I just wanted to take a moment to highlight Dustin’s birthday and to thank him for creating this site. It’s clearly gone beyond his initial expectations and it’s a great tool for many people who are trying to learn more about the local real estate market and industry (including related fields).
Best wishes on a marvelous day to you, Dustin!
I wish I could save this post for Valentines Day! Earlier this month, fresh from Inman NY, Brian announced that he is going to start posting tidbits of rate info on Twitter. If you subscribe to Brian’s Twitter, Mortgage Report, you’ll be notified if he feels you should be locking or floating…this is similiar to what I receive by investing my subscription to Mortgage Market Guide (bond quotes). However, this service is free and priceless!
Here are the alerts I received from Brian just today (which was an exceptional day):
This is simply a brilliant idea and a huge commitment from Brian Brady of Mortgage Rates Report and Bloodhound Blog. If you can’t wait until the end of the work week for “Friday’s Rates”, subscribe out Brian’s Twitter! You’ll be twitterpated. 😉
Part of me wants to stray away from writing this post, but I don’t want to withhold my nagging questions just because I’m a former Chicagoan. So many Seattleites have me snickering when I hear them lament about how frigid it is here. Makes me want to mutter back, “You have no idea!” Oh no, it’s in the upper 30’s or 40’s in Seattle – that’s nearly summer compared with what I’m typically accustomed to this time of the winter.
My parents’ poor puppy back home can barely place her paws outside it’s so brutally cold, and so I’m trying to convince them they need to to fly somewhere tropical to thaw out since they are no spring chickens and I shudder the thought of them shoveling snow in such wicked conditions.
Not sure how I survived so many winters there. Take care, Chicago!
While it seems to be a fad to track inventory, reality is that most times in January, and this year is no exception, there are plenty of buyers. They simply do not want the homes that are currently listed for sale for a myriad of reasons, nor should they.
Last Thursday a group of us went to Broker’s Open Houses. We did not see any homes on the tour that we would recommend to our clients. We did pick the ones we thought would sell first, even though we would not likely suggest that our clients buy them.
Here’s how it played out:
House #1 – We all walked in, it took about 3 minutes to determine that it was not priced right and was not good at any price for any of our clients. There was a busy street close enough to be visible from the home. The house was very “cookie cutter” and not “commanding” the asking price by style alone, before considering the busy road negative. Tacking on the busy road issue, we went upstairs. The master suite was on the busy road side. Had the master suite been on the quiet side and the odd bedroom on the busy road side, the value would have been different.
A few agents talked about the quality of the windows, the gorgeous granite counter tops, when I started clapping my hands and saying: Out of Here…NEXT! It’s $200,000 over on the asking price and there are better houses to be had at this price. Not necessarily for sale today, but clearly within any buyers future timeframe.
It’s a NO! Let’s GO! (the open house agent was not present nor were any agents from other offices, so we could speak freely like this at the first one, since we were early and the Open House hadn’t started yet.)
House #2 – Great house; how much is it? Too much. But a great house if it were priced $75,000 less. NEXT! Agent asked about the old windows. I said irrelevant. Lots of updates needed, so price it at good condition in need of updating. No need to calculate each why and how much, let’s go, it will be a long time before this seller gets real, and you can’t make an offer until the first number is a 6 and not a 7, you will still be $35,000 over value even with the best of negotiation skills. Start price has to be lower, wait for the price reduction.
House #3 – We got out of the cars and everyone proceeded to the front door of the house. I stayed standing in the middle of the street. I told everyone to come back and stand with me and tell me what they observed. Big dog barking incessantly. I said if the dog is in the yard of “the subject house”, no biggeee as he’s moving. No, it was a vacant house. So Big Dog Barking is next door. Everyone made a note of it in case they had a buyer client at a time when the dog was sleeping or not home. We then proceeded into the house.
I stayed at the front window. What is THAT?! Elementary School and Middle school next to it. Every Mom and Dad dropping off kids would be line up out front every day. Car doors slamming. Shouts of “You forgot your lunch!” Envision what isn’t visible. NEXT!
House #4 – Gorgeous remodel. Great price. Open House agent present. Directly behind the Open House agent I could see out the window. The next door neighbor’s house, or part of the accessory of it, was smack up against the fence of this house. The Open House agent should not have planted himself at the home’s worst negative. I couldn’t even concentrate on what he was saying because of the view behind him. I said that’s tough; he said yeah. NEXT!
