Buyers and Sellers: Help is on the way…

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I’m pretty sure that many real estate agents wouldn’t want to hear this, but the real estate industry has been very effective at protecting their own self-interest at the expense of home buyers and sellers. There are so many useful tools that could be built, but valuable real estate data is hidden behind thick walls! But rather than focus on the problems of the industry, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about the future…

If you’ve been reading Rain City Guide long enough, you probably know that last May I put together the first home search (“gHomes

Party on the Seattle Monorail Project…

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Drinks for PartyOn the assumption that the monorail board doesn’t find a way to revive it’s dying patient, the Puget Sound Business Journal had an interesting article on what might happen with the 34 properties that the Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) has already purchased. They mention that some of the properties, like the 7-11 store in Ballard, could fetch a quite a lot of money on the open market. I was surprised to find that through the process of eminent domain, the SMP could only offer the “appraised value” for the properties they bought. I (wrongly) assumed that the SMP was giving property owners some type of premium (on top of “relocations costs”).

I have no numbers to back this up whatsoever, but wouldn’t be ironic if the Seattle Monorail Project was able to close up shop having made a profit from all the properties that they bought at appraised values?

Real estate and coffee… It’s so obvious in retrospect

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All Seattle real estate agents should be holding our heads down in shame today as we let a company out of Jackson, Mississippi Michigan open a the world’s first real estate cafe.

It seems so obvious in retrospect! I imagine just about every agent in Seattle has had at least one meeting with a client in a coffee shop (heck, many of us run our entire operations out of coffee shops!), but none of us ever took the initiative to open up a cafe devoted to the real estate arts!

By the way, if there are any Starbuck executives reading my blog, I just thought I’d let you know I’d be willing to discuss ways of teaming on a real estate cafe venture! You guys have been focusing too much on music lately… There’s definitely more money in real estate!

Story via Inman News.

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UPDATE: One of my readers has been kind enough to let me know that this is not the world’s first real estate cafe, as as a matter of fact, Bill Wendel out of Cambridge, MA has been hosting a real estate cafe since 1995. None the less, my offer to Starbucks executives still holds!

New Monorail Director

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The PI is reporting that the Monorail project has a new director…

A top transportation consultant who worked on the Las Vegas monorail system has been picked to temporarily run Seattle’s troubled monorail project, weeks before a city-imposed deadline for determining whether the line should survive.

John Haley Jr. of the firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. was announced this evening as the interim executive director. Haley has extensive transit and transportation experience, including stints as deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

“He knows his job is to come in and help us figure out what to do,” including possibly abandoning the project, said board member Cleve Stockmeyer, head of a search committee. “He has committed to be objective.”

My hope is that he can bring the project back from the dead, but that’s probably too much to ask of a transportation consultant! 🙂

UPDATE: The Stranger presents the first positive article on the monorail I’ve seen in quite a while…

Winning isn’t everything…

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Rollin Sand SailingI know it is no good to laugh at the misfortune of others, but some people make it really hard…

The Seattle Times highlights the troubles of a group of people who bought land “sight-unseen” at an auction only to find out that the land they bought was not what they expected… Some highlights include:

  • The guy who bought 640 acres of desert land in Nevada for $75,000 only to find out later that it is about a mile from the nearest road, and there is no easement across adjoining land for access.
  • The guy (with photo) who bought land for his retirement home near the Skagit River, only to find out that the the town officials won’t let him build on the land because it is in a major flood plain.

I remember when the story of this action first made the press it was obvious to the casual reader that the land they were selling was not necessarily of the highest quality.

While we’re on off-beat real estate stories, check out this story on how NOT to handle an eviction notice from Behind the Mortgage…

“If you can email, you can blog”

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The first thing that struck me about this article from Inman the title of the article: “If you can email, you can blog”. I must have written and/or said a variant of that phrase about 10 times this past week in conversations and emails! (I’ve been evangelizing the wonders of blogging to all kinds of people!). While it IS very easy to blog, it is actually quite difficult to consistently write stuff that others find interesting. The Inman article I mentioned above describes the editor of Curbed, a real estate blog out of New York that consistently finds great off-the-wall stories to compliment their more serious posts. Curbed’s editor, Lockhart Steele, describes his site as: “It’s a blog about New York City, and everything in New York comes back to real estate.”).

Are you a food person? Curbed also puts out a blog that covers all things food in New York.

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!

One good faith estimate isn’t good enough…

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[photopress:Cats.JPG,thumb,alignright]In reading Elizabeth Rhodes response to an interest-only loan question, I realized that it has been a while since I talked about my uncomfort with interest only mortgages… I think way too many people are using them as a last resort to get into a house. When interest rates start rising, a lot of people could find out that they have bitten off more than they can chew.

