Realty Reality: How Jake, Jurij and Tatiana Pawlenko wove their way into our hearts . . .

This is a shaggy dog story…

It begins with Jake, the world’s most playful Yellow Labrador Retriever, and Jake is a thread running all through this tapestry.

And that’s the way to think of it — as a tapestry. The clients we love best — and we love to love our clients — weave themselves into the tapestry of our lives. They are with us for years — for life we hope — and they show up again and again in all sorts of unexpected places. For, while this is a Jake story, it’s also a Ronan Doyle story and a Richard Riccelli story — it’s a story where many of the threads of the tapestry of our lives meet and merge in beautiful, unplanned designs.

But this is most fundamentally the story of the work we did with Jurij Pawlenko — himself a shaggy two-legged dog — and his lovely wife, Tatiana. And the thread of their story runs all through BloodhoundBlog, so much have they meant to us.

Begin at the beginning: Cathleen Collins was previewing houses for Robert and Lisa Pageler, and one that she looked at was 922 West Culver St, a 1936 Ranch-style home in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Downtown Phoenix. This was Jurij and Tatiana’s home at the time, and Jurij and Jake were home when Cathy arrived.

I like dogs. I’m indifferent to cats. Cathy loves any creature with fur. She and Jake hit it off immediately, especially since Jake loves to play so much. His favorite game is fetch, and he will play it forever. Cathy threw her arm out throwing grapefruit for Jake to fetch — thus endearing herself forever to Jurij.

This was the Summer of 2005, and Cathy wrote about this part of the story earlier this year.

In January of 2006, we listed Ronan Doyle’s home at 1102 West Culver St for sale. If you go to our About BloodhoundRealty.com page, you’ll see that our brokerage consists of Greg Swann, Cathleen Collins, Cameron Swann and Odysseus the TV Spokesmodel Bloodhound. That’s true day-to-day, but there are two other key players without whom none of this would have happened: Richard Riccelli and Ronan Doyle.

Richard Riccelli has informed, hectored, advised, eviscerated and perfected our marketing every step of the way. From Odysseus’ confident smile on our logo to an ad we wrote yesterday, Richard has pushed us to find better ways of communicating the Bloodhound idea.

And Ronan Doyle was also with us from the beginning. I had been a Realtor since May 2001, but the BloodhoundRealty.com website went live in November of 2003. We had built our business model around the idea of web-based client services, and Ronan was one of our first totally-wired clients.

Ronan was relocating from Atlanta to Phoenix, and we looked at a whole lot of houses by remote-control. We live by web sites, whether stand-alone sites or folders within the BloodhoundRealty.com domain. We had done dozens of small sites before this, but Ronan’s was our first comprehensive home search documented by its own web site.

I loved 1102 West Culver St from the moment I saw it. The architecture is Adobe Revival, which is surprisingly rare among Historic homes in Phoenix. It was built in 1936, but the whole house was built on a poured concrete slab, a radical innovation for the time. Everything about the house was elegant, luxurious, whole and integrated. It was listed by Sherrie Jacobs, a great Realtor. Unfortunately, it was under contract to be sold.

Ronan was able to make it to town for a quick visit, and we made a strong run at a sweet home in the Willo Historic District. Alas, we lost that house, and he went back to Atlanta not knowing where he was going land.

There were other houses we were interested in, but none of them had commanded as much of Ronan’s time as 1102 West Culver. Even though it was under contract, he had walked it again and again, literally for hours at a time. Normally I can schedule showings for 15 minutes a house, but Ronan will spend either three quick minutes in a home or three hours, with no middle.

Anyway, we got lucky. The contract fell apart and we were able to swoop in with a very aggressive offer. We bought the house for $16,000 under appraisal, and Ronan moved in in February of 2004.

That would be a happy enough ending to a real estate story, but Ronan proved to be an amazing, dauntless, relentless source of referrals. He believes in the Bloodhound idea at least as much as we do, and he wasn’t shy about spreading the word. I can’t count the number of referrals and referred-by-referrals that originated with Ronan Doyle.