WHTF house (investor bought “Wrong House to Flip”). Now we can just say WHTF on any similar houses. Saves on time. Walk in say Great Remodel BUT “WHTF”. Still, all in all, I dubbed it my pick for “Best House of Day” as it was priced well and looked good and the cheapest good home in all of Bellevue at the moment.
I picked it as the house that would sell first without a price reduction needed. These “picks” go into an envelope, and we check back on them later to see how well we evaluated the properties. The agent who picks the most right gets a prize, they get to become a really good agent and stay that way.
There were two other houses, similar to house #2. Good houses, but priced out of range. One only needed a $10,000 reduction to get in range, so that was my second pick and some other agents’ first pick.
Even if you have been in the business for over 17 years, like me, you never stop doing Broker’s Opens to stay on top of the market and keep sharpening “the tool”.
Buyers can do this with Sunday Open Houses. It’s great fun and a valuable exercise.
First, I don’t know about other’s experiences in blogging, but stumbling upon Rain City Guide over a year ago or so and Dustin’s introduction to me of the world of moving away from a static glorified business card (called a website) to that of the dynamic and interactive world of Blogging has had a tremendous impact on me and as a small business owner (like everyone here).
For example, I’ve been able to make contacts with people whom I would never have had the chance to without the platform of blogging, both personal contacts and business contacts. Today, I got a chance to head back to my old stomping grounds in Seattle due to a courtesy signing with a client who teaches at Seattle University. After finding a parking spot, I headed over to the campus and walked to the School of Engineering to meet for our appointment. After about 30 seconds, I realized I was talking to an old neighborhood acquaintance whom I have not seen for over 30 yrs!
Inspired, after the appointment, I drove up Madison St. towards 19th and headed North towards St. Joe’s School on 19th and Aloha where I went to school as a kid. On the Northwest corner of 19th & Aloha is a small building where I was given my first job as a skinny, messy 70’s style haired bloke. The impact of that first job is really what set the stage for the foundation of work ethic and character building.
My first job was given to me by the late George and Evelyn Benson of Benson’s Mission Pharmacy on Capitol Hill. For those unfamiliar, George Benson was a long time pillar of the Capitol Hill community and a respected Seattle City Councilman. You want to talk about customer service? I distinctly remember George pulling up in his car to hand deliver a prespcription for my mom or dad at our front door a few blocks away. Those were the days of intensely personalized service. Mission Pharmacy and the Benson’s are no longer, but the windows I washed and the sidewalk I swept are still there as they were 30 years ago.
I headed over to my old house where I grew up, drove around the front of the home, got out of my car and headed over to the steps and walkway that wind up to the front door, but I stopped short of that trek—memories just racing through my head. Walking back to my car, I then drove around to the alley, which really was “our” front door entrance. Peering through my passenger door window I stared up into my old bedroom window and into the back yard. I was too embarrassed to walk up and knock on the door. Perhaps another day.
Part of the motivation for telling you this is about finding out who you really work with and the idea of “trust.” Does it matter to you? Trust in real estate is the glue that keeps customers coming back to you. Trust to do the right thing. Trust to work in the best interest of our mutual client.
When you strip away all the marketing persona and fluff in our industry and get to know potential new clients in a transparent and personal way, giving a glimpse into what makes you tick, warts ‘n all, it is remarkable how quickly you forge trust in the person standing across from you. Finding a common denominator and building trust with a potential client on a level that has nothing to do with business has been exceptionally fruitful.
Since the beginning of this year, just days ago, through blogging, I have reunioned with two old childhood friends and received fruitful clients. When you strip it all away I’m not terribly different than any other agent or loan officer trying to make a living. On Thursday, I headed out to brokers opens to meet some new people in the business who work in our area and I bumped into an old “acquaintance” whom I met at college in 1985. I haven’t seen her for 21 yrs. The funny thing about the meeting was that she (the agent) mentioned to me “ya know, I just speak my mind, and I wanted to you to know that I had a crush on you way back when we were freshman.” What a Brokers open and what a week.
Dustin, although I’ve never met your family personally, thanks for introducing me to a way that a small fry can compete with the Goliath’s.
The intersection of ethics and real estate meet again
As if WaMu didn’t have enough on its public relations plate, CNN Money reports:
Jeniffer Wertz, who is seeking unspecified damages, says WaMu stopped accepting her appraisals in mid-2007 a month after she reported that her local housing market in California was “declining.”
Evidently, Wertz claims that Washington Mutual wanted her to change her forecast to “stable.”
