BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 173 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

November 17, 2006

New NAR policy allows “objective” exclusion of certain listings from members’ presentations of IDX feeds . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is the news from NARdiGras — from RealEstateJournal.com:

A revised policy approved by the National Association of Realtors this week may make it harder for discount brokers to draw attention to homes they list for sale.

The policy, approved by directors of the trade group at a convention in New Orleans, involves information about homes that real-estate brokers get from their local multiple-listing services, databases that are typically operated by local Realtor associations. Among other things, the policy reaffirms that brokerage firms that put listings from the MLS on their own Web sites can exclude certain homes.

The revised policy states that brokers must use “objective criteria” if they screen out some listings. The criteria could include location, type of property, compensation offered for agents who find a buyer, or the level of service provided by the listing company. Thus, listings from brokers providing limited service for lower fees could be excluded from other brokers’ sites.

By contrast, the policy now states that multiple-listing services must make all types of listings available to the Web sites of participating brokers. It would be up to brokers — not the MLS — to decide which listings are used on individual brokers’ sites.

A broker quoted in the article makes a compelling case for this position: “We spend a lot of money advertising our Web site to the public, and we have a right to put what we want on our site.”

Indeed. And as a counter-marketing strategy, a brokerage could proudly announce that its web site sports the full MLS.

But: There’s more. The other night Cathy, Russell Shaw and I were talking about the contrary case: What if I want to exclude one of my listings from the MLS feed? That sounds counter-intuitive, but for certain very-high-priced homes, it makes sense. As the listing broker, I might want to advertise and cooperate, but I would not want to invite a deluge of traffic from unqualified buyers.

Moreover, I think this new policy has about as much chance of succeeding with the Feds as the last one. The individual liberty of real estate brokers seems not to matter much in Read more

November 17, 2006

Home buyer always liable for mortgage . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is my column from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). No fireworks, today, just real estate.

Home buyer always liable for mortgage

I got a great question by e-mail. It’s really a lender question, but it introduces a number of interesting topics.

“Are homeowners personally liable for their mortgages? If yes, is it possible to structure a home loan that doesn’t require a personal guarantee?”

Generally speaking, yes, a mortgage is secured both by the real property and by the borrower’s personal promise to repay the note.

If the down payment is 10 to 20 percent, the personal promise may not be as significant. But if the down payment is very low or if real estate is declining in value, the lender will depend on the borrower to bring any shortfall to the closing table, should the home sell for less money than is owed on it.

Many types of loans are not secured by the borrower’s personal promise to repay. The loan will be secured by the real property or by other assets. A foreclosure won’t affect the borrower’s personal credit.

Here is an example that can be used for mortgages for residential rental homes: the non-recourse loan. The loan is secured by the real property only, with no “recourse” to the borrower on default.

Obviously, the lender is going to make sure the amount lent is substantially less than the value of the property, that the property produces income sufficient to pay its own expenses, etc.

This is an investment product, but the interesting thing about non-recourse loans is that they can be deployed by self-directed retirement accounts to own real estate.

Your self-directed IRA, as an example, would have to make a hefty down payment on a piece of real property, and there are rules about what your IRA can own and to whose benefit. But by means of the non-recourse loan, your IRA can own real estate to build your retirement nest egg.

But the answer to the main question is probably no, alas. I know of no primary-purchase mortgage loan that does not require the borrower to personally guarantee repayment.

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November 16, 2006

How to make money banking on the West Valley real estate market . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Want to get rich in real estate? A workable strategy might be to march your way west on this map:

If you click on the map, it opens to a larger, PDF version.

This is is significant chunk of the Southwest Valley in Metropolitan Phoenix. I’m showing you every major development that will affect real estate appreciation values — actual, probable and speculated.

Start by buying all the house you can afford in the eastern third of the map. Every two or three years, move yourself three to five miles further west, again buying all the house you can afford — from your income plus your accumulated equity. In five moves, you should have a ton of money regardless of your other investments.

Looking to invest in rental real estate instead — or as well? This map shows you where to move your money — again, slowly and incrementally to the west as development warrants. Your goal is to be where the great masses of people want to be — a year or two before they get there.

