by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

In last week’s Blog-off Greg addressed the importance of cleaning your house before listing it in no less than three of his posts: #43, #78 and #98. When you’re posting over 100 articles in one day you don’t have the luxury of putting a lot of thought into your posts, but keeping your house clean while it’s on the market shouldn’t require a lot of thought. This should be obvious to everyone… It should be obvious to those of us who make a living marketing homes, of course. But this isn’t a trade secret. This is a precept that every seller, represented or not, should take to heart.

So when I was showing a buying client houses this past weekend, I was surprised to see these comments in the Remarks field of the listing:

This house is priced right and just needs cleaned up.

The remarks go on to highlight the features of the house. And everything that was promised in the remarks was dead-on accurate! It’s a wonderful floor plan in my favorite Surprise community, priced $22,000 under the most recent sale of this same model in the same subdivision. The only discernible difference between the higher priced structure, which went under contract only two weeks after it was listed earlier this year, and the house we saw Friday, which has now been on market for six and a half months, is the higher priced house had “fresh paint,” and Friday’s house “needs cleaned up.”

I had warned my clients before we entered, and told them that the seller was paying, with a low list price, for someone else to clean the house. The house is vacant, so I expected dirty walls that need painting, a dirty perhaps pet-soiled carpet, maybe some nicks or dents in the sinks or on the dishwasher. I had expected the type of problems that maybe a down-on-his-luck seller couldn’t afford to invest in fixing. But the house is only five years old, and as I said, empty, so I had hoped for better.

Instead, we were faced with an empty home filled with trash. Nothing big, nothing that would Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this as a comment at Rain City Guide (which thread is very worth visiting), but I’m echoing it here:

> Who pays the commission is all semantics, really.

I would disagree with that. Buyers have been persistently misled about who pays the commissions, which skews their behavior.

> The buyer will not pay LESS for the house if there’s no buyers agent involved

Let’s put the buyer’s agent’s compensation under the buyer’s control and see what happens. A buyer who hires me to help execute a transaction he or she has already decided to undertake should pay less for my representation than a buyer commencing a completely unfocused home search. Do you disagree?

Ours is the only sort of business where compensation is completely uncoupled from effort and costs. That’s absurd, particularly as home prices surge upward. Doubly absurd when you consider that there is a glacial glut of real estate licensees.

> I don’t see the point for all the discussion here.

How about because the things most worth talking about are the ones no one ever wants to talk about? 😉

Technorati Tags: compensation for buyer representation, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Because of my long-time affiliation with Tom Horton, I got to write the inside-front-cover copy for Outrageous Good Fortune, Tom’s biography of Ed Robson, founder and owner of Robson Communities, which builds active-adult communities all through the Sothwest.

From left to right, author and publisher Tom Horton, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, Mark Robson (now a real estate devloper in Southern California) and Master Builder Ed Robson.

Here is the copy I wrote for the Robson biography:

Here’s a trek for the intrepid: Take the I-10 Freeway south from Phoenix, Arizona, and get off on the Riggs Road exit.

If you drive west into the Gila River Indian Reservation, you will see some of the extent of Ed Robson’s legacy. In the reservation, the land is dead flat nothing for miles in every direction. Not beautiful, mountainous desert. Just desert, the kind that kills unprepared wanderers every day.

Now turn your car around and drive east into Robson’s Sun Lakes. You’ll find rolling hills, man-made lakes, golf courses, clean-lined stores and churches and compact, elegant homes — a model suburb.

But we’re not finished yet. Because when Ed Robson first set foot on the land that became Sun Lakes, the land he stood on and the entire southeast quadrant of the Valley of the Sun looked just like the reservation.

It was Ed Robson’s Sun Lakes that led the way as the southern corridor of Maricopa County was transformed from scraggly desert and struggling agriculture to very beautiful, very prosperous suburbs.

And Sun Lakes was just the beginning. Ed Robson spread his ideas about building master-planned active-adult communities throughout Arizona and into other states. As the Baby Boomers march en masse toward retirement, it will be Ed Robson who builds their homes — homes sturdy in construction and rich in luxuries, with the kinds of activities and amenities that make retirement an adventure.

Did Ed Robson get rich doing all this? Oh, you bet! But he has enriched us all along the way. Not just the people who live or work in his communities, but also the people who live and work in the surrounding communities, communities that would not Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a bunch of Phoenix-area real estate news piling up in browser tabs, so I want to reference it now, before it blows away in the autumnal desert breezes.