And on the other side of the coin
Bloomberg reporting that inflated appraisals causing significant losses to lenders.
`You started to see more and more loan products that would keep payments low, and I see that as correlating with appraisal pressure because those products only work in a rising market.”
(and, which loan products might those be I wonder tongue in cheek?)
Former guest at Inman Connect, Jonathon Miller, a sought-after New York appraisal and real estate consultant remarked:
“Lenders and mortgage brokers routinely pressured appraisers to boost values, said Jonathan Miller, a New York property appraiser for more than two decades who writes a blog about the problem.”
And more from the Bloomberg article….First American and WaMu working together?
“In New York, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two biggest buyers of U.S. mortgages. He also sued First American Corp.’s eAppraiseIT LLC for allegedly caving to pressure from Washington Mutual Inc., its biggest customer and the largest U.S. thrift, to inflate values.”
Ethics in real estate: oxymoron?
I would appreciate any advices you may have regarding people who have come here from other countries, and for whom English is an additional language.
Often the advices of Brokers to agents from other Countries is that they should only work with people who are from their Country. Clearly that is much too difficult to do, and sustain a reasonable lifestyle as a real estate agent, and growingly moreso.
If you receive an email from an agent with stilted language or broken English, and odd spellings created by the spellchecker (like shell instead of shall), do you overlook these things? Or do you expect an agent to be fluent in the English Language?
Accent alone can be quite charming, but in a field where misrepresentation is quite hazardous and good communication is key, can a Broker afford the risks that come with misunderstandings created by language difficulties? And yet it seems to be discrimination to not hire people with language issues.
Are there programs that are a big step up from spell checking, that assist people with these difficulties? Any advices appreciated.
This is huge news for a local real estate company… Long-time Rain City Guide contributor, Russ Cofano, recently accepted a position as Vice President and General Counsel at John L. Scott. From an email I received from Russ:
For me, the New Year is bringing a major change. Beginning Monday, January 14, 2008, I am joining John L. Scott Real Estate as Vice President and General Counsel. The decision to leave Bullivant Houser Bailey was a difficult one as this is a truly exceptional law firm. At the same time, my new role at John L. Scott will provide unique challenges and opportunities for personal growth. John L. Scott consistently ranks in the top 10 of U.S. independent real estate brokerages and I am looking forward to helping them in their continued growth as an industry leader.
Russ was clearly instrumental in the early growth of the Rain City Guide community! And for anyone who was around for the early discussions between Russ and Ardell, it was like having a front row seat to a force of nature! I learned a ton from Russ on so many levels and am so excited to have him back “in the industry!”
By hiring Russ, John L. Scott is getting a lot more than just a superb lawyer. They are getting a thought-leader in the world of online real estate!
Seattle attracts many people to move here from other states, if you did why?
In 1994 I moved to Seattle for lots of reasons, a job was not one of them, but many people do move here for work reasons. I am wondering about those of you who moved to Seattle, why did you? I know some of Rain City Guide contributors are natives (lucky you!) and others moved here from elsewhere. Oddly enough many people I have met or know moved to Seattle from Chicago, Karen Kirr here at Rain City Guide, moved here from Chicago and has been chronicling her experiences here on RCG.
I’ll kick this off with a few of my reasons: I transferred within my company from San Diego to the L.A./ Orange County area and it never felt like home to me even after 5 years. Since my family had already moved away from San Diego to Alabama years before, I was looking for another place. I wanted to be able to buy a home (something I would not have been able to in California) and get away from what I called “relentless sunshine”…because coffee is better savored in cooler weather! The place had to have a metropolitan feel to it and be supportive of the arts. Be close to mountains and water because views are important to me…they calm me and give me a sense of space and proportion. I choose to move to Seattle because it seemed to have what I was looking for. The decision was a leap of faith since I did not know anyone who lived here, and it has turned out to be a wonderful choice for me, I love living in Seattle!
I am curious, why did YOU move to Seattle?
On the flip side, what do YOU Seattle or Washington Natives find to be the best things about living in Seattle?
The growth of non-profit associations within the real estate sector can be traced to 1977 and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). At that time, banks began giving money to the non-profit housing sector in order to meet their CRA requirements.
Non-profit housing agencies perform many services for the community. First time homebuyer seminars, and then later, mortgage default counseling, preforeclosure workout assistance, help negotiating short sales, all for free or for a nominal cost.
Non-profits set up special training programs for loan originators and loan officers who want to be on the “approved