Author Archives: Anna

Some tips on selecting a listing agent

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[photopress:View_of_Patio_1.JPG,thumb,alignright]Today’s topic is inspired by a woman I ran into at an open house. The woman was going through a divorce and wanted to sell her home quickly. A nearby home had recently been sold quickly, so she contacted that real estate agent (who sent her a helpful postcard!) and she quickly listed her home with this agent. So far, so good… right? Wrong!

What’s wrong with this story? Well, first off, the home owner only talked with one agent and didn’t really interview him to find out what type of service he would provide. It turns out that this particular agent does a horrible job marketing everything but the “after sale” postcards where he announces to all the neighbors that he just sold a nearby home! The photos he took of the home were unflattering (and it was a beautiful home!). The brochures he created were very generic and photocopied (to save money!). And this was for a $400K home! No wonder some people are frustrated with the commissions of real estate agents!

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a rant on any particular agent, the idea behind this post was to give some concrete ideas on how you should go about selecting an agent. First off, yesterday I ranted about how home buyers should ALWAYS get more than one quote from a mortgage broker. (I’m sure my broker friends hate me for giving out advice like that!). Today, I’m going to turn the tables on myself. Home owners should ALWAYS interview more than one real estate agent before listing their home!

What difference does it make? Well, there are about as many styles of agents as there are agents. And at the end of the day, you really want to find an agent who is going to meet your goals. What might your goals be? One goal might be to maximize the amount of money you can sell your home for. Another goal might be to ensure that the new home owners are decent people. A third goal might be that you want a really fast transaction. Ideally, you’ll find an agent who will help you define your goals and then go out and beat them.

So, now that we’ve all agreed that it is worthwhile to interview more than one agent (everyone’s on board right?), what types of questions should you ask? In a previous post, I listed 10 good questions for sellers to ask a real estate agent along with some background on why the questions were important. The questions are summarized here:

      1. How long have you worked full time in real estate?
      2. Do you have a personal assistant, team, or staff to handle different parts of the sales transaction?
      3. Do you and/or your company each have a website that will provide me with useful information for research, services, and how you work with buyers?
      4. How will you keep in contact with me during the buying process, and how often?
      5. Can you explain one thing that you do that other agents don’t do that ensures I’m getting top dollar for my property?
      6. Will you give me names of past clients who will give references for you?
      7. Do you have a performance guarantee?
      8. How are your fees structured? May I have that in writing?
      9. How would you develop pricing and marketing strategies for our home? Will you commit to the marketing strategy in writing?
      10. What will you do to sell my home?

[photopress:shilshole_boats.jpg,thumb,alignright]Rather than go through each question with a blow by blow with my answers, I thought I would outline my basic strategy that I give to each and every home owner. For my own benefit, I’ve broken the process into three categories. When I’m successful, all three of these steps come together to form a cohesive whole:

  • Preparing Your Home. Advice can range from “you need to bring a U-Haul truck here and remove the clutter” to “I think this room would look much better with new drapes, to “Wow! Your home looks amazing!”
  • Marketing Your Home. This is where I bring in photographers and have my design team put together color brochures, fliers, ads, webpages, and other home-specific marketing techniques. Of course, I also list the home on the MLS and open houses until the home is sold.
  • Selling Your Home. This is where we strategize on pricing the home to meet the sellers goals and maximize the price. This is also where my team performs numerous quality control checks to ensure that all the legal issues are settles.

So, to answer a more fundamental question… Why am I (as a real estate agent) advising you to interview more than one agent? I’m confident enough in my own ability to say that there is not another agent in North Seattle who can offer the market insight and quality of service that I provide. My experience has proven that when I’m given the opportunity to present my ideas for preparing, marketing and selling their home, many home owners choose to work with me!

Flipping Responsibly

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lambsThe Las Vegas Review Journal reports that some flippers (people who buy and then quickly sell a property with the goal of making a large profit) have filed a class-action lawsuit against a home builder (Pulte) because they’ve lost money!

The crux of the story is that Pulte lowered the price on many of their homes across Las Vegas a few weeks after the flippers purchased homes from Pulte. The result is that the resale value of the homes the flippers had purchased dropped considerably.

Jason Beaver of San Francisco followed some untimely advice from a friend who’d made a hefty profit flipping homes in Las Vegas.

He paid $350,000 for a three-bedroom, 1,500-square-foot new home in the Solera subdivision of Anthem last September, just weeks before the builder, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Pulte Homes, lowered prices in several communities across Las Vegas Valley.

It’s ridiculous of the people to sue Pulte or any of the other home builders. These people bought homes in a highly speculative market. They obviously didn’t do their research to find out a glut of homes were on the market and so they lost a lot of money. It is really hard for me to feel sorry for them.

