Category Archives: General

Should you have an Open House?

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I just sold another house from an Open House this weekend, and am reminded of all of the articles about how Open Houses do not sell houses. Sometimes I think the articles are sponsored by agents who don’t want to spend their Sundays working 🙂

I have changed a few things that I do based on technological advances, like pricing the home straight on $350,000 for double hits, instead of $349,899 to be first to show in the mls book. But listing and selling houses via Open Houses has always been “my thing”. I have provided some online training on the subject to agents around the Country, and still there are some agents who can honestly say that they have never sold a house from an Open House. It just boggles my mind.

I have always spent a great deal of time helping the seller get the house ready for weeks beforehand, before it goes on market. Then I usually do open houses the first two weeks back to back. This weekend I listed a property, that I had already spent many hours staging,and put “No showings until the Sat. Open House and Open Sat. and Sun. 1-4 p.m.” in the mls remarks. This is less wear and tear on the seller and creates a new listing that opens up with a BANG! Lots of energy! Agents showing and people coming all at the same time. I have 6 Open house signs and those big flags that new construction people use. It’s like a big party! Sometimes I even cook Italian food and play Connie Francis and Mario Lanza…and of course FRANK! But that’s usually for Broker’s Opens. I even had agents dancing once…that’s an accomplishment 🙂

Anyway, back to this weekend. I had an offer by the time the Open House was over and another from an agent who was begging me to wait for her as she rushed back two hours from wherever she was to write it for the buyers who came without her to the Open House. Turned out I didn’t have to do the Open House on Sunday, as it was all tied up by noon on Sunday.

Of course an agent who sits in the living room watching the ball game or playing with his laptop looking bored to tears may never sell a house at an Open House. But if you love doing them, there are plenty of ways to turn an Open House into a SOLD House! I hate to admit it, but I did get a call from my friend Reidi in Florida when she saw American Beauty. When Annete Bening got to the Open House hours early in her work clothes scrubbing it down saying “I am GOING to sell THIS HOUSE TODAY!!, Reidi called me and said “Ardell, they made a movie with YOU in it! LOL I’m not quite that bad…but close.

I’ve created a monster!

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Despite my adamant protest, many Rain City Guide contributors have gone off and created their own blogs. (what are they thinking???). However, as each and every one of these people have been very good to me, I thought I’d let you know where you can find more of their writings:

  • Russ Cofano — Realty Objectives [link removed]. While Russ is a real estate lawyer, I can tell you from our many conversations that his true love is innovation. His blog is a reflection of his interest in understanding real estate technology. (Check out his Speaking Opportunities [link removed] section to see something I might blog about soon…)
  • Ardell DellaLoggia — Ask Ardell. I don’t know about you, but I could NEVER get enough of Ardell’s writing… Where does she find the time???
  • Craig Blackmon — Real Estate Law Blog. He’s been keeping up a great real estate blog mainly geared to FSBOs.
  • Robert Gray Smith — Lake Sammamish Living. All kinds of good stuff about life on the Eastside.
  • Galen Ward— ShackBlog. He’s been out of town for a while, but when he’s around, he’s always sharing interesting stuff.
  • Marian Crkon — It’s a Feature. This might sound a little like it is coming out of left-field, but if you’re interested in Oracle applications, this blog is as good as they get!

As I often enjoy following the comments on RCG more than the posts, 🙂 I thought it also might be fun to highlight some of the great contributors (via comments) that regularly appear on Rain City Guide:

NWMLS to take 3 more baby steps into the digital age

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Ok, Robbie and I have both made our gripes known before about how closed the NWMLS technology is — even for agents. Well they are finally taking some steps in the right direction. I don’t have all the details yet so really not sure if they’ve gone far enough.  But I thought the readers of RCG should see it here first. I’ll follow up with details as each is launched.

