by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 30, 2010 | Scottsdale Real Estate
Ordinarily, we here at the Scottsdale Property Shop are not overly concerned with the machinations at play within our brokerage. Perhaps an odd disconnect given that Realty Executives has dominated the top spot in market share for virtually every measurable category in Scottsdale (and Arizona at large) since 1974, but it is a crutch to lean on your company name too much in a field of independent contractors. Broker support, institutional marketing and the like are vital to the sale of real property, but the job largely comes down to the salesperson entrusted to do the work. Frankly, if we are to toot any horns, we’d rather tout our own abilities (green agents tend to prop themselves up by company affiliation while more experience veterans tend to promote their own skill sets).
We are breaking from that customary recalcitrance to share some pretty big news about what’s going on downtown. My colleague, and Tempe Real Estate wunderkind, Nick Bastian, shares the unveiling of a project that has been months in the making behind the technological scenes. With a host of company websites that had been a sore spot amongst the more tech savvy agents in the brokerage, Realty Executives did not turn a blind eye to the issue. While upstart brokerages have clung to a technological advantage over our leviathan in an effort to gain market share, the full resources of Realty Executives have finally been brought to bear in this arena with today’s re-launching of www.realtyexecutives.com.
How does this benefit you, our clients? In essence, it will dramatically improve our ability to drive traffic to this already heavily trafficked site. More clicks, more eyes, more buyers looking at your home listings … more of everything you have come to expect from us.
If I sound jazzed, that’s because I am. Kudos to our proud brand for recognizing this prior weakness and turning it into a standard bearer for the Scottsdale Real Estate market.
Read more about the dramatic redesign of Realty Executives’ online presence at Nick’s Tempe Real Estate blog.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 28, 2010 | Home Selling, Scottsdale Real Estate
There are dragons lurking in the dark recesses of your property listing. Mean dragons. Scaly, grey, mean dragons that might rise up out of their lairs and go all Godzilla on your potential showings if left unchecked.
And what, pray tell, is the name of these marauding reptiles?
“REALTOR Remarks”
Ah yes, that hobgoblin of good intentions in the multiple listing service that provides for private communication amongst local Realtors. It gives me a good shudder just to type the name of the foul beast. Suburban legend has it that if you say it three times in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights off, you will doom yourself to a lonely stint on the market. Why? Because the private portion of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service which is intended to impart “eyes only” information to the Real Estate sales force is home to some of the most spectacular lapses in judgment this side of New Coke.
“Do not approach cage, monkey will bite!”
“Disregard water damage in hall bathroom shower.”
“Bring me an offer, seller needs to sell NOW!!!”
From the laughable (“House is better than pictures make it look”) to the horrific breaching of client confidentiality (“Divorce situation: husband not cooperative”), one little notation in the private remarks of the listing can torpedo the price you command for your home, if not endanger the sale altogether. Alarm codes, additional showing instructions, agent to agent disclosures – all are intended fodder for the REALTOR Remarks section. The mistake that is often made, however, is that anything goes so long as it remains hidden from the prying eyes of the public.
The moral of the story? Read the full property listing before your agent inputs it into the MLS. While you will most likely view a copy of the completed listing once it hits the system, you will not be able to see what is privately disclosed to other agents. You will want to see a copy of the FULL listing to ensure that your best interests have not been compromised by a few careless words.
You priced the home well, staged it to look its best, had it professionally photographed, toured and dispersed to the far reaches of the Internet. Don’t blow it now, kid.
Of course, if you want me to avoid your home like the plague, make sure your agent denotes that it “smells kind of funky, but no known presence of mold.”
In the mood to receive offers that are 50% below your list price? Instruct your agent to notify fellow Realtors to “Bring me any offer and I’ll get it accepted!”
Unless the Stargate in the study presents a clear and present danger to those who would tour your home, best not to mention the possible credit for intergalactic species remediation.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 23, 2010 | Home Selling, Scottsdale Real Estate
I have seen my share of thumbs down houses over the years. It’s a sad truth, but for every summer blockbuster, there is a Real Estate Gigli. Properties that look so promising in the MLS trailer fall flat despite the star-studded cast. Granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, new carpet, manicured back yard … a quick read-through of the script tells you that the home should be a smash hit. Only when you see it on the big screen do you realize that the photos omitted the faux oak paneling throughout the entire downstairs, or the sunken conversation pit in the living room. You never know where Rosemary’s Baby may be lurking behind the pleasing marketing facade that a savvy listing agent has erected to entice showings.
Enter the Real Estate sneak preview.