First, more fake good news downtown: “Phoenix is putting in place the final building block in its plan to construct a new downtown.” How? What are you, new? Massive tax-payer subsidies, of course. How else? But, not to worry. This will be the piece that completes the puzzle for a true downtown in Downtown Phoenix. Pay no attention to all those other, past, failed pieces that were to complete the puzzle. This is the real deal, you betcha. If you say otherwise you’re a counter-revolutionary running-dog imperialist wrecker. Oops! Wrong propagandists…

But don’t get the idea that Pravda — er, the Arizona Republic can’t issue a discouraging word: It turns out that trolley riders, if there are any, may have trouble finding shaded parking. If they can find any shaded parking now, in this benighted pre-trolley epoch, they should move to Vegas. They’re beyond lucky…

But at the same time, don’t conclude that the Republic can’t strain at gnats over a good press release: Active-adult housing is popular in the Southwest Valley — even though there almost isn’t any. The article justifies its spin by stretching as far as Sun City Festival — which is in the Northwest Valley. (Disclosure: I am a long-time friend and confederate of Tom Horton, who wrote the biography of Ed Robson, founder and owner of Robson Communities, which in turn owns PebbleCreek, the principle focus of this article.)

Did I say something about the Northwest Valley? Here comes the Northern Parkway, to relieve all the traffic out there where nobody lives — yet. The City of Glendale, which used to end at 67th Avenue, is going to extend itself miles and miles further west so that its tax-payers can delight in subsidizing thousands of new homes along the incipient SR-303 Freeway.

All of this serves as a nice way of distinguishing capitalism from mixed-economy socialism. None of this would be happening if our real estate economy were governed by capitalist Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So here comes the call, at 9:27 am. Blocked Caller ID. I don’t normally take line-blocked calls, because they’re almost always spam. But I was waiting for an important piece of information, so I took the call anyway.

An irate Realtor, of course, angry about this morning’s Arizona Republic column. I should have been expecting it. Anonymous phone calls from Realtors and brokers — pissy but pusillanimous — are a regular Friday treat around here.

And here is where I respect doubly the people who send email to gripe at me: They put their names behind their words, and they have to devise an actual argument to justify an email.

So I’ve got the call, like it or don’t, and the cranky Realtor on the other end says, “I’m a Realtor and I want you to know that I don’t agree with your columns saying that we get paid too much.”

And this is an instant when I am thinking too fast to stand in awe of how fast the human mind can think:

line-blocked call — hiding identity — no name offered — calling strictly to gripe — to penalize me for inciting her ire — wasting my time with no argument to make — nothing I say can possibly make any difference — moreover a phone call is no venue for intellectual debate — I need my phone back — I don’t get paid for this — I don’t have time for it now in any case

All that was about one-third-of-a-second.

Just like that, I said, “That’s your perfect right. Thanks for calling. Buh-bye.”

If you want to stand up for something you believe in, standing behind it by putting your own true name out in the open, then I’ll give you my time. I just might learn something, and that’s a treasure I’ll make an effort to earn. If you’re calling me to commit the telephonic equivalent of midnight vandalism — get lost. You tell me everything I need to know about you by concealing your identity…

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my real estate column from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). Today should be a fun day. My editor told me that, in respose to last week’s column, a Realtor called him, threatening to turn me in to the Arizona Department of Real Estate. I can’t imagine what the violation might be, but the hearing would be a hoot.

 
Repeat after me: Mr. Realtor, what do you charge?

Want to foment a revolution in residential real estate? It’s easy to do. Just learn these five simple words: “How much do you charge?”

Sellers have known that question forever. It’s often the first thing they say at a listing appointment. They understand that they are hiring a Realtor for representation and marketing, and they want to know how much it’s going to cost them.

Historically, buyers have not understood that they, too, pay for representation. Realtors have always insisted that the seller pays all sales commissions, even though every dollar on the closing table is brought there by the buyer.

Unless the seller is taking a loss, the buyer pays for absolutely everything. That’s true not just for houses, but everything.

When you buy a bottle of Pepsi, the marketing and advertising costs are not paid by PepsiCo. They’re paid by you as a part of the purchase price.

In just about every other line of business, vendors roll out the red carpet for buyers because they know that buyers make the world go around.

Not so in residential real estate. We baby buyers, telling them tender, loving lies: “Buyer representation is free.” “I’m paid by the seller.” “My services cost you nothing.”

All of this is false. The cost for buyer representation is rolled into the purchase price, just as the cost of marketing and advertising is rolled into your bottle of Pepsi.

There is a difference, though. If you would have bought the Pepsi anyway, you can’t ask Pepsi to scale back its marketing costs.

But if you’re hiring a buyer’s agent to help you buy a home you have already decided to purchase, you should practice those five simple words: “How much do you charge?”

If you’re buying a new Read more