And, best of all, he let us list his home for sale when he was ready to move on to Boston. Working with buyers is a doable proposition, provided you’re prepared to do the work. Working with sellers is an attainable goal — particularly right now. Working with sellers in a neighborhood like F.Q. Story is very difficult. The home-owners love their houses, they know everything about them and about every other home in the neighborhood, and they pay very close attention to what is sold, by whom and for how much. To break into a neighborhood like Story is a triumph for a listing Realtor.

And this was Ronan’s Handsome Parting Gift to us, the chance to list not just a Story home but one of the most distinctive and “storied” homes in F.Q. Story.

We pulled out all the stops. We would have anyway, it’s just the way we list homes for sale. But we didn’t want to even think that we might let Ronan down, after all he had done for us. We did all of the Bloodhound stuff, including canvassing the Historic Districts twice. The house sold in four days.

And we succeeded in making a profound impression on the neighborhood. The neighbors were used to stately, dignified, country club listings — three huge price reductions over the course of six months — sold or expired, who cares? We were the first listers down there to actively — as against passively — market listings. Since the homeowners are paying close attention, the difference was dramatic.

We got a lot of attention on the strength of Ronan’s listing, and each new listing gave us the opportunity to cement our reputation that much more firmly in the neighborhood. We’re not done yet, we’re barely begun, but a lot of people down there know us, love the work we do, and will be listing with us when they’re ready to sell.

And that brings us back to Jurij and Tatiana Pawlenko. When Cathy had seen their house, it was listed by one of the country club agents. It didn’t sell. Oh, well, what can you do? A do-it-all-yourself discount lister had a lightning strike with one house in Story, so the Pawlenkos gave them a try. No dice. Even so, they really wanted to move closer to one of Jurij’s sons, in the Southwest Valley.

Jurij had remembered Cathy — her love for Jake and the photo of Odysseus on her business card. He remembered the copy I had written for Ronan’s house. And he remembered the word “Bloodhound.” By this time, we would have left at least four advertising pieces at the Pawlenko’s house, plus Cathy’s business cards when she had been there. All that had gone into the trash. What they had left was “Bloodhound” — and that’s how they found us, by Googling for bloodhound +”real estate” +phoenix.

Jurij called us and I took the call. “I want to call in the Bloodhounds,” he said. “I was just telling my wife, Tatiana, no one can sell our house. We need to call in the Bloodhounds.” This is the way he talks all the time, and I’m sure it can be off-putting to some people. I have the same kind of dramatic streak (as you may have noticed), so it was right up my street. We talked about their situation and what they wanted to do, and I set a listing appointment for later that day.

Cathy was out, but I caught her on the phone to talk to her about the Pawlenko’s house, since she had been in it. What she remembered best was Jake, of course, but she recalled that the house was well-maintained and market-ready when she had been there. So why hadn’t it sold? Because it was a Ranch home, more than likely. Further north, in North Central Phoenix, Ranch homes are ubiquitous and very popular. In the Historic Districts, smaller footprint homes like Tudors are much more popular. I pulled comps and the long listing history of the house, and Cathy and I went together to the listing appointment.

Jurij and Tatiana Pawlenko are big, beautiful people. They are both refugees from the Soviet planned famine of the Ukraine in the 1930s, having been spirited out at different times from different places by some very courageous people. They met, fell in love and married as adults living in Phoenix, second marriages for both of them. They are fun, out-going and very talkative. It was impossible for me not to like them.

And that really complicated things, since I had come intending to turn their listing down.

Why? Because the house had failed the test of the marketplace twice. Tudor, Spanish Revival and Craftsman homes weren’t selling. What hope did a Ranch home have in an Historic neighborhood?

“But,” Jurij said, “our house didn’t sell because it’s never been marketed! Everyone just stuck a sign in the yard and prayed for it to rain. The Bloodhounds market a house. That’s why we called you.”

The appeal to vanity is nothing to me, but I don’t like to say no to people I like. Plus which, I knew Cathy would walk across hot coals to help people worthy of the love of a dog like Jake. I won’t list if I’m not rock-solid sure of the price, and this often means getting an appraisal for Historic homes. The Pawlenkos agreed that we would list at or below the appraisal, which at least gave the house a fighting chance in the marketplace.