Via The Housing Bubble 2 (which is currently the most active real estate blog for people anticipating a large correction in housing prices at some point in the future.)

Walk on the Wild Side

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Donald Playing the GuitarWhen the local weekly starts making connections between Alan Greenspan and the “electro-clash” and the semi-acoustic/psychedelic “folk” revival, they’ve got my attention!

The idea behind the article is that:

Alan Greenspan has set radically low interest rates in recent years, fueling gonzo speculation of real estate. The subsequent inflation has transformed cities across America and displaced millions of poor people. As a parallel, we have witnessed the rise of two paradigmatic indie-music movements in the last five years: “electro-clash” and its successor, the semi-acoustic/psychedelic “folk” revival—movements based on the absence of space.

I’m bet most of my readers hadn’t seen that connection before The Stranger pointed it out! 🙂

What to look for in your first real estate company

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houseI read a great post the other day about a woman who is looking to become a real estate agent. This inspired me to think of what type of advice would I like to give to aspiring agents, and I’ve come up with these six things to consider in a real estate agency:

1) Broker Compentition. In general, be weary of firms where your broker also acts as an agent. There is enough compentition in the industry so that you shouldn’t have to compete with your broker for a listing.

2) Training. Just about every company will market their wonderful and unique training opertunities. Get the details. Are their classes offered in your office or do you have to travel far? Who’s teaching the classes? How much do they cost? The best real estate agent are always learning new things.

3) Office fees and commission structure. In general, there is a trade off with most agencies. Sometimes the monthy fees are high, but you get to keep a much larger portion of your commission. Other companies have low monthly fees, but take a larger portion of your commissions. Along these lines, office fees might very anywhere from $50 to $1000 for a month. Also, make sure you ask about all the fees. Is there a cost to use the office supplies, like copy machine or fax machines?

4) Office atmosphere. Are there experienced agents around who can give you advice and help you if needed? There will probably be times when your broker will be unavailable… Is there someone else to help you out?

5) Location. Is the office near your home, so you can get there on short notice? Is the office close to the market you want to concentrate on? Is it convenient for your clients?

6) Successful agents. Also know that when you begin, a great way to get clients is by doing open houses. Being part of an office with lots of succesful agents can mean that you can host their open houses when they are too busy. Are their lots of successful agents in the office?

Most importantly, make sure you interview a bunch of real estate companies. Just about every agency has a different feel to it. Interview enough and you are sure to find a company that will suit you. If you are interested in interviewing with Keller Williams, let me know and I can introduce you to the appropriate people!

To help you along, I’ve compiled this list (almost entirely compiled by Seattle Property News with just a few additions by me) that lists the residential real estate agencies in Seattle. The list is not exhaustive, but does include most of the companies that have practicing agents.

If you want to find agents, instead of agencies, the google directory provide a pretty comprehensive list of agents with websites.

George Washington, the real estate mogul?

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Revolutionary War general, father of our country, cherry-tree murderer. Many descriptions come to mind when we invoke the name of George Washington.

Real estate mogul isn’t one of them. But it should be.

This fun San Francisco Chronicle column continues…

At the tender age of 15, Washington became a professional land surveyor and cartographer, a short-lived career that would have a long-term influence on his destiny. Among his earliest jobs, he laid out the subdivision plan for Alexandria, Va., adding “urban planner” to his résumé. By the time he quit to join the Virginia colonial militia a few years later, he had surveyed some 66,000 acres of land and traversed most of what would become the original 13 United States.

Walking the land seemed to whet his appetite for owning it. He learned to assess property and poured his earnings into buying tracts of land near and far. By the time he was 21, he owned 1,558 acres of land purchased from his earnings as a surveyor. By the time he died, Washington was one of the country’s wealthiest landowners.

Preapproval financing letter may not be worth much

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homelessThe Seattle Times ran an interesting article on how on-line preapproval letters. It should serve as a warning to sellers to make sure that you are getting a pre-approval letter that is actually worth the paper it is printed on.

The agents said 39 percent of preapprovals issued by Internet-based lenders are faulty or invalid. Nearly 30 percent of mortgage broker-issued preapprovals are in the same category, along with one out of every five preapprovals from national lenders.”
A faulty preapproval letter may say something to the effect that “We have preapproved Mr. and Mrs. Flanagan for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 5.5 percent in an amount not to exceed $500,000.” That allows the Flanagans to look at — and bid on — homes without anybody seeing proof of their actual qualifications.

But what happens when the lender simply relies on Mr. and Mrs. Flanagan’s statements about their income, assets and credit, and issues a preapproval without verifying the information?

“That’s where you can get into deep trouble,” says John Marcell Jr., a real-estate broker who is the incoming president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers. He runs Compass Realty and Better Mortgage Brokers, both based in Upland, Calif.