Knowing all too well that I am performing preliminary recon, sellers will occasionally grill me as to my intentions when I arrive for a preview appointment. As I circumnavigate the home, they give me the unabashed hairy eyeball treatment reserved for ex-cons, Realtors, bankers, lawyers and ill-mannered guests who don’t sit on the plastic. Believe it or not, though, the preview does not merely serve as an arbiter of a buyer agent’s pass/fail verdict. It is a crash course in product awareness.
To those who would disallow Realtor previews because they anticipate the reports will discourage potential buyers from viewing the home, allow me first to offer a mild rebuke, and then to assuage your fears. First, disallowing preview appointments will have the opposite than desired effect. Like the producer of straight to DVD smut who would sooner pay a personal assistant a livable wage than allow an advance screening for critics, you are telling wily Real Estate agents that the house is a total clunker if you won’t let them in for a quick peek prior to an actual buyer showing. Thou doth protest too much, Ed Wood.
Moreover, you do you and your home a disservice by limiting Realtor previews. Salesmanship requires a deft touch. It is just not that easy to sell what one hasn’t seen. When I come through with my client, you want me to focus on the features with which I became acquainted during the preview rather than blundering about blindly. Knowing what specific hot buttons light my buyer up, all parties are best served if I have direct, first-hand knowledge of such. You know, the stuff that doesn’t necessarily make it into the MLS.
Is the second bedroom close enough to the master to make a suitable nursery?
Is the kitchen open to the family room or a candidate for expansion?
Is the yard private, but not overwhelming?
Worst case scenario? The home is not a fit for my clients, and I save everyone time. Surely you don’t want any more strangers stomping around your home than absolutely necessary, especially if there is zero chance that the property will work for them. To boot, I just might remember your house as a possible fit for the next buyer I meet.
Want to sell your house? Heed the marquee:
Coming soon … to a home near you … Realtor Paul Slaybaugh!
Pretty please, let him in.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 19, 2010 | Home Selling, Scottsdale Real Estate
Oh, but that little house was turned out the day it landed on the multiple listing service! The hardwood floors all scrubbed and polished. The smell of freshly cut lawn and bougainvillea greeting new arrivals as they stepped out of Mazda Miatas and Chevy Tahoes and Ford Fusions. The windows so crystal clear that the rogue speck of dirt eventually capitulated and moseyed along to a less lonesome locale. Everything was just so as you wooed prospective new owners.
You sold your home that very first weekend. Enchanted the buyers through your concerted efforts to distinguish a well-loved home from the abandoned dreams that haunt the competing bank-owned and short sale properties, you did. Bent on purchasing the best bargain on the block when their plane touched down at Sky Harbor, the nice relocating couple from South Dakota instead rationalized the higher price tag of your owner-occupied home against the great unknowns that plagued the lower cost, distressed property options. After several celebratory glasses of wine, they recast the entire episode with your home starring as the greatest value proposition on the market.
It is now day 14 of the escrow period. The home inspection, a week in the rearview, couldn’t have gone any better. You were never all that concerned about it. You change the A/C filters regularly and have the units serviced semi-annually. You resealed the foam roof with elastomeric last May. You even placed a home warranty policy on the property prior to hitting the market to fend off any unexpected eventualities, you clever fella, you. Now, having agreed to correct the double tab at the main breaker box (damn landscapers), replace the faulty GFCI outlet at the pool equipment and fix the malfunctioning shower diverter valve in the hall bathroom, you let out a well-deserved sigh of relief. Knowing that you have an honest to goodness sale firmly in place, you turn your attention to other pressing matters that had been relegated to the back burner.
And the lawn grows a little taller as the mower doesn’t make it out of the shed this week. The carpet in the hall gets a little matted down from the higher than normal traffic and a missed date with the vacuum cleaner. Aside from little Johnny’s peanut butter fingerprints on the lower third of the living room picture window and the fogged up corner of the breakfast nook window by the doggy door, the glass is still pretty passable. The contents of your cabinets and drawers are strewn about the den and family room, but you have to break a few eggs to make a moving omelet, right? Besides, you already found your buyer. No more agents calling to pop in for a showing with ten minutes notice.
Thus begins the great unraveling of your sale. You see, in 2010, you do not just stage your home for potential buyers. Matter of fact, buyers don’t even possess the most discerning eyes that will take in your abode during the sale process. Nope, those hawkish peepers belong to a black-hatted professional who holds the fate of your transaction in his number-crunching hands.
Once you strike a deal, you better keep the joint gussied up for the appraisal, Jack.
