20 ticket to see a real estate motivational speaker amounted to his handful of magic beans.

He went to the talk because he had already paid and, well, . . . what the hell. The magic speaker was a man by the name of Dave Stone. Hearing him talk at the Mountain Shadow Country Club in Phoenix was the turning point in Dave Liniger’s life. He sat in the first row, mesmerized. Stone was a brilliant real estate man who loved to teach, the predecessor of all great real estate instructors; and his words penetrated Liniger’s brain like none he had ever heard before. At the break, Liniger ran up to Stone and introduced himself. They talked until the speech started up again. Liniger watched Read more

December 1, 2006

Ask the Broker: Are new build prices negotiable?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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When purchasing a home or condo in a new development are the prices quoted firm or can the buyer negotiate the selling price with the broker? Are the costs of “upgrade options” negotiable.

The definitive answer: Maybe.

New home sales is a retail business. The builder has to move current inventory to finance the future inventory, just as Sears has to clear out all the Fall and Winter goods to make way — and pay — for the Spring line.

Sometimes builders have more business than they need — and in consequence nothing is negotiable.

Sometimes — like now — builders need to move inventory, and they are willing to Make Deals, as they say down at the new car lot.

Even then, the deals may be set by higher ups, with the on-site sales staff authorized to smile and say the same things over and over again.

But what is that classic car dealer’s line: “What’s it going to take to get you into a Cadillac today?”

If a salesperson says something like, “If the only thing standing between us were the carpet upgrade, would that make a difference?” — that is a closing question, but it’s also a hint about flexibility. Even then the salesperson may not be able to make concessions, but the hint is that concessions are possible.

If you’re truly interested in the home and if you can be persuaded by a better deal, now is the time to sit down and dicker. Even if you have to leave the deal on the table for referral back to the main office, you may have won.

As with cars, upgrades are where the profit margins are highest. If you can arrange for and pay for your own granite countertops, don’t buy theirs unless it’s free or deeply discounted. Seven-inch stainless steel sinks are crap, buy you can buy a top-quality sink at Lowe’s for much less than that same sink at the builder’s design center.

There can be exceptions, though. For example, right now in Arizona, a great deal of spec home inventory is being sold at huge discounts. People bought new homes contingent on the sale Read more

December 1, 2006

Ask the Broker: Giving the bum the bum’s rush . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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What do you do when the dual owner of a house refuses to leave or cooperate after signing the purchase and sale and a document to agree to sell the house? This is a nasty divorce situation. The divorce court’s finding was to sell the house and split the proceeds. He is occupying the house now and the closing is in 15 days.

The answer to this question is: I am not an attorney. You have to take this up with your divorce lawyer to see what can be done lawfully and without resort to the long arm of Colonel Colt.

It happens that I have a sale going on right now with a very similar situation. She’s gone, he remains, and he managed to kill two prior contracts with his recalcitrance. I represent the buyer on the third contract, but we got lucky: The divorce judge has ordered that the soon-to-be-ex-wife is solely authorized to negotiate and sign for both parties, with the proceeds to be split according to the judge’s orders.

I don’t know if this could work for you, but it is at least possible to resolve a conflict like this. I wish you good fortune…

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December 1, 2006

Use full appraisal to correctly assess house’s true value

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is me from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

Use full appraisal to correctly assess house’s true value

Who can best judge what a piece of real property will sell for?

We all know the answer to that. The best estimate of the value of real estate will come from an experienced real estate appraiser.

After that, a Broker’s Price Opinion will come second. In certain very homogenous neighborhoods, a Price Opinion may be just as accurate as a full appraisal.

Third place belongs to an experienced agent’s Comparative Market Analysis. This can be very accurate in homogenous neighborhoods, substantially less so where homes or lots differ significantly.

Last place goes to the results produced by an Automated Valuation Method, such as Zillow.com or Eppraisal.com. An AVM does not evaluate houses, but rather provides statistics and records about houses. It cannot, for an extreme example, tell you whether the house is still there at the time of the evaluation.

It is fairly common to hear people say that AVMs will get more accurate in time. In fact, there is a finite limit to how much they can be improved.

A CMA is essentially an all-paper calculation. But a CMA is produced by an agent who has a great deal of on-the-ground experience, most of which will never be encoded into an AVM’s software. Amenities such as landscaping, decor, orientation or views cannot be accounted for by an AVM.

But the other end of this question is need vs. costs. If you want to know what your supervisor’s house is worth, use Zillow.com. It costs nothing, and close enough is good enough.

If you need to know what to offer on a house you want to buy, you need a CMA at the least. The good news is, your agent will probably provide it free.

The same is probably true for a Broker’s Price Opinion, which you will want if you are planning to sell a home.

But if you need to know the value of a piece of real property to a very high degree of accuracy — for instance, to qualify for a mortgage — you’re going to pay $300 or Read more

November 30, 2006

Real estate links and how to enact a Hollywood Western . . .

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Teresa Boardman guest blogs at The Real Estate Tomato with some excellent advice on honing our technology skills.

Free The Drones has more on the Google Sandbox.

Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets is raising a stink about smelly houses. This may be the perfect answer to the question, “Why preview?”