This is really not that large an area — it’s about 26 miles by 14 miles, 364 square miles. But as many as 1.5 million people will be moving into the area described by that map over the next twenty years.

Clearly, there is money to be made…

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November 16, 2006

If the sheep are going to be sheared anyway, is it wrong to sell spectator seats . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Comes news today that we are that much closer to two new Food Stamps allocations to Major League Baseball. The count so far this year is three Welfare-addicted baseball teams moving into two brand new, taxpayer-funded stadia. If you read nothing but the Arizona Republic, you would never know that professional ath-a-letes and their empressariat make quite a bit of money. Cancel your subscription for three months and you might actually get the addle-pated idea that they can afford to pay for their own damn ballparks.

Not here.

Our public schools provide free breakfast and lunch all Summer long in even the wealthiest of suburbs, and the municipalities of Greater Phoenix have never once met an ath-a-lete who didn’t need a multi-million dollar hand-out. The quality of mercy is not strained.

Fine. Stipulated. This is the way things are, and they’re not going to change anytime soon. Metropolitan Phoenix grew faster than any American city by not emulating the dumb stunts by which other cites manage to lose population, but those days are done. We are still not as stupid as the cities celebrated by the celebrated Richard Florida — cities attractive only to people who don’t have children — but we inch our way ever more Floridaward with every election. Again: Fine.

My conundrum is that, as much as I hate these silly stunts, they turn out to be very good for my clients. Any rational economist is only too happy to point out that, in the long run, subsidizing the lesser producers of wealth at the expense of greater producers is suicidal — and who can walk the Floridian Utopias Back East without fearing that the collapse might come at any instant? We might spit in spite of John Maynard Keynes, who famously said, “In the long run, we are all dead” — but, alas, it’s true. In the long run, the policies that Phoenix is pursuing will result in the same civic, economic, cultural and demographic disasters we witness in the cities now feeding our population growth.

But real estate is a medium run investment.

We have a new football stadium on the west Read more

November 16, 2006

John L Wake says: Buy . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From my email this morning, Phoenix-area Realtor and weblogger John L Wake offers this advice:

I recommend that anyone who has been waiting to buy or who was considering buying with in the next 6 months, that they now seriously consider buying within the next 6 to 8 weeks.

The argument is based in a statistical analysis of listings history, and John’s audio explanation of his charts is worth listening to.

I thought yesterday that a podcast with Russell Shaw would be a wonderful thing, and here’s another case where I’d really like to explore John’s numbers in detail. I’m going to have to do something about this…

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November 15, 2006

Meeting Russell Shaw: It turns out there is no topic of conversation except real estate . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Years ago, when I lived in Boston, I knew a computer programmer who had no interest in computers outside of work — not even to use, much less play with. I thought this was so weird, because my work completely dominates my attention. It’s all I think about, it’s all I want to talk about, it’s there in the back of my mind no matter what I’m doing.

When Todd Tarson came to visit us, we talked about real estate for every minute he had to spare.

Last night Cathy and I met Russell Shaw in person for the first time. We closed a Mimi’s Restaurant. We got together at 7:30 p.m. and left at midnight, just before they called the cops on us. No liquor, mind you — iced tea, cappuccino and ice-water. But we were drunk all the same, awash in ideas.

We talked about real estate the whole time. Russell is very smart, and very forthcoming with information — as you know from reading him here. We covered a vast horde of topics, from tiny marketing details to big-picture analysis of the NAR/DOJ/FTC fiasc-o-thon.

It was an amazingly wonderful evening for me — my birthday, by chance — entirely my style of living. Cathy has been making notes from memory all morning.

Here’s one concrete plan that came out of our scheming:

We’re going to debate Dual Agency in BloodhoundBlog, with Russell on the affirmative and me on the negative.

Russell is all over the idea that, while forbidding Dual Agency with buyers can make sense for us, we should not rule it out for sellers. He makes a very compelling case, and he may yet carry the day.

But, as the the great Arizona patriot Sam Steiger used to say, we’re just a wave, we’re not the water. The issue is bigger than either one of us can cover. I know there are many stout defenders of Dual Agency from whom we have heard nothing. Opponents may have arguments we have not yet considered. Either way, marshall your positions and tell us what we’re getting wrong.

