Category: Ask the Broker (page 5 of 6)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is hard, so I’m going to make it easy:

What should I look for when I’m evaluating a neighborhood to buy in?

Because of the Fair Housing Laws, this is actually a difficult question to answer. I can give you some useful hints, though.

Visit your prospective neighborhood at 9:30 at night. Sit in your car and watch what happens. By 9:30, people in the neighborhood will be doing what they do at night.

Are they doing what you like to do? If so, you’ll like that neighborhood.

Are they doing things you don’t like to do — or worse, don’t want done around you? That neighborhood is not for you.

Obviously you’ll factor in location, structure, amenities and price. But if you don’t fit into your prospective neighborhood at 9:30 at night, you won’t fit in at any other time, either…

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came up in a comment from a bubble head a few weeks ago. In truth, it’s nobody’s damned business, but it is a matter of concern around here:

What kind of car do you drive?

I drive a Hyundai Elantra Wagon:

Her name is Beatrice, after the gorgeous Weimaraner in Best In Show. “BHND-01” is our brokerage code in the MLS, so “BHND ME” is me, the broker.

I have a problem with Realtors who drive big, obnoxious cars. This job pays very well, if you do it right, but I think it’s both a poor use of money and poor salesmanship to drive around in an Escalade or a Hummer. Each man to his own saints, but my Beatrice is the best girl for this job, in my opinion.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The is another one of Cathy’s questions:

What will it take to make Phoenix a true city?

It’s actually pretty simple. All Phoenix really needs, to become a true city in the way that people think of New York City or Chicago, is…

Cooler weather.

What makes other cities look and feel like cities is mass outdoor ambulation: People walking around.

People don’t do that here. It’s amazingly more convenient to drive, anyway. But even allowing for that, there is something about $1,000 suits and 115 degree heat that just don’t work well together.

Phoenix could build something like a downtown in the form of an air-conditioned indoor plaza, but there will be no true downtown life here until something like that is built…

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The question is Cathy’s, and it really plagues her:

Why do people hate Realtors?

It’s funny, truly, because almost nobody hates his own Realtor. Some people have real horror stories to tell, but most people don’t. To the contrary, most people have very happy, funny, charming stories to tell about the Realtor who helped them find their home.

Straight-commission sales people in general take a hit, not alone because we might seem to be more interested in the commission than in the work it takes to earn it. And, of course, there have been no end of unflattering portrayals of real estate agents in art — especially TV and movies.

Here’s my best answer, though:

Why do people hate Realtors…?

Because they think they’re supposed to…

Technorati Tags: sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a question from me to me, one I’ve spent quite a bit of time on over the years:

What should I call my real estate brokerage?

I really hate personality marketing in real estate, so I’m much stronger on the subject of what not to do.

But here is the strategy we deployed in naming our brokerage.

First, we wanted an iconic idea — an idea that conveys a host of other ideas without explication. Odysseus the dog was an accident in our lives, but choosing the word Bloodhound was no accident. The word and the image of the dog, both in photographs and in our logo, sell a vast array of ideas about our business without our having to sell anything.

Second, we named our business “.com” to enhance our findability. We are not a realty.bot, and we will never be one, but using our web address as our business name means that our web address appears every time our business is mentioned.

An example: Every listing of ours produced by any IDX system, no matter whose, will list our web address.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a question dear to Cathy’s heart:

I’m selling my house and have pets so I don’t want to put my house on a lock box. All the realtors I’ve talked to say I have to put my house on a lock box, and the one who I wanted to give the job to actually turned me down if I don’t put it on a lock box. She said she can’t sell it if I don’t. Is that true?

Good thing you didn’t call me: I would have insisted on a lock-box, you bet. But beyond that, I would want two more things:

1. I would want the pets out of the house entirely
2. I would want their odors completely eliminated

Pets are a wonderful thing. Because I love my wife, and because she loves every living thing, we have four dogs and nine cats right now. How do we sell our houses? We move first, then remodel the house we’re leaving prior to selling it. The carpets go, and everything gets repainted. Plus we pet-proof our new house before moving in.

Does that sound like an extreme expense? This is the burden you took on when first you admitted a large, furry, affectionate creature into your life. (Note that in real estate, pets that can’t escape their habitat and don’t make odors don’t matter.)

I have been in pet-occupied homes where I could not smell the animal. But I have been in far more where I can smell the pets from outside, even from the street.

Odor is a powerful subconscious influence on the human mind. Even people who like pets won’t like the smell of your pets.

So: Lock-box, yes, but not before the pets are out of the house and all of their odors eliminated. If you want your house to sell, you have to present it in the way the buyer wants to buy it. If you don’t, buyers will go elsewhere…

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This question comes from my mother-in-law, Cathy’s mother:

Why do builders make yards so small?

This is a question that applies to the Phoenix area, but I know it fits in many markets in the southwest.

Phoenix was settled in sections, 640 acre square-mile parcels. A farm might be a section, a half-section, rarely smaller than a quarter-section. When parcels were split to become housing lots, the one acre lot was a very common size. There are still thousands of acre lots in Phoenix, vast and lush.

But most new homes are built 6, 8, 10, 12 or more homes to the acre. Why is that?