The three major changes coming up are:

  1. New Vendor Access Agreements for MLS Data. This new agreement allows a Broker to have as many IDX downloads as the Broker wants —as long as the providing Vendors sell their products only to that Broker’s agents. For agents this is great as we should see a greater range of MLS data solutions. The downside is I’ve heard that it these vendor agreements will be excluding public access solutions of the data. In other words, you might be able to develop a really bitching CRM system for agents that accesses MLS data directly, but we (agents) are still limited to our company’s primary IDX feed for our website data.
  2. NWMLS Sold Data to Become Public  – Not sure they are going to give us all of the data fields on this, but a lot of the fields that become public record (e.g. close date, purchase price, etc) will be available on Broker-controlled websites. My guess is you will see some of the brokers coming up with online CMA systems for the general public. (Heading Zillow off at the pass?)
  3. FINALLY!!!  Digital Signatures. – NWMLS approved and endorsed DocuSign as the sole electronic signature system for NWMLS documents.

– Robert

New Law To Regulate Mortgage Professionals

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On March 9th Washington State’s Governor Christine Gregoire signed House Bill 2340 which will regulate all Loan Originators in the brokering of residential real estate loans. According to Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers the new legislation requires the following:

  1. All Loan Originators will need to pass a basic compliance skills examination prior to January 1, 2007;
  2. Continuing Education will be required on an annual basis;
  3. Background checks will be required prior to licensing, removing felons’ and person with criminal histories that do not warrant the public’s trust.

Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers (WAMB) also states:

(The licensing) creates new consumer protections by raising the bar for practitioners in our industry by achieving two key objectives: 1) it will help weed out those in the industry who do no have the consumer’s best interest in mind and creates a revocable license for those that employ unethical and illegal practices; and 2) it will strengthen our industry by exposing educational opportunities needed for brokers that care about doing things right, but may be lacking the knowledge to remain compliant in accordance with State and national regulations.

WAMB provided some interesting facts about other states that have implemented a licensing requirement:

  • In Ohio 10% of loan originators were removed due to felony convictions.
  • In Utah 25% of loan originators never passed a basic compliance skills examination.
  • Many “out of state

What to Look For In Your Real Estate Blog Stats

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I’m sad to report that we weren’t made an unbelievable offer for RCG, and we have no plans to change our name to either “Google’s Rain City Guide” or “Rain Zity Guide”. 😉

And now that it is April 2nd, I thought I’d get back to work by giving some advice on what to look for in the stats of your business blog.

It can be useful to know answers to questions like: Who is visiting my site? Where they are coming from? Am I giving them what they want? And (assuming you’re running a business blog), is anyone buying the product/service that I’m selling? To get at these answers, I turn to one of three different stat programs (all of them free!):

  • awstats came installed by my internet service provider (ISP) and offers the best look at long term trends for me because I’ve had has been running the entire time I’ve had RCG. It always shows slightly higher stats than the other programs because it picks up everyone who visits the site and not just those who load the whole page and/or have javascript installed. For better or worse, my host only updates the awstats once a day, and they get aggregated by month so that I can’t really make head’s or tails out of what is going on “right now” using this stat program.
  • MapStats has some interesting features that make it very useful for blogging. It not only maps all of the users out based on their IP address, but it also let’s me know where the latest visitors are coming from (i.e. what links they clicked on and/or what search term they used to get to RCG). It is updated every few minutes making it very useful in seeing what’s happing in the hear-and-now.
  • Google Analytics is an amazingly comprehensive stat program that is probably better suited for sites 100 or 1000 times bigger than RCG (or at least sites that have a staff with time to pour over all the information it gives!). It includes tons of interactive charts and you allow you to reference and cross-reference by date and referrer (and ad program if you do that kind of thing). Like awstats, it has the disadvantage that it only updates once a day, and like MapStats it misses out on people who don’t have javascript installed and running. But the charts are amazing. To give you an idea of some of the things you can see with Google Analytics, I’ve included a chart of the “loyalty” of RCG readers:

[photopress:rcg_loyalty.jpg,full,centered]

(You can read the chart as saying “In March, 10,254 visitors came only once while 743 visitors have been to Rain City Guide more than 200 times.)

Interestingly, the loyalty chart reminds me of something said by Niki Parekh of HouseValues at the MIT Forum that has resonated with me. The topic was how real estate agent using HouseValues system have to be patient because it can take months, if not years, between the time when a home owner contacts HouseValues looking for a home valuation report and the time when when they are ready to sell their home.