More counter-intuitive rising-home-value news from Hot Property at BusinessWeek. If there were as many different ways to count groceries, you’d never make it home with a dozen eggs.

Back home in San Diego, Kris Berg has an excellent cautionary tale on the peril of ignoring the preliminary title report.

Two words: Galen Ward. The man is a poet.

Geri Sonkin at All About Long Island has thoughts on discounting. My preliminary conclusion is still that buyers don’t care very much, but I’m still playing with the idea. Three of the houses I have closing in December I would not have had without the flat fee buyer’s agent’s commission, so that’s a counter-argument.

In a Hollywood Western, about a half-hour after the second-act gun-battle, a seeming rout for the bad guys, the respectable townsfolk start poking their heads out to see if it’s safe to come outdoors. Then they gather in the town square and cluck about how much they abhor violence. This is done as comic relief and to set up the expectation of peace, to be spectacularly defeated by the third-act gun-battle. (Can you imagine what fun it is to sit through a movie or a play with me while I pick it apart line by line?) Today some of the townspeople of the RE.net have decided my brief war with Keith at Housing Panic was unseemly. Oh well. Kris Berg brought home a nice post on Realtor bashing, and, of course, Jay Thompson was a combatant. Other remarks suggest that — alike unto the comments of the BubbleHeads — people still don’t understand the issue: When someone tries to extort away your right to say what you choose, that is when I will be eager to engage in a discussion of what is ugly or a waste of time. At the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp Read more

November 30, 2006

And now we are nine . . .

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Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

We’re adding another contributor this morning, Doug Quance of Broker’s First Realty in Atlanta:

Doug Quance is an Atlanta-based Realtor and Associate Broker. Backed by his team, Doug is in the vanguard of the Realtor 2.0 movement toward hi-tech, full-service real estate.

Doug managed to get good and sick over Thanksgiving, so it’s a particularly cruel injustice to do this to him today, but he insisted we proceed as planned.

Athol Kay at The Real Estate Guide calls us The Borghound Blog, which was a lot of fun. This much is true: We’re doing our best to recruit the very best real estate webloggers. But the last thing we want is that “one cut of face and figure,” “the prison-uniform” of some uniform school of thought. To the contrary. Our diversity is our strength. (Didn’t I get a badge from the NAR that says that?)

In any case, while we are not The Borg, today we are a nonet to be contended with…

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November 29, 2006

The sight, the scent, the touch of rich, luxurious, full-bodied . . . real estate commentary . . .

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Today, Jeff Brown is a thorn among roses. We’re adding a new contributor, San Diego Realtor and super-blogger Kris Berg. With Cathleen Collins below the BawldGuy and Kris above, the median quantity of hair approaches the statistical mean.

But rich, luxurious, full-bodied hair — or none at all — is no measure of the prowess of a BloodhoundBlog weblogger. And, of course, no one can be encapsulated by a capsule biography, but it falls to me to write one anyway:

Kris Berg is a San Diego Realtor and Associate Broker who is avidly building a business with her husband, Steve, while raising a family, maintaining a home and writing cleverly original real estate commentary.

If you haven’t read Kris at The San Diego Home Blog, you’re missing out on one of the great treats of the RE.net. She writes pertinent real estate commentary with a style all her own — sometimes raucously funny, always precisely on target. I can’t wait to see what she’ll write here…

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November 29, 2006

Foghorn Leghorn strikes out: What if they gave a war — and nothing happened . . . ?

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Well.

That was underwhelming.

First, I make a brutally funny, completely accurate joke about that risible demagogue, Keith at Housing Panic.

Then Keith offers to sell out his weblog and his entire constituency of mouth-breathing morons to escape the ridicule that is his just desserts, his one indisputable claim on the wonders of the universe.

His “offer” is essentially extortionate. The “or else”?:

A war with the thousands of HP’ers so harsh and loud your practice and reputation in Arizona likely wouldn’t survive (beyond the damage you’re doing yourself)

Now anyone who is paying any attention here — a company that excludes Generalissimo Foghorn Leghorn — could have predicted with perfect precision what I would do in the face of something like this: Make it public, of course, in spades.

So: Keith puts on a predictable pantomime of outsized outrage, heavy on the high-moral dudgeon. And the mouth-breathing morons zoom in to BloodhoundBlog to poke around at random and issue inane comments — heavy on the profanity, light on the grammar.

This much is a big yawn. There are thoughtful, intelligent people among the BubbleHeads, but I can’t imagine that any of them is so lacking in self-respect that he would take “orders” from a detestable thug like Generalissimo Leghorn.

That’s as may be. The thuglets who do shake a leg the Leghorn way gave another perfect demonstration of why I have referred to them as Brown Shirts and Flying Monkeys. One Junior G-Man dug up and published my address (ahem — it’s on our web site) here and on Housing Panic. An amazingly drunk man in Connecticut left 23 very long incoherent voicemails on my cell phone. A cadre of relatively literate BubbleHeads tried to figure our how to censor me by means of Arizona Association of Realtors or Arizona Department of Real Estate complaints. It might occur to you to wonder if they have not heard of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution — but of course they have. Thuggery and principle are moral opposites, never doubt it.

There’s more, but it’s all nothing. I told Keith in advance that it would come to nothing. The original Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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