Besieged by stringent regulations and menaced by fire-breathing underwriters, appraisers are no longer encouraged to hunt for validation of the accord reached on the open market by a willing buyer and seller. That’s so 2006. These days, the poor SOBs have more incentive to impugn a home’s value than defend it. This is not a knock on their collective competence, but an indictment of the constraints by which appraisers are currently bound. You counter this institutional bias with the same measures you employed to overcome the price objections of your buyer.
You have to resell the house.
Do not discount the human element in a supposedly objective endeavor. Consider the properties that most Real Estate appraisers spelunk on a daily basis. Bank repo after bank repo, the job should come with a snorkel and a mobile decontamination unit. Given the wide disparity in property condition in the market, the silver lining to cloudy times is an ability to add value to your home though no greater expense than meticulous housekeeping. It’s your agent’s job the sell the objective proof (most viable comparable sales, list of upgrades / features, comparisons between the subject property and comps, etc), and it’s your job to sell the feeling of mom, baseball and apple pie.
Clean and “not-jacked-up” is the new granite counter tops and travertine floors.
There may not be an input column in a uniform residential appraisal report for “squeaky clean” or “not infested with hobos,” but latitude is given to appraisers for affixing additional value to a property based on conditional comparisons to the properties selected for the analysis. The dialed-in condition of your home will stand out in full bas relief against the tired housing din. It is especially critical if you don’t have all of the snazzy upgrades. You are relying on the impression of value for lack of more readily quantifiable measures.
Don’t give in to inertia prior to what has become the penultimate part of the escrow process. Treat the appraisal as a showing appointment instead of the contractual procedure that it is and you give yourself considerably better odds at a soft landing at the closing table with the same purchase price with which you began.
Scented candles, they aren’t just for buyers and third dates anymore.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 13, 2010 | Home Buying, Scottsdale Real Estate
The current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor buyers. I repeat, the current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor buyers.
Allow me to explain. For months, if not years, you have been told that the glut of housing inventory here in the greater Phoenix area makes for a buyer’s market of epic proportions. Why, the ancient Greeks themselves would write songs about the opportunities that abound for any would-be hero with a hankering for a house. The only problem with this suggestion? It’s just not true.
What is a buyer’s market? Most would define it as a preponderance of available supply and an accompanying dearth of demand. Let’s take a look at both aspects of that equation.
In a perfect financial world, a buyer waits for the market stars to align in just such a manner before swooping in to claim a nest at a fraction of the “normal” cost. It all works great in theory, but real world application necessitates that the prospective buyer be subjected to the same set of variables that has drawn down the pool of demand at large. It’s a buyer’s market when few have the wherewithal to actually buy.
Appraisal difficulties and tightened lending regulations are contributing to a somewhat artificial suppression of demand. The “want” is present in the market. Consumers want to buy houses. They want to take advantage of the greatly reduced pricing and sublimely low interest rates. Homeowners want to refinance their houses so that they can stay in them, thus contributing to the lowering of the overall supply.
Want has nothing to do with it. Without ability, all of the consumer confidence and desire does not translate to actionable demand.
So to clarify the lead-in to this post, the current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor ALL prospective buyers, as the “buyer’s market” connotation suggests.
Further, the favorable conditions for those who are in positions to purchase do not necessarily translate to negotiable strength. Well-heeled cash buyers, W2 employees with verifiable income, solid credit history/scores, etc will find that they do not call the shots to the extent that they were led to believe. The bargain bin of bank-owned foreclosures is incredibly crowded. You are elbow to elbow with competing consumers when a new shipment arrives. The mom & pop resellers, by and large, do not have the equitable flexibility to negotiate the 30-50% off of list price that many buyers envision. The short sale properties with the absurdly low price tags are, more often than not, pie-in-the-sky figments of the listing agent’s imagination. You submit an offer 10% off list price to the bank, which in turn proves to be 40% off the BPO (Broker’s Price Opinion) that is performed three months later. The bank tells you they will gladly approve the sale – for 75k more than you offered.
While the inflated inventory levels in the housing sector are cited often enough, it is not widely reported that the number of unencumbered properties available for purchase is far less. In a market that is most assuredly not of the “see house, buy house” variety, the redaction of readily purchasable properties (due to competition in the low end, and lien encumbrances across the full pricing spectrum) tilts the negotiation playing field back towards center. Neither party has a clear cut advantage when facing each other at the negotiating table.
The truth of the matter is that most of the savings that you can expect to uncover have already been factored into the asking price by the time a listing is brought to market. Sure, there will be those that require substantial negotiation, and plenty others still that simply fail to sell. Never underestimate one’s ability to overprice a house. These aren’t the homes you are most likely looking at, though. The ones that buyers are flocking to in droves are those that present the best value opportunities. And why not? Just be prepared for the competition that you did not think existed in this ballyhooed “buyer’s market.”
