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Category: Real Estate (page 62 of 266)

January 5, 2010

Are the uninformed chatterboxes in your area insisting that the real estate market has recovered? You may want to defer the celebration. Even so, this could be the golden moment for investors in Phoenix.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve known for six months or more that there was a sweet spot on the horizon for investors and other highly-solvent buyers. That event was delayed by the first-time home-buyer’s tax credit. Today’s news about declines in the number of pending purchase contracts is a symptom of the market returning to an unstimulated level of demand. I watched the dropoff reflected in today’s news as it happened last fall. Lenders cut off new applications for first-timers and, just like that, price pressure eased, available inventories started to rise and it came to be a lot easier to get a house under contract.

We’re all waiting for the other shoe — the shadow inventory — to drop, but the supply of the homes I want most for my investors has almost doubled since mid-October, from around 350 units then to just over 600 today.

Here’s even better news for buyers (not for banks): Prices are going down.

This is the Cliff’s Notes for the last four months, as reflected in the BloodhoundRealty.com Market Basket of Homes:

September: +3.15%
October: +2.14%
November: +2.22%
December: -8.03%

That’s a huge drop for December — giving back almost everything we’ve gained since April, 2009. But, interestingly enough, the ratio of sales price to list price was positive. In other words, there is still competition for listed homes, but list prices are dropping.

I don’t know how it is by you, but this is the perfect storm for investors in Metropolitan Phoenix. The homes are in much better condition than they were this time last year, and the prices are at hovering just above the 2009 low.

Are we at the bottom? Feels like it — but we’re going to be here for a while. Positive cash flow is easy, but cash flow is all there is right now. If you’re not a buy-and-hold investor, Phoenix is not for you. I’m sure that’s true in most rental markets.

But if you’re thinking of buying a rental home anywhere in the South or Southwest, reflect on this: This could be the coldest winter in 25 years. Whether they can afford to or not, people are going to move. When Read more

January 2, 2010

New York Times on the Loan Modification Program

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

The New York Times is reporting what everyone at Bloodhound Blog has known for a long time about the Federal Government’s attempt to encourage loan modifications:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

If you’re a fan of Peter Schiff, then you heard him say in the fall of 2008 that the government’s cure to a bursting asset bubble would be worse than the underlying problem itself. He was right, but the logic of politics does not care about the long term economic health of the country.

Here’s The New York Times telling us that government-backed loan modifications are:

1. delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate,

2. [encouraging] desperate homeowners [to send] payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences,

3. [are allowing banks to use] temporary loan modifications under the Obama plan as justification to avoid an honest accounting of the mortgage losses still on their books,

4. [are preventing] housing prices [from] drop[ping] to levels at which enough Americans can afford to buy,

5. delaying the return to work for carpenters, construction workers, and a whole sector of the American economy.

These numbers tell the story:

In 2008, more than 1.7 million homes were “lost” through foreclosures, short sales or deeds in lieu of foreclosure, according to Moody’s Economy.com. Last year, more than two million homes were lost, and Economy.com expects that this year’s number will swell to 2.4 million.

Now, if in late 2008, the government had simply let foreclosures go forward without holding out hope for a loan modification program, it would’ve been an awful as opposed to merely bad 2009. But we would be seeing a recovery in the next 6 months. Instead, we’re just going to see more foreclosures for the next two years.

Update: The Washington Independent has a good Read more

December 31, 2009

Using the DISC system to understand the boys of Entourage

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve talked about the DISC system of personality profiling in past. I’m talking about it again, now, because I want to use it to discuss how we are going to build our ideal real estate team. For now, I just want to talk about thinking in a DISC-like way, using on-the-fly DISC analysis to evaluate and respond to the people you come into contact with.

Here are the four DISC categories:

Dominance; Influence; Steadiness; Compliance

That’s less than useful. Here’s a better way of understand what DISC is measuring:

D’s are drivers. They’re all about getting things Done. A high-D (c’est moi) can be a prick to work for (yeah), but every successful boss will have a lot of D in his personality.

I’s are all about Image, about the way other people perceive them, their accomplishments and their stuff. Many successful salespeople are strong on I traits.

