Author: Greg Swann (page 56 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From The New York Post:

The latest numbers suggest we’re finally at the beginning of the end of the housing correction — no thanks to Washington.

Last Thursday’s numbers from Realtytrac seemed like bad news. In August, foreclosure auctions hit their second-highest monthly total in the report’s history: 147,003, up 9 percent over the month before and up 2 percent over August last year. That’s 7 percent below the peak month, March of this year.

And the immediate precursor to foreclosure sales — bank repossessions — hit their all-time high in August: 95,364, up just 3 percent over July but 25 percent over August 2009. That makes the ninth straight month repos have increased on a year-over-year basis. But foreclosure is a pipeline — and those numbers are the outflow end of it.

On the inflow end, things are slower. August saw 96,469 default or foreclosure notices go out, a 1 percent drop from July and a 30 percent fall from August 2009. And that marks the seventh straight month new foreclosures have fallen on a year-over-year basis. This trend — increased “outflow” and slightly reduced “inflow” foreclosure activity — means that lenders and loan servicers are 1) giving up on modifying mortgages when the borrower can’t pay, and instead repossessing homes and auctioning them off, but also 2) trying to manage the foreclosure pipeline to minimize the downward pressure on home prices.

Why isn’t this bad news? For starters, a multiyear tidal wave of foreclosure sales has been inevitable ever since the housing bubble burst: Too many people had mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay, mortgages with a face value higher than the home’s new market price. There’s never been any way for prices to start heading back up until they first find their bottom — which won’t happen until those bad mortgages are cleared away.

President Obama’s $75 billion mortgage-modification program was always going to be a huge failure — you just can’t keep people in homes they can’t afford — but now the markets are admitting it.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Urban savant Joel Kotkin in Forbes magazine:

What we are going through now is not a sea change but a correction from insane government and business practices. The rise in homeownership from 44% in 1944 to nearly 70% at the height of the bubble reflected a great social democratic achievement. But by the mid-2000s government attempts to expand ownership–eagerly embraced by Wall Street speculators–brought in buyers who would have historically been disqualified.

In some markets, prices exploded as people moved up too quickly into ever more expensive housing. Housing inflation was further exacerbated by “smart growth” policies, which limited new home construction in suburban areas and instead promoted dense, “transit oriented” housing with limited market appeal and economic logic.

Rather than artificially constraining supply and protecting irresponsible borrowers, we should let nature take its course. Home values need to readjust historic balance between incomes and prices. Over the past 60 years, notes demographer Wendell Cox, it took two to three years or less of median household income to purchase a median-priced home. At the peak of the boom, that ratio had ballooned to 4.6.

The disequilibrium was the worst in regions like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Bernardino-Riverside and Miami. At the peak of the bubble, between 2006 and 2008, according to the National Homebuilders Association- Wells Fargo “Housing Opportunity Index,” barely 2% of families with a median income households in Los Angeles could afford to buy a median priced home; even in the traditionally affordable Riverside area, the number was roughly 7%. In Miami, barely 10% could afford such a purchase; in Las Vegas, often seen as one of the cheaper markets, only 15%.

What a difference a market correction makes. The affordability number for Los Angeles is now 34%, 17 times better than two years ago, while Riverside is now near 70%. Miami’s affordability picture has improved to over 60% while in Las Vegas, it’s back over 80%.

These lower prices–not Wall Street or federal gimmickry–will lure new buyers to the places that some new urbanists have predicted will be “the next slums.” Already there’s evidence in places like Miami of a renewed interest in Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was talking to Scott Cowan this morning, and he asked me about future Unchained events. It happens that I’ve been thinking about doing something, and Scott and I explored a few ideas.

Here’s one I really like: BloodhoundBlog Unchained and Unwired in Las Vegas: The Return of the Sales Monster.

I’m thinking Friday, November 26th, 2010, the day after Thanksgiving. One day, one big room like we did in Orlando, 9 am to 9 pm, bop ’til you drop. You could fly in Thursday night after the family stuff or early Friday morning. Arrive when you can, leave when you have to, and maybe we do streaming video and a webinar all day as well.

For content, I think I want to focus on selling, rather than marketing. We can be counted on to cover a lot of wired marketing just in passing, but, as I have been writing, there’s is a lot of ground on the sales side of our business that we’re leaving uncovered.

I also want this to be a Stone Soup project, if we can get that done. I want to keep it cheap, so you can afford to come, and I want to keep it simple, so that I can coordinate things without going up in flames.

So tell me: Is this a good idea? Would you come?

Also: Hit me with ideas. Content ideas in particular, but I’m game for anything you have to say. We might set up the room in “rounds” so that we can structure the day half as formal group sessions and half as mini-kennels, self-coalescing unconference sessions.

I’ll listen to a sponsor if you’ll pay for the room and two rounds of snacks-‘n’-beverages, and I’ll give you banner space, a meet-and-greet table and a 30 minute speaking slot in exchange. Conference space should be cheap in Vegas right now, so we might not be talking about a very big check.

I truly don’t know if this is worth doing. I think Realtors need to get back to selling basics, but the great mass of wired agents seem to be so infatuated with selling small talk to each Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want to talk about being a sales monster, so I want to issue a disclaimer first: We are all about value. I get paid for closing real estate transactions, and I like getting paid, but I never want to get paid for encouraging a client to do the wrong thing. I’m going to be talking about closing in a lot of different contexts, but I am never talking about arm-twisting or even the mildest kinds of suasion. The ancient Roman law of agency is respondeat superior — let the master answer — and this is how we conduct our business.

But still, as a salesman it’s my job to close. That’s important just by itself. It’s one thing to be an ethical salesperson, as above, but it is quite another to fail to close at all. My job — always — is to move the process to the next logical step. If my client wants to make a deal, it’s my job to make it happen, and the way I do that is by closing on the step of the deal-making process that happens next in the sequence.

That’s Salesmanship 101, except that no one teaches salesmanship these days. And, alas, many of the salesmavens who taught this discipline in the past were creepy, oily, slimy, smarmy moral degenerates. Selling is not a confidence game, and there is nothing at all wrong with helping your client take the steps necessary to achieving his objective.

Because marketing on the web is so cost-efficient, I can do a lot of my closing with software — passively, automatically, at any hour of the day. But: I still need to close.

When a new vistor lands on one of our web sites, I’m closing on one idea: More. Stick around and read — there’s lots of content. Or swap over to our free Phoenix MLS search. At an absolute minimum, I want you in our internet universe, so I do a lot to attract people, then I do a lot more to hang onto them.

When we get someone to do something we want them to do, we call Read more