The particular question Elizabeth was answering was in regards to whether or not someone should stick with a mortgage broker that made them feel uncomfortable… She gave an appropriate response (concluding that the client should walk away from this broker) but missed out on giving some truly useful advice that could really minimize this issue. What she could have said: “Get more than one quote!” or “You’re making a mistake by using only one broker anyway.”

In practical terms, “getting more than one quote” means getting at least two good faith estimates. At a minimum, you should get an estimate from at least one on-line banks and one local broker. If I ever create my own set of top 10 rules for a home buyer, getting two good faith estimates would be at the very top. No one has to tell you that you’re making a huge investment when you buy your home. By making loan brokers compete, it is entirely possible to get a much lower rate. Even saving just two-tenths of a percent on your loan can add up to thousands of dollars in the long run.

If you want some more detail, I wrote a bunch more on getting a home loan last March that stills seems relevant.

Catching up…

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I haven’t blogged in a little while, but that is not because there is a lack of interesting things to talk about. All kinds of interesting things have been happening on the real estate front, so I’m going to attempt to catch up all in one huge post.

First off, I joined up with the Real Estate Blog Squad. The idea behind this group is that lots of real estate agents would team together to blog about topics related to the National Assn. of REALTORS® annual convention and exposition that will be going on October 28-31, 2005. In reality, I have no idea what will come out of this group, but I’m happy to take part in the experiment.

Redwood TreeNext I wanted to talk about a local news items from this previous week… Seattle Times: Seattle market: Distorted prices — or room to grow? The Seattle Times ran an article about a story I covered about the riskiest cities to live in… The only reason I mention it is that the article says: “The word went out on CNN. It ran in The Christian Science Monitor. A Seattle real-estate blog reported it, and it earned the cover-story spot on msn.com’s money page.” I’m pretty sure that I’m the only Seattle blogger that covered this story, so I’m going to hazard a guess that the Seattle Times real estate writer is now reading my blog! Welcome Elizabeth Rhodes! I definitely read just about everything you write!

After an absence of 5 days, I enjoyed reading this post from Counter Intelligence that described a situation that I’m sure is familiar to many real estate bloggers: “I’ve got to post a new article today or I’m going to lose readers.” I was surprised to hear that counter Intelligence lost 90% of their daily hits after 50 days of not posting. Contrary to the idea you might get by reading this recent article from National Association of Realtors (NAR), real estate blogging is hard work. Let this serve as a warning to real estate agents who are thinking of diving into blogging. Writing an interesting post on a daily basis is tough stuff. Make sure that you enjoy writing. Make sure that you enjoy keeping up on the news. Real estate blogs like Hot Property have an inherent advantage in that it would be so much easier with multiple bloggers all posting to the same site. Ideally, Rain City Guide will someday get about 5 of 6 different real estate agents who post articles on a regular basis. That way, any one of the agents can take a week off when they get burned out without the site suffering a blackout period.

Funny headline of the week… The Ballard News-Tribune (a local paper with a malfunctioning website) had this title for their August 3, 2005 issue: “We could get monorail first.” The article went on to describe how the Ballard segment of the Monorails Greenline would likely get built before other sections. This begs the question: Do the writers of the Ballard News-Tribune read other newspapers? . Do they know that the monorail is much closer to dead than ever being built at this point. The mayor of Seattle has given the monorail an September 15th deadline to come up with a plan or he is going to kill the entire project. The entire organization is in shambles.

Jeremy Zawodny had an interesting analysis of the insane housing market of Silicon Valley. The fact that home prices continue to rise at astronomically fast rates in Seattle, makes me glad to live in Seattle…

I think I bunched enough stuff together for one post, but I there are so many more stories to talk about… I’m just about ready to publish my first podcast for Rain City Guide. I’ve been working late into the night to create an updated MLS home search on top of google maps (nothing is ready to demonstrate yet!). Curbed nominated the “hotest” real estate agents in NY City (do we need something like that for Seattle? 🙂 )

UPDATE: . I imagine Bill Wendel over at Counter Intelligence will get a kick out of learning that even some at Wired News have been getting burned out on technology lately!

Get emotional about the deal, not the house

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dragon over waterBarry Ritholtz offered up 10 common mistakes made by real estate investors based on an article by Bankrate’s Pat Curry. The mistakes pat identifies stem from the idea that “real estate has become the tech stocks of the 2000s, the darling investment that everyone seems to think will be their ticket to easy wealth.”

Barry sums up Pat’s 10 common mistakes made by real estate investors:

1. Falling in love with the property.
2. Not performing your due diligence.
3. Forgetting the rule of home improvements.
4. Thinking you’ll get those low mortgage rates you see on TV.
5. Not pre-screening tenants.
6. Breaking your own rules.
7. Investing long-distance.
8. Paying too much for the property.
9. Not studying the competition.
10. Being underinsured.

There’s a lot more background in Pat’s article, making it well worth reading.