S’s are strongly associated with family life and social communities generally. If your office has a Secret Santa gift exchange, it’s being run by an S.

C’s are associated with calculation, computation and a comprehensive attention to detail. If the till comes up three cents short, a D will toss in some coins to get on with business, but a C will keep counting and counting until the cause of the discrepancy is uncovered.

Here are two more axes for understanding DISC profiling:

D’s and I’s are about telling, where S’s and C’s are about asking.

And D’s and C’s are about process, where I’s and S’s are about people.

It would be terribly convenient (at least for me) if people fell neatly into one DISC quadrant or another, but of course they don’t. Some people are chameleons, with just about the same amounts of each characteristic. More commonly, people will tend to have one strong trait and another that is fairly strong, with the other two coming in less strong.

So, for example, in my own idealized self-image, I am all D and nothing else. But in the reality of day-to-day life, I am a high D with relatively high I-like tendencies — which you could guess just by reading this post. I want Read more

December 26, 2009

Interest rates have been trending upward, but what happens when Uncle Sugar quadruples the sugar supply at Fannie and Freddie?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration’s decision to cover an unlimited amount of losses at the mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the next three years stirred controversy over the holiday.

The Treasury announced Thursday it was removing the caps that limited the amount of available capital to the companies to $200 billion each.

Unlimited access to bailout funds through 2012 was “necessary for preserving the continued strength and stability of the mortgage market,” the Treasury said. Fannie and Freddie purchase or guarantee most U.S. home mortgages and have run up huge losses stemming from the worst wave of defaults since the 1930s.

“The timing of this executive order giving Fannie and Freddie a blank check is no coincidence,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee. He said the Christmas Eve announcement was designed “to prevent the general public from taking note.”

Treasury officials couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

So far, Treasury has provided $60 billion of capital to Fannie and $51 billion to Freddie. Mahesh Swaminathan, a senior mortgage analyst at Credit Suisse in New York, said he didn’t believe Fannie and Freddie would need more than $200 billion apiece from the Treasury. But he and other analysts have said the market would find a larger commitment from the Treasury reassuring.

What’s your take? Are we looking at another two years of 30-year fixed mortgages under 5%?

December 24, 2009

Howling for the hard-working dogs: “We interrupt this Christmas Season for the following brief commercial transactions.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Rich full day today, lots of variety. Working Christmas Eve with me were home inspector Mike Elsberry (two houses), wood inspector Joe Letourneau (two houses) and our handyman, Mark Deermer (one house). We had a plumber working at one of our listings, as well. I could tell by the (lack of) traffic on the streets that a lot of people took the day off, but I am delighted that so many of the people that I work with were working today.

I’m going to work quite a bit tomorrow, Christmas Day. Mail, of course. But I’m also going to service a listing and take a look at half-a-dozen vacant REOs. Nothing terribly time-consuming, more like errands than anything else. But it’s work I want and need to get done, and I don’t want to put it off.

I think this is all part of the revolution incited by these devices — alike unto the idea that privacy is an artifact of inefficiency. I don’t take time off as a binary state event, and it kind of drives me crazy when other people do.

I think it’s insane that too much of the commercial world comes to a complete standstill on special days. But at least we are not insane enough to be consistent. No one preaching the virtue of sacred pretend-poverty wants for the power plant or the hospital emergency room to shut down from now until the Feast of the Epiphany.

Even so, it is simultaneously plausible to me that I might have something to prove: I’m going to celebrate my Christmas, and I am not going to interrupt anyone else’s. But I can do valuable work for my clients tomorrow, and it is important to me to get it done. And, at a minimum, my clients will be ahead of the game and my workload Saturday will be lighter. Everybody wins.

But here’s the thing: I think you’re going to work tomorrow, too, even it’s only to deal with your client email. And I think this is something to be celebrated, not condemned. We work in the pursuit of happiness, as Jefferson had it Read more

December 24, 2009

My car is not a real estate office. In 2010, my car is going to become a wi-fi-enabled mobile real property exchange and conference room.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is the car we bought for me in July. It’s a used Kia Rondo, a semi-unassuming wannabe minivan that I have denominated with this demanding appellation: Prometheus.