We listed with our usual fan-fare — and heard crickets chirping. It wasn’t the house as much as it was the truly amazingly lousy real estate market in the Summer of 2006, but I had moments of true despair at Open Houses that drew three parties in two hours. In the end it didn’t matter. We only needed one buyer, and we got it from a sign call. (Why do we spend so much thought, time, effort and money on signs?)

The buyer was an incipient lawyer, just finishing her degree, preparing to take the Arizona bar for her first job and planning for her marriage. A lot on her plate. I showed her the house on a Saturday, then again on the following Tuesday with her fiance. Because we don’t do dual agency, I encouraged her to find a buyer’s agent she could trust. We put the house under contract — with a very long close — about six weeks after we listed it.

Incidentally, I talked about a number of these houses in Debunking Zillow.com. We listed the Pawlenkos house for $495,000 based on an appraisal of $500,000. The Zillow.com Zestimate of value at the time I wrote that article was $297,319. The country club lister had offered it as low as $429,800 — and didn’t sell it. We closed escrow at the end of a very slow Summer selling season for $475,000 — having sold the home in six weeks on the third marketing attempt.

The long close had its benefits. For one thing, Jurij could take his time on the repairs. For another, Jurij and Tatiana weren’t racing around trying to move in the brutal Summer heat. As a third benefit, the long close gave them time to shop for exactly what they wanted in a new home.

Cathy was planning to serve as their buyer’s agent, and she went out with them a couple of times to look at resale homes. But at some point Jurij got interested in the incredible deals builders were offering on spec homes, and, on a day that the Pawlenkos wanted to go looking at a new home subdivision, Cathy was unavailable, so I went with them instead. They found what they wanted in a general way, and three days later we went back to make the deal: A huge three-bedroom spec home with an $80,000 upgrade package thrown in for free, plus a 6% builder contribution to their costs. The builder wanted to pay me an 8% commission, so I conceded 6% of that toward their costs as well.

We built a web site, of course. Bloodhounds howl, but Bloodhound Realtors talk in web sites. We were able to track the construction every time one of us visited the house, giving Jurij and Tatiana a way of showing off their new home.

We initiated the paperwork to buy the house on August 27th, and the builder’s goal was to have the whole thing closed by September 30th — the end of the fiscal quarter. Because the house on Culver wasn’t scheduled to close until mid-October, the Pawlenkos were looking at carrying a note to buy the new home. But luck comes to the well-prepared, and, as it turned out, the builder wasn’t able to close until October 25th. Jurij and Tatiana bought their brand new home for cash, taking the builder’s concession and mine and folding them up and putting them in their pockets.

There’s more to this than I’ve talked about. We are very intensive Realtors, and the Pawlenkos are very gregarious clients, so we saw quite a bit of each other. We’ve had dinner with them on a couple of occasions, and we’ve spent a lot of other time in their company — in their home, shopping for homes, talking on the phone. Jurij is a big fan of BloodhoundBlog, and he likes to tease me about the work we’re doing here. Cathy bought Jake his favorite toy, and both of us have spent hours playing fetch with him.

Because of the double-move, Jake had to stay with neighbors and then spend a week in a kennel. Once he was able to move into the new house it took him a while to realize that this was his new home. Jurij and Tatiana are buying all new furniture, so they’re still living out of boxes for now. But they have a very luxurious, brand new home with incredible views of South Mountain. They own it free and clear with a huge amount of instant equity.

Now, again, that’s a happy enough ending to a real estate story. But, if we’re getting this right, the stories should never end, they should simply skip from episode to episode on the tapestries of our lives. So this Sunday just past, November 12th, 2006, I was back out at the Pawlenko’s subdivision helping Jurij and Tatiana’s son and daughter-in-law buy a spec home right up the street. And on Monday, the inestimable Richard Riccelli helped me write an ad about the Pawlenko’s home-buying experience.

So is this the end of our involvement with the Pawlenkos? God I hope not. We love them like family and we want for Jurij and Tatiana — and Jake! — to be threads in the tapestry of our lives forever…

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