by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If you list, you last,” runs the Realtor’s mantra. This is true to a degree: It assumes you will last long enough to get a listing and for that listing to sell. It’s no accident that most agents start out working with buyers. It’s harder work — from the traditional point of view — but buyers will be more forgiving of a lack of experience, and working with buyers can require a smaller up-front, out-of-pocket investment.

In any case, I didn’t list very much in my early years as a Realtor. I crashed and burned on an early listing, and I didn’t race back to the wreckage until I had learned a lot more about what I wanted to do. Even on that listing, we were doing a lot of radically-innovative things, but I had made the classic new agent’s mistake: I was drawing huge traffic to a home that was over-priced.

After that bad first experience, I listed when I couldn’t avoid it: For pre-existing clients. Listing, lock-box, sign, flyer — but also price, preparation and presentation. We weren’t gun-shy, but we wanted to perfect the idea of our kind of listing before we rolled it out in any major way.

As it happens, we hit our stride as listers just as the Phoenix real estate market oscillated to an absurd frenzy. We did a lot more work last Summer than we actually needed to do: Web sites, open houses, neighborhood canvassing, etc. — when all we actually needed to do was go down to the Safeway and whisper that we had a house for sale.

But we got really good results really quickly, and we learned a lot about the things we do now — when selling any house, even a perfect house at a perfect price, is a major undertaking.

This is from our seller’s web page:

Take a look at this web site.

This is the site we built for a house we recently listed in the F.Q. Story historic district of Phoenix. It happens that the home was owned by one our favorite clients, but that’s beside the point: This is the work Read more

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

She did, however, write this post on raincityguide. Nice person that she is, she also took the time to write and welcome me to the blogosphere. And after reading her post, Real Estate 101 – Improving on “the basics”, I have several things I want (need?) to say.

Observations:

1. Ardell finds it quite easy to bond with her clients and for them to immediately recognize her as a nice, honest and professional person.

2. She – like all top successful agents is quite good at establishing someone’s level of motivation to buy or sell. Further, she has developed a workable system (she probably thinks of it as a “knack she has”) for detecting and routing nuts (crazy people).

3. Her “care factor” is quite high. She likes and truly enjoys helping others and making sure things “go right” for herself and others is quite important to her. Her ability to actually make things go right is very very good.

Why am I writing all of this about her, you ask? She and I have never met.

Because everything she wrote is completely workable and valid for agents everywhere, just so long as they are – each and every one of them – just as nice, as intelligent and as caring about others as Ardell. But if any of those agents don’t have each of the above qualities and virtues she obviously has – I see failure in their future.

On point number 1. above, I don’t believe that the average buyer or seller thinks of the average Realtor the way I described Ardell. NAR publishes our “improved rankings” in the Gallup Poll every time we get a slight improvement. Set aside the “we are up 3% in the polls” crap and you could just as easily say that the average buyer or seller is hoping to find the agent who will lie to them the least. So, unlimited credibility isn’t in the new agent’s arsenal. Most sellers (who aren’t family or friends of the new agent) may not instantly be moved by the agent’s opinion of value. I believe it is possible for the new listing agent Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Phoenix-area real estate market’s three-month experiment with stasis came to an abrupt end in October: Although sales levels were normal, as compared with October 2003, the most-recent October before the real estate boom, both asking and selling prices dropped precipitously among the homes tracked in the October 2006 edition of the BloodhoundRealty.com Market-Basket of Homes.

Average prices for Market Basket homes in October were down 4.07%, compared to September, a difference of $10,327. Year-over-year, prices are down 7.97%, and down 9.88% from the December 2005 high. Prices in October were strongly affected by deep discounting by new home builders. Even so, two-year appreciation on an average Market Basket home is 38.21%. Three-year appreciation is 63.15%.

A total of 162 sales were recorded, down from September’s total of 183. Market-Basket homes spent an average of 103 days on market, 3 days more than in September. For comparison purposes, 149 Market Basket homes sold in October of 2003, the last relatively normal year, in an average of 54 days.

As has been the case in recent months, many Market-Basket homes are selling at or above list price. A few deeply-discounted properties pulled down the average – most notably deeply discounted builder’s spec homes. Average discounting netted out to 1.96%, down from 2.03% in September.

Inventories of available Market Basket homes continue their decline. There are now 1,229 homes available for sale in the Market-Basket, where there were 1,337 in September, 1,406 in August and 1,506 in July. With sales of 162 homes, the implied absorption rate is 7.58 months, up from 7.31 months in September, but down significantly from almost 10 months in July. A six-month absorption rate is considered normal. The number of homes listed as “Sale Pending” is 191, up from 165 in September.