My favorite god, as you might have guessed, from all of human history. Prometheus, you will recall, stole the fire of the gods from Zeus and gave it to the people. An alternate reading of the Greek cites Prometheus as having borne the gift of mind to humanity, a rendering of the tale I like even better. If you are a life-sucking real estate broker or any other functionary of the life-sucking National Association of Realtors, the memes that move me will tell you a lot about my long-term plans for you.

But: Sometimes a minivan is just a minivan. I chose the Rondo because a client of mine rented one when he was in town, and I realized it was the perfect real estate car. I had looked at more expensive so-called “crossover” vehicles, but we have practiced and perfected the art of being cheap bastards. At ten grand out the door, the Rondo seemed like the optimax choice.

And this has it proved to be. I’m in it a lot, and it is a very comfortable roaming office for me. I don’t know how other Realtors deal with all the lengthy phone calls that go into selling real estate, but I take down a whole bunch of them from my car. I can make anywhere from one to five calls between stops, and if I were not doing those calls from behind the wheel, I wouldn’t be doing them at all.

But wait. There’s more. I bought the Rondo because I knew I would be doing more and more real office work from the car. The vehicle has three cigar lighters, and I have 300 watt 110 volt power inverters plugged into two of them. That is to say, two three-prong outlets in the front seat and two more in the back. I could be working on my laptop, an assistant on another and a client on a third, all of us plugged in to Read more

December 23, 2009

Need Big Bear Bloodhound for a Listing

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

A couple I am fairly close to, both personally and as fellow investors, are going to sell their second home in Big Bear.  I can proudly say their expectations have been raised and they are well versed in the Bloodhound way.  If you are – or know of – an agent in that area who leads the pack in marketing and listing activities based on the great foundation of “WHY,”  I have a listing for you.

December 21, 2009

Who’s Afraid of Redfin.com?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Bob Haywood, an Owasso, OK real estate agent makes a case for why you should be aware of Redfin.com.  Bob articulates, from behind the cloaked wall on Active Rain, why Redfin.com is the REAL agent of change in the real estate industry.  Read what Bob has to say:

You should pay as much or more attention to Redfin and what they are doing than you do to Zillow. Am I saying we should ignore Zillow?  No!  But the group who has the potential to really change real estate is Redfin, not Zillow.  And here’s why…Zillow is just an information source.  So they give lots of information.  Yippee.  The information real estate vault is now open to the public.  Zillow is just one of many players in the information delivery game.  And guess what?  Zillow exists at the 20,000 foot level.  Their information is not very accurate.  You and I exist on the ground level.  We know our local real estate market in ways that Zillow will never know.  We know what actually sold.  What it sold for.  What it is actually worth and often, what is about to come onto the market.

Fear Zillow.com?  “Not so much”, says Bob and I agree with him.  Zillow introduced the  Zillow Mortgage Marketplace and it has had no impact on my business these past 18 months.  Only one consumer has referenced Zillow’s mortgage rate quotes in their negotiation with me.   That consumer did speak a lot about the Zestimate and its inaccuracy; that inaccuracy actually helped me in the negotiation with the consumer because it threw a shadow of doubt upon the accuracy of the mortgage quotes they offer.

And that is why you should watch Redfin. Redfin is a ground level company.  They are attempting to take the information and link it to agents on the ground.  That’s what makes them dangerous.  If they ever get their feet under them and decide that they actually want to be a player nationwide, they could just change the way real estate is bought and sold.  And if they do, they could end up owning (many of) us.  Already, Read more

December 19, 2009

Yelping Googly Trulia! Is Google is doing some last minute Holiday shopping?