I’ll post something in the next day or two. With Read more

November 14, 2006

Realty Reality: How Jake, Jurij and Tatiana Pawlenko wove their way into our hearts . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is a shaggy dog story…

It begins with Jake, the world’s most playful Yellow Labrador Retriever, and Jake is a thread running all through this tapestry.

And that’s the way to think of it — as a tapestry. The clients we love best — and we love to love our clients — weave themselves into the tapestry of our lives. They are with us for years — for life we hope — and they show up again and again in all sorts of unexpected places. For, while this is a Jake story, it’s also a Ronan Doyle story and a Richard Riccelli story — it’s a story where many of the threads of the tapestry of our lives meet and merge in beautiful, unplanned designs.

But this is most fundamentally the story of the work we did with Jurij Pawlenko — himself a shaggy two-legged dog — and his lovely wife, Tatiana. And the thread of their story runs all through BloodhoundBlog, so much have they meant to us.

Begin at the beginning: Cathleen Collins was previewing houses for Robert and Lisa Pageler, and one that she looked at was 922 West Culver St, a 1936 Ranch-style home in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Downtown Phoenix. This was Jurij and Tatiana’s home at the time, and Jurij and Jake were home when Cathy arrived.

I like dogs. I’m indifferent to cats. Cathy loves any creature with fur. She and Jake hit it off immediately, especially since Jake loves to play so much. His favorite game is fetch, and he will play it forever. Cathy threw her arm out throwing grapefruit for Jake to fetch — thus endearing herself forever to Jurij.

This was the Summer of 2005, and Cathy wrote about this part of the story earlier this year.

In January of 2006, we listed Ronan Doyle’s home at 1102 West Culver St for sale. If you go to our About BloodhoundRealty.com page, you’ll see that our brokerage consists of Greg Swann, Cathleen Collins, Cameron Swann and Odysseus the TV Spokesmodel Bloodhound. That’s true day-to-day, but there are two other key players without whom none of Read more

November 13, 2006

Once more unto the breach: Assailing home-buyers from a different direction . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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We are forever indebted to Richard Riccelli. The ad shown below is another attempt to persuade buyers to think about what they’re paying for buyer representation, and how they might pay less. This approach was suggested by Richard, and he out-and-out wrote about half the copy. If we had to pay him for these efforts, we would have to sell our own house!

Sometime very soon, I’ll write the full story of our work for the Pawlenkos — which is involved — and from that I’ll revise the landing page for this ad.

Splitting our bets, here’s a completely different take, commended to us by Jeff Brown. As I’ve discussed, we list very hard, but we’ve been very careful taking listings this year. If a house isn’t A+ in all categories it won’t sell, and we don’t list to not sell. But Jeff is convinced that the worm will turn with the calendar, and we’re inclined to agree. And, unlike buyers, sellers care a great deal about value propositions.

The real push for an approach like this is door-to-door, and we’ll begin that in earnest in early December…

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November 13, 2006

Avid AVM aversion extends only to Zillow.com: NCRC off-shoot starts competing on-line valuation service . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Curiouser and curiouser. Could it be that NCRC’s motive is not to shake-down Zillow.com but to sully its reputation, in advance of going into competition against it? From InmanNews (fingered by Jim Duncan of Real Central VA):

Zillow officials say their valuations should also be seen as a starting point for consumers who want to learn more about the value of their homes.

But the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Zillow does not adequately disclose the degree to which its free automated home valuations can over- or underestimate a property’s value. The site is “likely to cause substantial injury to consumers who rely on the inaccurate representations made by the company,” the complaint alleged.

Zillow officials called the allegations groundless, saying they make every effort to explain the site’s role as a starting point for research, and display accuracy rates for every area covered by the site.

In a confusing twist, a nonprofit group formed by NCRC to promote best practices in the appraisal industry has hired another company, Eppraisal LLC, to provide a service similar to Saris Technologies’ eppraisal.com.

The NCRC offshoot, the Center for Responsible Appraisals and Valuations, is contracting with Eppraisal LLC to operate its www.BuySmartProgram.com Web site, which offers consumers appraisals using an automated valuation model in conjunction with the services of an appraiser.