Marcell’s loan brokerage does not issue preapprovals for buyers whose credit files, assets and income have not been verified, and his realty firm won’t accept preapproval letters if the information has not been confirmed by the lender or broker issuing the letter.

“In those cases [functioning as Realtor] we go to the [mortgage] broker and say, ‘Look, we’ve got to see the credit reports. We’ve got to see the W-2s. We’ve got to see the bank statements.’ ”

Compass Realty also warns the seller on homes it lists whenever preapprovals look dubious.

Troll Avenue North

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[photopress:victorious_half_dome.jpg,thumb,alignright]I just returned from a wonderful vacation in Yosemite to find out that two blocks of Aurora Avenue are proposed to be renamed Troll Avenue North. Such huge news! 🙂

We had a wonderful time, and while my family didn’t make it up to the top of Yosemite Falls (so we do not have a “five-years later” photo), my husband did make it up to the top of Half Dome!

[photopress:river_rafting.jpg,thumb,alignleft]With over 40 members of my family in the valley, our vacation involved lots of laid back time with family. We went on many small hikes and found time to go river rafting just about every day. So much fun!

Anyway, I’m sure that as I go through all the websites that I missed while on vacation, I’m going to find lots of stuff to blog about. I’ve got lots of reading (and writing) to do! In particular, google came out with an official “API” for their on-line mapping which should simplify the development of the ghomes tool that I’ve put together. I’m going to work on that this afternoon, and hopefully, I’ll have something interesting to share with you soon!

Yosemite Vacation

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I’m taking a week-long vacation at Yosemite National Park, but that doesn’t mean that Rain City Guide will go on a break as well… Mary Jereczek has kindly offered to step up and write posts in my absence!

This is a great time to mention that I’m really thrilled with the response that I’ve had from my call for guess bloggers. I think that these top title representatives, mortgage brokers and real estate agents offer an interesting and useful perspective and really help round out the discussion on this site! I look forward to having more guest bloggers and welcome anyone who might be interested!

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By the way, this photo of my family was taken at the top of Yosemite Falls five years ago! Obviously, my daughter has grown considerably since then! It should be a lot of fun to show her the incomparable valley again now that she is old enough to appreciate it!

Starbucks on Anna?

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[photopress:luke_hurley_and_bird_patterson.jpg,thumb,alignright]I’m always interested in new marketing approaches and I recently read about two ideas that seem worthy of more consideration. The first comes from Rosa where she describes an investment banker that buys everyone coffee at the local Starbucks once a week. Here’s how Rosa describes it:

This morning Kerwin and I walked into a Prescott Starbucks and both ordered their strong-brew coffee of the day to then find it was free. The barista at the cash register motioned over to a gentleman sitting in an animated discussion with a group of about six others, and said, “Your coffee is on Mr. Perez this morning.

Redfin — The Anti-Google

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[photopress:sasha_with_troll.JPG,thumb,alignright]I’m extremely disappointed in the latest direction that Redfin has taken and I’d like to use this post to explain why I’ve completely stopped doing business with them.

For those of you not familiar, Redfin is a company that has developed a really great aerial technology for viewing MLS data. When they came out, I signed up as a “Redfin Agent” because their technology was superior to anything else available for searching the MLS. In previous blog entries I’ve mentioned how great their technology is.

How did they plan to make money? In the simplest sense, their business plan involved displaying MLS information via an intuitive interface using aerial images. When prospective clients would look for a home, Redfin would direct them to local real estate agents. After the prospective clients purchased a home, the real estate agent would send a portion of the closing commissions (20%) back to Redfin. By repacking the MLS data in a new way and getting real estate agents to promote them, they hoped to take the industry by storm. However, their site must not be nearly as popular as they hoped because their newest business venture turns them into a discount real estate company.

However, I wouldn’t write this blog entry if they were just another discount real estate agency. I don’t have a problem with discount real estate agencies and I think they provide a useful service for a subset of sellers (and besides, they keep us full-service agents on our toes!). The reason I write this article is that Redfin went from being a partner with real estate agents to a competitor. I think they assumed they could use the goodwill that they’ve built up with agents to slip a fast one on us.

The worst part is that Redfin didn’t have to go that route. Early on, I talked with them about licensing their technology to display MLS over my site. When the showed only passing interest, I decided to develop the MLS Search Engine myself… And while my technology is still in the infant stage, I’ve found a way to display MLS data over aerial photos (so don’t believe their front-page marketing that says that are the only ones doing this!).

If you are currently a “redfin agent” (like I was!), please join me in severing your business relationship with Redfin until they decide to join us again as a partner. As Redfin doesn’t offer a way to “delete” your account, I recommend doing the next best thing. To delist yourself from their database, go to: http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/my-redfin. Log in using your username and password. Click “edit your profile