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

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All this week there has been a lot of buzz around the interwebs about Google’s possible acquisition of Yelp.com. The local reviews website has been wildly popular almost everywhere I have been in the country and could stand an image makeover in my humble opinion. One big enhancement could be the business user side to there social networking and business placement. Something Google is doing a good job of with their “Place Pages” for Google search and maps (example: San Francisco Real Estate Services )

With Google Place pages, business owners have the opportunity to have a publish the content of a business page, including video, where as “Yelp for business owners” seems to be geared towards offering buy up features such as advanced profile control and targeted advertising to the tune of $300-$1,000 a month. I’ve never really cared for this option too much as an advertiser or a consumer and think that Google might do a much better job of providing what’s best for the consumer. Yelp’s approach has been, in my experience, at bit heavily controlled.

Yelp for Real Estate has been at best an ongoing resource of placement for you business, à la Citysearch, and some seem to think a resource where Reviews of actual agents should be found.

What else might be under the tree?

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Even Bigger news for Real Estate on the Google front broke just last night when Kara Swisher from All Things Digital posted about talks going on regarding the acquisition of Trulia.com.

It is unclear what price Google (GOOG) would pay, but sources estimate that Trulia’s valuation ranges between $150 million and $200 million, although there could be a big premium on that.

Rumors about Google’s interest in the real estate search market–and specifically in Trulia–have been rebounding around Silicon Valley for the last year.

But Google has pulled the trigger on a number of acquisitions of innovative start-ups recently and, sources said, will continue to do so.

There’s also been a lot of chat about Google’s interest in Real Estate in the online Real Estate space which is mostly about us looking inward. Google, in my opinion, is Read more

December 18, 2009

One Turtle Dove

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

The Glass Ceiling

I remember the moment I decided to stop wearing a suit and tie in public—forever. It was a couple days before Christmas and I dropped by the K-Mart to pick up a punch bowl for the office party.  I was looming  in Housewares when an elderly woman approached me with a fistful of coupons.  Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing that insidious song through the sound system.

“I want to file a complaint.”  She said.

“I don’t work here.”  Me.

“You’re not the manager?”  She asked,  insistent.

“No. I’m not the manager.”  I replied, perhaps a little snippy.

She glared up at me like…well…like I was lying.  More than anything, I hate being implicated in an aspersion when I’m innocent. I’d rather receive three french hens every day for a year from someone I don’t truly love than be deemed a liar (unless of course, I actually am, in which case, I will simply deny until totally boxed in).

“This is an Italian suit,  lady. You need to find someone with a name tag,”  I continued, perhaps a little prideful.

“That lady over there said to ask  you. That you were a manager.” She pressed.

We turned our attention to a  squat woman in a burka, a rare sight in Richmond, Virginia in those days.

“That lady over there doesn’t speak English.”  Me, perhaps a little too loud.

“I speak better English than you,” the lady yelled back across the aisle.  “I speak five languages. How many you speak?”

Oh yeah.  One of  those days.  A blue light siren began twirling above my head and something inaudible was announced over the speakers, interrupting  the chipmunk falsetto drone. I froze as a wave of shoppers began scurrying  in our direction; something about cutlery.

“You don’t have this Foot Soaker in stock.”  The elderly lady shoved a coupon under my nose as the herd surrounded us.

“I know I don’t, ma’am…Because…. I. Don’t. Work.  Here.”  Me.

“She deserves a rain check,”  Burka lady. “It’s false advertising if you don’t. Bait and switch.”

“Yes. Bait and switch,”  Elderly lady.

“Bait and Switch!”  Somebody yelled from the mob. “Bait and Switch….”

About that time an employee approached me and ask Read more

December 17, 2009

VA Condominium Complex Approvals: Navigating the Maze of Paperwork

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

We helped to secure a lot of VA condominium complex approvals in 2009.    The VA Regional Home Loan Center-Phoenix is one of the best government agencies with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work.  The folks working there are professional and committed.  It helps that they know that we do our homework prior to submission for a condominium complex approval.

Sometimes, the system breaks down. My goal today is to explain how better to manage the process, for all parties involved.

The key component to the VA condominium complex approval is the Attorney’s Opinion Letter.  Essentially, the VA relies on the expertise of an independent attorney to evaluate the condominium documents and offer an opinion as to whether or not those documents comply with the VA regulations.  An attorney opinion letter is NOT a requirement for the submission package but attempting this without one is not recommended.  While it adds another layer of cost to the approval process, the result is a greatly reduced examination time at the VA.