The relevance to the loyalty chart is that I have this not-too-small hope that more and more of the home buyers and sellers who read Rain City Guide regularly will begin to take advantage of Anna’s referral service when they are actually ready to buy and/or sell a home. While a dozen or so people contacted Anna in March, there is still plenty of room for this service to grow, and I was glad to hear Niki highlight the importance of keeping a long-term view of things.

More Stat Fun
On a related note, I’d feel like I was hiding something if I didn’t give an update on our statistics at the beginning of the month (jan, feb). Here are the same two stat charts updated to include data for March:

[photopress:unique_visitors_march.jpg,full,centered]

[photopress:total_visitors_march.jpg,full,centered]

One last thing
And finally, Happy Belated Birthday to Merv’s blog in Virginia . If you want a little background on why Merv has been so successful at real estate blogging, check out the interview I did with him back in December.

If you thought “Zestimates” were off, try RealEstateABC.com’s Value Tools

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Announced with lots of fanfare on Inman today about New home-valuation site rivals Zillow. Just went to check it out and it valued my home at $618,000 compared to Zillow’s Zestimate of $1.12 Million. Hmm..just a slight margin of difference there. Inman’s blog site covers the ABC Value tool as “Zillow is old news“.

Personaly, while neither is quite accurate (I think Zesitmates have been covered enough already), I’ll take the old news over the new player on the block. They seem to miss some major value factors like..oh about 50ft of waterfront. All-in-all I think these services make interesting discussion points for our clients but it will be some time before they are on the money.

Robert

Top Ten Questions – Wiseguys and such

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[photopress:sopranos.jpg,full,alignright]Agents usually list the Top Ten Questions buyers and sellers ask them on their website or in their blog. While they certainly ask me plenty of real estate questions, I have to say that the number one question that is not about real estate that people ask me is: “Is the Sopranos ‘Authentic’?” I was asked the question so much that I had to watch the show. Even at the recent MIT Forum, I found myself answering this question to the guy on my right. Lord knows how the subject came up with Redfin, Zillow and House Values in the room.

Christopher is one of the only true Wiseguys. Paulie is what we would call a choochamend. You don’t hear about Philly much because, for all intents and purposes, Jersey doesn’t exist. North Jersey goes with NY and South Jersey goes with Philly. So when you are dealing with North Jersey, as in Tony, then you see NY and not Philly, except for the occasional assist. Gobbagool is Capicolla. Bobby Bacala’s name is spelled wrong. It’s Baccala or salted cod or a spanking. Unless someone else knows why my grandmother was always threatening to give us a baccala, and it clearly wasn’t fish.

Names like Joey-two-toes and such does not mean someone is in the Mafia. It is a Catholic thing, not a mafioso thing. When I was a kid, people were not allowed to name their children anything but a Saint’s name. So everyone was named Joe or John or Tony. So to distinguish all of the different Joe’s and Tony’s, you had to add something. My dad was Giuseppe Pasquale DellaLoggia aka “Joe-the-hat”. Trust me, he was not in the mafia. He got psoriasis of the scalp when he was 19 and went bald, so he never took off the jeff cap, hence “Joe-the-hat”.

OK, you can go back to 1031 Exchanges now…not my favorite topic 🙂 Can’t wait to see how Dustin tags this one.

Can Real Estate ever ‘Bust’?

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Last week an investor called me from LA who is a stock broker. Our conversation got me thinking about the rich investment opportunity real estate provides, in spite of all the talk of a bubble burst. I’ve played the stock market for years and have won some and lost some but I’ve never been able to get it down to a predictable outcome. I invest in stocks because I’m told by financial advisors that I need to diversify. However, there is a way to invest that has many more controllable and dependable outcomes – Real Estate! Real Estate will never go out of business, never merge, never have problems with DOJ, never be outdone by the overseas manufacturing industry, never worry about ever changing technologies. There’s always supply and there’s always demand. With the exception of mother nature simply obliterating the landscape, real estate will always be there.