Land isn’t cheap, for one thing. But neither is landscaping. If you work in town and commute 45 minutes each way, you may find that your enthusiasm for yard work in the 115-degree heat is not as robust as it could be.

The bottom line is: New home buyers don’t want larger lots enough to pay for them. They might say they do, but when it comes time to write a purchase contract, they tend to buy more house for their money, or a pool, instead.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me asking a question of myself:

Why in hell do we frame houses with wood in the Sonoran Desert?

Because it’s cheap.

Look at this:

That’s a finger-jointed 2×4. An ordinary 2×4 wasn’t cheap enough, so the builder is using glued-together mill waste to keep his costs down. Nice.

This is one of the driest deserts in the United States. Wood dries out in our air, warping as it dries. If it gets wet, it is susceptible to mold and dry rot — a fungal infection that causes it to crumble. It is an irresistible treat for subterranean and dry-wood termites.

That finger-jointed member is going to shrink away from its glue as it dries, and the glue itself is going to dry up. Some day, that 2×4 is going to be about as sturdy as a stack of empty milk cartons. Nice.

Wood framing is cheap. Steel framing is forever.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The question:

What does “refrigeration” mean for cooling? An evaporator? Central air? Standing in the open fridge?

Bravo! You have exposed one of the oozing wounds in the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service. Right there among all the utilities information, it will say “Refrigeration”.

What does it mean?

Refrigeration is distinguished from either an evaporative cooler, a wall air conditioning unit or nothing. An evaporative cooler — also known as a swamp cooler — works by blowing dry desert air through a burlap-like pad saturated with water. A certain amount of the water evaporates, cooling the air, which is then blown through the house as a crude form of air conditioning. An even cruder form of this cooling system was invented by Native Americans in the Southwest.

Refrigeration, of course, is true central air conditioning. A noble gas is put under high pressure, causing it to cool substantially. This cold gas is forced through a radiator, as air is driven past the cold radiator fins. The cooled air is blown thorough the house.

There is actually an interim step between the evaporative cooler and central air conditioning — the chiller system — a heating and cooling system not-unlike the radiator systems used Back East.

Now you know more than you’d ever dreamed about desert cooling systems.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This question came at an appropriate time. My column in tomorrow’s Arizona Republic deals with this topic:

Last year it was so hard to buy a new home. We would have had to camp out in some builders’ parking lots just to have a chance to be in a lottery to see if we could qualify to buy their house! But now it seems the builders are are giving really good deals. And I don’t need a realtor to find new houses that the builders are selling. So, is there any reason why I should use a realtor when I find a house that I think I want to buy?

I love this picture:

Those people are waiting on a line to take a raffle ticket that will afford one or two lucky winners the opportunity to put a deposit down on a house that will not have been built for ten months or so. The photo was taken last June, in the midst of the buying frenzy that was going on in the Phoenix area at that time.

I was at another subdivision at about the same time where a couple was living outside the sales office in their mobile home. One or the other was continuously waiting on line on the off chance that the builder might release a lot for sale.

All of these folks were owner-occupants. Investors were banned from new home subdivisions at that time, and no investor would wait day-upon-day for a chance at a lot, anyway. The investors were buying resale homes, where all you needed was cash and fast information.

Those days are done. Resale inventory hovers at around 47,000 homes right now, where normal is somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000, and new-home builders have their own excess inventory to work through. For one thing, their demand projections were wrong, so they planned more lot releases than they had buyers for. Add to this the slow sales in resale — which means that many would-be move-up buyers have had to cancel their contracts.

For now, builders have a surplus of ‘spec’ homes — houses that have been specified, planned, permitted Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is an excellent question:

Do buyer’s agents have to disclose ALL compensation he receives from all sources to his client? It would be important to know who’s filling his lunch sack. Example: Builder pays a bonus above the commission listed in the MLS to the buyer’s agent if his client purchases.

What does a buyer’s agent have to disclose about his compensation? In Arizona, the answer is crystal clear:

It depends.

A buyer’s agent is not required by law to disclose the amount of the co-broke commission or finder’s fee offered by the real estate broker of the seller. On the other hand, both RESPA and state law require the disclosure of bonuses, rebates, referral fees or any other sort of non-commission compensation.

This is ARS R4-28-1101-G:

A salesperson or broker shall not accept any compensation, including rebate or other consideration, directly or indirectly, for any goods or services provided to a person if the goods or services are related to or result from a real estate transaction, without that person’s prior written acknowledgment of the compensation. This prohibition does not apply to compensation paid to a broker by a broker who represents a party in the transaction.

There are a lot of things that reek about this, in my professional opinion. First, a bonus is just an attempt to induce a buyer’s agent to betray his fiduciary duty to the buyer. But second, a lot of bonuses are being paid right now in the form of commission. If I take you out to buy a new home tomorrow, the builder will pay me at least 6% of the purchase price, all of it of your money — and I do not have to disclose this to you.

In fact, all commissions and fees paid will be disclosed on the HUD-1 form — which you will see for the very first time at Close of Escrow. Wonderful…

My take on the subject: Buyers need to learn the five little words that sellers mastered long ago: “How much do you charge?” The agent may not be required by law to disclose commissions, but you can condition your working with that Read more