The document checklist is available in Chapter 16 of the VA Lender’s Handbook.  Specifically, the table of required documents is available on page 16A.03.    I suggest that the loan originator AND both real estate agents AND the escrow officer review this table as soon as an agreement of sale is executed.  At first glance, the list appears to be ominous (lots of dead trees).  Upon more careful scrutiny, it is plain to see that only 5-6 documents are required; the other 20 or so are only required IF AVAILABLE.  The VA condominium complex requirements then are almost identical to what would be required for an FHA or conventional loan.

Still, the required documents are the required documents.  Failure to provide those documents can result in lengthy delays.  The reason is not because of the process, it is because of “trust”.  The VA trusts the attorney to properly vet those documents, the attorney trusts the lender to properly organize those documents, and the lender trusts the escrow officer and title officer to properly provide those documents in an expeditious manner.

Simply put, if you show that “you Read more

December 17, 2009

Next year we’re going to splurge — maybe — starting with the twenty-first thousand dollars for the month

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my favorite Christmas card this year:

I helped Stephen and Suzanne Kranick buy that house in the weeks before Thanksgiving. I think it’s cool that they love it so much that they made it the star of their holiday card.

I put two houses into escrow today. I’ve done that before, but Cathleen and I are both packing transactions into January at a nice pace. I’m still holding out hopes for one more all-cash deal in December, but the calendar is turning on me day-by-day.

But here’s the thing: The pace we’re on right now puts us at $20,000 gross commission income a month for 2010. I’m sure that sounds like a lot of money to anyone who is not in the real estate business, but it ain’t. But our marketing costs are where they’ve always been — very low — so we’re right on the cusp of proving the claim I’ve been making here for coming on four years: It is possible to do this job without spending fifty cents on the dollar for client acquisition and without feeding a vast cadre of useless eaters.

It’s plausible to me that we could be at $40,000 a month by the third quarter, and from there it’s not a huge jump to seven figures, GCI, per annum.

But: Meanwhile: We are cheap bastards. We never hesitate to spend whatever it takes on mission critical tools, and that will always be the case. But we have been very tight on every discretionary expenditure for a long, long time. And as much as business has sucked over the past four years, it is being tight that has gotten us through the worst of it. A lot of Realtors didn’t make it, as we all know.

So: Cathy just had her birthday, and from me she got a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for her iMac. So romantic…

But, even so, we can foresee that we are going to have a little money for luxuries in the coming year, and the question plaguing me has been how to manage that kind of spending without going crazy on the upside, as it were.

Here’s Read more

December 17, 2009

Christmas and Natasha – only in America

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

2009 has changed me. It has been a year of struggle, victory, and in the end… of complete thankfulness for all of the good things that I have in life. Living in America is one of those good things. Living with a family that loves me unconditionally is another. One of the lessons that I learned from this last year was to redouble my efforts to pay it forward and to give back.

I received an email last Sunday night from my friend Nancy Schafer that her efforts to host a child from an orphanage in the Ukraine had paid off and that 11 year old Natasha would be flying here on the 16th of December for an 18 day stay and hopefully to find an adoptive home here in the USA.

My mind raced back to my own family and then directly back to Greg’s Ramblin Gamblin Willy story about Anastasia. I am not a guy that likes Latin much and this to date was my favorite post that Greg has written. If you have not read it yet, please do. If you have, it is worth another read.

“Do your worst. I will not kneel.” has become a mantra that has stayed with me. And now when I thought of an 11 year old flying over 24 hours straight with no parents to meet an unknown person (as great and kind as I know Nancy is, she is an unknown to Natasha) I knew that I must try to help out in my own small way to make her stay here more enjoyable and hopefully help raise enough awareness so that she might enjoy the blessings that I have:

Living with a family that loves her.
Living in a free country.
Being free from the restraints of a caste system so that her dreams can in fact become a reality.

For those who may not think that America is truly the land of opportunity, I would simply contend that we build fences to keep people out while others build those same fences to keep people in. People are dying to get INTO our ‘hood. We 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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