Based on the idea of the Consumer Price Index market-basket of goods and services, the Market-Basket of Homes uses average sales prices for a small subset of all Valley home sales to get a clearer idea of what is happening in the middle of the bell curve. The alternative method, striking a median among all closed transactions, introduces too many extraneous Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reflecting upon today’s Arizona Republic column, here is a story I’ve been sitting on all week:

Work is under way to build a bridge on Cotton Lane and expand the road from Maricopa County 85 to Estrella Parkway.

The project will produce a half-mile, six-lane bridge over the Gila River complete with bike lanes and sidewalks.

The Maricopa County Department of Transportation has partnered with Goodyear and developers to coordinate and pay for the $59 million project.

With Estrella Mountain Ranch and the planned King Ranch communities expanding or sprouting, the project becomes necessary to serve the area’s new residents, said Bill Hahn, a project manager with the county transportation department.

A six-lane bridge…

Lose the sidewalks and bike path and it could be converted to an eight-lane bridge…

This is not the emptiest land in Arizona, but it is close — for now. The trouble is, Estrella Mountain Ranch is maybe five percent built, with plans for 30,000 more homes. There are other huge projects planned for the immediate area, and The Sprawl Machine is going to start growing northward from Casa Grande and Gila Bend, as well.

I think this enormous bridge is de facto stake-driving for the unplanned, unannounced, unwhispered-about extension of the SR-303 Freeway south to the Interstate 8 Freeway.

I don’t even think it’s a horrible idea, stipulating that they’re going to build the Freeway anyway. Better to build the bridge right, even by sleight-of-hand, than to have to replace it later.

But: It’s sleazy to build a Freeway bridge without telling the tax-payers that they just signed up to build the whole Freeway.

And: The tax-payers shouldn’t build the damn Freeway in the first place…

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). Presumably, there’s nothing here to annoy Realtors or brokers, so I can have a Friday free of vitriolic anonymous phone calls. We’re back to money again next week, though, so my relief will be short-lived.

 
Government needs to stay out to stop sprawl

It seems reasonable to suppose that someday, the Sun Valley Parkway will be called the Loop 404 freeway.

By then, Loop 303 might stretch south all the way to Interstate 8 and east all the way to Fountain Hills, and from there all the way south to Apache Junction and Coolidge.

Already, people are talking about turning Northern Avenue into a freeway connecting Loop 101 and Loop 303.

All of this is simply the inexorable logic of the “Sprawl Machine” in action.

How does the Sprawl Machine work?

First, developers put up houses on remote farmland, where the land is cheap. There are no roads, schools, libraries, fire stations, etc., but the developers know that the new residents will clamor for those things as soon as they move in.

Politicians, scared to death of negative opinion, build all these missing amenities, adding value to all the remaining unbuilt homes and undeveloped land.

The politicians finally get wise and impose “impact fees,” taxes assessed in advance to pay for the amenities that will be built as the new homes rise.

The developers argue that this makes the homes less affordable, which is true. The politicians argue that the new residents are bearing the costs of the new burdens they occasion, which is also at least somewhat true.

But here are two more true statements that you will seldom hear uttered aloud:

In our current mixed economy, if the politicians said, “Sorry, folks, you moved where you shouldn’t have,” eventually developers would stop trying to build in places where municipalities don’t provide services.

In a truly free market, developers would build all the amenities we’re talking about (and then some) at a particular project, or they wouldn’t build the project at all.

The current mess is occasioned by government intrusion into real estate.

On the one hand, developers build where they shouldn’t. On the other, Read more

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Thank you, Greg! That was such a flattering (and nice) introduction – now I have to eventually write something useful or at least interesting or I’ve let you down. I really appreciate you making room for me like this here on your blog – that is very generous of you and it is my intention to have you glad you did this.

I originally wound up looking at your blog due to an article I read on Inman News about Zillow. What you had to say regarding Zillow was more insightful and relevant than just about anything I had ever seen on the subject. So I am a fan of yours.

It is my hope that I can provide that same level of insight to your readers on the subjects I write about here. I have been interested in writing a blog ever since reading the wonderful book, “Blog”, by Hugh Hewitt. I was particularly impressed when I read that blogs made it impossible for the Main Stream Media (MSM) to continue to control what was to be considered “news”. Owning a printing press and buying ink by the barrel was no longer a requirement for getting the word out.

What word needs to get out?

Several: For example there are many functions that the National Association of Realtors (and the various state and local associations) do a wonderful job of handling. There are other areas where the “handling” is awful or simply non-existent. Any real estate media I’ve ever seen (Inman News, RIS Media, Realty Times, etc) all have deals with or sell advertising to the very people they maybe should be “reporting on” – or like Inman, have such a specific agenda (I can’t really call it hidden) that for the most part they are either bought and paid for or are nothing less than enemies of working Realtors.

All of the various companies, individuals, programs, lead generation services, lead generation websites, coaching services, seminars for Realtors, etc. that all seem to be saying to every agent in existence, “sign up for “brand X” and achieve unlimited success. Are they all really telling the Read more