I don’t mean to paint an overly rosy picture here, but having been in the business for, gulp, nearly 30 years, and watching the ups and downs and downs and ups, (I once sold a home to a client with financing at 22%! not to mention using precious gems as a down payment!), I just don’t see the glass as half empty but rather half full. I have been a restaurant and marina owner and a real estate developer and investor, throughout the various market ups and downs. I suggest you look at real estate values over those last 30 years and see how many times they’ve multiplied. And we’ve had 5 or 6 ‘busts’ in that time. As a new licensee, I sold my first home for $32,500 in 1978 and today that home is listed at $495,000 – a multiple of 15 times. We all know this is true, so why are we all sitting around worrying? All this talk about real estate busting like the stock market did is just ridiculous. We’re not comparing apples with apples and even if the prices do go down, it will most likely be short term creating a great buying opportunity, and when prices bounce back we’ll all sit back and have a good laugh at all those naysayers with dour predictions.

I wish I’d taken my own advice in 1986 when I could have purchased 150 homes from a bank for 20 cents on the dollar. I didn’t have the foresight at that time to know what I am telling you now; real estate bounces back and prices rise even higher. Had I bought those homes that year, I’d be writing this from my estate in Maui! I’ve learned my lesson and now I want to share my perspective with you.

So, keep on investing. You may not be able to live off the profits from a short term flip but if you invest with someone that understands the market and the profit potential, you won’t have to worry about any ‘busts’ now or in the future.

Can we create THE Real Estate Guide for Seattle?

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I’ve been playing around with wikis for quite a while, and I finally got around to installing one (that I’m happy with) on the Rain City Guide server. But before I tell you what you can do with the wiki, I should probably give some background…

What is a wiki?

In the simplest sense, a wiki is an editable webpage. Have you ever read something and thought “I know more than the person writing this!” Well, a wiki gives you this option as it is designed to allow readers to edit webpages.

[photopress:hanging_tree.jpg,thumb,alignright]The most popular wiki is, without a doubt, the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia is essentially an encyclopedia made for the web. It allows anyone to update any page. This might sound like a mess waiting to happen, but in practice, the concept has worked well because there are more good people than bad on the site and the results is an amazingly comprehensive listing of public knowledge. While running a wiki takes a certain amount of faith in the “goodness” of contributors, all public wikis tend to have really good “roll-back” features that allow an users to “undo” unhelpful comments and block IP addresses from spammers (including the wiki I installed!).

So what am I up to?
In my quest to create the best resource for real estate information in Seattle, I’ve created a wiki that will complement this blog. Whereas the blog best serves timely updates, the wiki will hopefully become a wonderful way to present information that can benefit from continuously improvements over time.

So what am a really up to?
I want to create THE real estate guide for Seattle. It will take time, but I think that if we keep plugging away, we can harness the knowledge of the Rain City Guide community to create a truly unique resource. As I really do plan for this to become “the” real estate guide for Seattle, I’ve named the site: the.raincityguide.com.

What are some uses for the wiki?
In my mind, the low hanging fruit is a real estate directory for Seattle. If you are a real estate professional in Seattle, feel free to add yourself to the real estate directory that I’ve created. Adding yourself to the directory is easy and just meant to get you comfortable with editing a wiki, while also qualifying yourself as a web-savvy real estate professional. 😉

In terms of the directory, I’ve added the following categories: Appraisers, Construction, Escrow, Handymen, Mortgage Brokers, Real Estate Photographers, Real Estate Agents, Real Estate Lawyers, Real Estate Technology, and Title Companies. But the beauty of a wiki is that if I missed your line of work (assuming it is within real estate), simply edit the page and add your profession. (By the way, I haven’t added separate webpages for any of the people in the directory yet, but if you’d like to add a page to expand on yourself and the services you provide, feel free to create a page by putting your name in brackets, as in [John Doe].

Another idea I have is almost definitely ahead-of-its-time, but could be interesting, is that anyone selling a home is free to create a webpage that describes their home on the.raincityguide.com. It will cost you nothing but time, and if you are creative enough, it might get you some interesting publicity.

Of course, I have even more ideas for how a wiki could be useful for better understanding real estate in Seattle, so don’t be too surprised if I reference wiki articles in future blog posts! With that said, I’m a huge fan of the “release early and often” philosophy (and this feature is definitely released early), so don’t expect too much from the wiki and you likely won’t be disappointed!

Also, if a wiki seems a little bit intimidating to you, feel free to play around in the sandbox. You can’t mess anything up in there, so edit away and I think you’ll quickly see how easy it is to create and edit webpages with a wiki.