NCRC vice president David Berenbaum said there is no contradiction in NCRC’s complaint against Zillow and CRAV’s use of an AVM on the www.BuySmartProgram.com Web site.

“The product being offered is an appraisal involving a site visit. It is not limited to an AVM,” Berenbaum said. “We do not have a problem with accurate AVMs, especially if they are combined with (the services of) an appraiser.”

Berenbaum said Eppraisal LLC is a subcontractor with no influence over policy decisions at NCRC or CRAV.

Based in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, Eppraisal LLC offers access to a network of 10,000 appraisers through its Web site, www.uappraiseit.com.

Scott said the term eppraisal has not been trademarked, and that Saris and its www.eppraisal.com service have no ties to Eppraisal LLC.

Another unrelated company with a Read more

November 12, 2006

Dustin says, “It’s time for a New Name for ‘Blog'”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Indeed! Blog is an ugly word. Weblog is an ugly word.

The relationship I will have with Russell Shaw — blogfather and blogson or blogchild — is delimited by ugly words.

The ultimate ugly word associated with wegblogging, itself an ugly word:

Blogosphere.

It sounds like something Uncle Chester had to hack up every morning before his day could get started.

How soon will these words change?

Right after they fix the HVAC system in Persephone’s winter home…

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November 12, 2006

Beat the Devil Sunday: What’s the highest buyer’s agent’s commission you can find in your market . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Let’s print up a junk mail envelope: Doug Quance may already have won!

Witness:

I think I might have found a winner…

I searched our MLS yesterday, and found a co-broke of 20%! New construction 4 bed 2.5 bath listed at $270K.

http://brokersfirstrealty.com/2006/11/12/commissions-incentives-and-ethics/

It’s no typo… the listing agent spelled it out in the public remarks…

Dave Barnes dropped a dime on this one, not as high in percentage terms but a huge amount of money.

Can you beat these? I know of a bunch of 10% deals, but nothing this extreme. How about you?

(Inlookers take note: We come not to praise excessive commissions but to damn them.)

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November 11, 2006

Links for a very busy Saturday . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I’m selling at least two houses this weekend, so I’m catch as catch can. I want to write a very involved Realty Reality story, too, so my Saturday is much enriched. Here are some other riches:

Realty Thoughts ponders the differences between the Inman shows and NARdiGRAS. Here’s one that pops out at me: So far, almost no news has broken at NARdiGRAS.

Both The Real Estate Bloggers and Real Central VA draw attention to The Real Estate Journal’s expose on agent bonuses:

The best defense for buyers may be to insist that agents disclose the compensation being offered on any property under serious consideration. That way, consumers could negotiate ways to share anything that goes beyond a normal pay day for the agent — or at least take the incentives into account in assessing the agent’s advice. But few consumers raise such questions. Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez, a broker in the Washington, D.C., area who operates a real-estate search site, www.tbhse.com, says he believes “most buyers have no clue how their agent is being compensated.”

“‘Ethically, if you are representing the buyer and taking the buyer to a place where you are getting an increased commission, the right thing to do is tell them,’ says Danny O’Sullivan, a senior vice president with Long & Foster Real Estate Inc. in Fairfax, Va.” Ya think? In September, I wrote on Arizona’s laws regarding agent bonuses.

Jim Duncan at Real Central VA is in love with the improvements to GoogleBase announced at NARdiGRAS. I’ll withhold judgement. Even so, its seems inevitable that we are to be XMLated by The Borg. This bodes ill for smaller players, I should think.

Marlow Harris at 360Digest is trading maps for money in a very astute analysis. How hi is Seattle’s tech?: I don’t know of a single map interface at a Phoenix brokerage.

Joel Burslem at The Future of Real Estate Marketing doesn’t like Cyberhomes. Who can blame him?

Finally, The Real Estate Tomato is spreading the spaghetti sauce: Jim Cronin has started TomatoBlogs.com, a turn-key real estate weblog vendor. Pre-launch blogs: The Realty Doctor, The Silver Bee and Sacramento Real Estate Voice. All WordPress, Read more

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