Trying to cobble “x” percent off the list price in circumstances in which others are offering “x” above the list price will only lead to frustration. Don’t get greedy. Do what it takes to lock up the lowest pricing the Valley has seen for seven to eight years (longer in some areas) while interest rates continue to hover around 5%, and you are well ahead of the game.
And lastly … smile. You are the guy that so many lament not being right now. You know, the hypothetical guy who spurs such proclamations at office parties and cocktail hours all across Scottsdale:
“If I had two nickels to rub together right now, I’d buy every house on my block for less than I paid for this albatross back in ‘05.”
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 6, 2010 | Home Selling, Scottsdale Real Estate
2010 is the Year of the Niche.
It’s true, feel free to consult the Chinese calendar to verify. Scottsdale Real Estate practitioners, in self-defense, have turned to new and interesting means of keeping their businesses relevant in these inexplicable times. Today’s homework assignment for a Real Estate adventurer? Finding a profitable, niche specialty. Thus, the members of the rank and file have been advised to choose a tunnel and follow it out of the malaise. Two examples stand above the rest as the most popular paths to career CPR: bank-owned property sales and short sales.
Forever a fringe subset of the industry, the foreclosure market has become a predominant segment. Virtually unheard of outside a counter-culture circle of practitioners a few short years ago, short sale specialization is another a bully of the current Real Estate pulpit. Given the adapt or perish mantra that permeates a commission based existence, it is hard to fault an agent for migrating to either avenue in an effort to remain profitable. It’s Survival 101.
I won’t pretend that I have not considered both routes as viable solutions to the systemic problems facing the current Real Estate market here in Scottsdale. The smart money goes where the action is. And yet, I have no particular affinity for the institutions that contributed to the implosion of my clients’ property values. I have no burning desire to represent said institutions in transactions against the little guy whom they have summarily defrocked. I’ll put my buyer in the car and go try to steal a property from the bank, but there aren’t enough deflated greenbacks in the US Treasury to convince me to sign on as the Devil’s listing advocate.
Short sale sellers deserve professional assistance. Sadly, I fail to believe that an agent who would flee to “specialization” in this sector at this late stage would prove a legitimate source of the expertise that so many need (and so few actually have). A weekend course and some moxie do not an expert make. Perhaps the specialists that are being churned out at an alarming rate will boast the training and experience necessary to be of legitimate value during the next down cycle, but such “expert in training” zygotes are not the answer for those who need assistance NOW. The stakes are too high to navigate the short sale obstacle course on a bike whose training wheels were only recently, and prematurely, removed. A substantial incubation period is necessary before such a “specialist” fully morphs from a liability to an asset.
Beware the marketing Sirens who would lead a negative equity seller onto the rocks with good intentions.
So where does that leave a conscientious objector to the hordes of freshly minted “experts” with 6 months of experience in a chosen area of specialization? Right back where I started: 100% loyal to real, live humans.
There is nothing wrong with diversifying one’s business practice to gird against shifts in the market, but I refuse to abandon a loyal client base for the new money of bank business. Once you become beholden to the financial institutions, there is little time left in the day to service those who now constitute an under-represented segment of the Real Estate market. Sure, the bank guy might take on a few moms and pops here and there, but can an overextended agent really provide a private seller the level of service required to do this job? A dubious proposition in the best of times, let alone in the murkiness of 2010. With a market that is still twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, your agent’s periscope better be nimble and at the ready if you are to avoid the same shipwrecked fate that has befallen so many neighbors. Unthinkable in an industry with more per capita agents than snakes on a plane, but I surmise that all of this nichefying has relegated the non-distressed homeowner to afterthought status.
Assuming you have no equity in your home, or will be unwilling to part with it at the market’s nadir if you do, the industry has given up on you as a viable source of business. It has moved on. And yet, there are a few straggling agents who aren’t quite ready to throw in that towel.
While it may seem that every agent and his recently licensed brother have gone to work for the banks, know that there are still a few of us diehards around who pledge allegiance to you. Our phones aren’t always jammed with 8 bazillion calls about our 8 bazillion listings. We won’t take a week to respond to your questions and concerns. We have staked our careers to providing a certain level of service, and we will not compromise it. Market conditions be damned.
Tempting though it may be to wear the “Certified Gastrointestinal Distress Expert” or “Short Sided Career Reinvention Specialist” hats, we stay away from the light and cement our enduring commitments to those left behind in the industry’s pursuit of the next big thing.
Our niche is you.
Should you require the hands on, fully attentive assistance of a couple of non-certified, non-distressed, non-toxic property experts, give us a call. We’re not too busy panning for the bank’s gold to take it.
