A not very nice person who calls himself “candybags” wrote the following:
“You all need to either get real or get off that high horse of pomposity you rode in on. Comparing a Realtor with a surgeon??? what next?? Auto appendectomies indeed! Who do you think you are kidding? You are lowly paper pushers compared to doctors and lawyers who had attended YEARS OF SCHOOLING PEOPLE to get what they have. They didn’t take an online course and sit an easy written test of 150 questions. I am sick of reading about parallels between doctors and Reel-torrrrs. The old adage is alive and well – no one thinks more highly of a Reeltorr than the Reeltorr himself. Perfect. Get real. Be prepared to be disintermediated. Dinosaurs. I won’t be paying no stinkin 6%,5% or even 4%. Try 3%. IT WONT BE LONG NOW. ”
__
I don’t compare myself to a surgeon except in the income department – I make more than they do. I don’t think I am kidding anyone. You can think of me (and other Realtors) in any way you like (lowly paper pushers). I neither need nor want your approval. If you live in the Phoenix area you would not be able to pay me any amount, because you are exactly the kind of person I choose not to do business with – and if you somehow snuck in under the radar, rest assured, I would have spotted you anyway and cancelled your listing.
No matter what you write or where you write it I am going to go right on surviving quite nicely – as are all of the other Realtors. Further one of my primary objectives – why I am here posting at all – is to let the rest of the real estate community know that people like you (I’ll be much more specific in just a bit) should just be avoided, no matter what fee you would be willing to pay. So thank you for getting me to make this post at this time.
80% of all of the people in the world are Social Read more
Category: Enduring Interest (page 9 of 10)
Picture yourself living in Boston, Massachusetts, where the climate is six months of drizzle and mud followed by six months of deep snow and permafrost. Let’s say it comes to your mind to bid a final farewell to all things wintery and shuffle off to the endless, boundless, soul-enriching sunny skies of Phoenix, Arizona.
This is a rare adventure that only happens about 200,000 times a year, so you’ll want to do some preparation. So you put on your long underwear and your clothes, your overclothes and your overcoat, your socks, oversocks, shoes, overshoes and snow-boots, your gloves, your overgloves, your hat and your overhat, and you grab your umbrella and layer on a scarf or two for good measure and then you trundle out into the permafrost to face the day.
You waddle your way over to Out Of Town Books in Harvard Square and buy a copy of Phoenix Magazine. The photos are astounding — mountains, deserts, golf, tennis, spectacular sunny skies and stunning women in skimpy sun-dresses. If you’re looking for everything Boston isn’t, you’ll find it in the pages of Phoenix Magazine.
But: Is this adequate preparation for a transcontinental relocation? I really like Phoenix Magazine, and I have a client who is an Associate Editor there, so I have even more reason to like it. But there is a big difference between thumbing through one issue of Phoenix Magazine and making detailed plans to move from Boston to Phoenix.
Who could doubt this?
I’m being very serious. Even if someone could be so impulsive as to move from Boston to Phoenix on a whim, goaded by a photograph in a magazine, would even that will-o’-the-wisp conflate impulse with planning?
The answer is obvious, isn’t it?
This is how we can know with a certainty colder than the wrought iron railings of Beacon Hill in Olde Boston Towne that the complaint brought against Zillow.com by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) is completely specious.
Do you see why? There is no possible way that any thoughtful person could confuse a number regurgitated by a piece of software with a responsible evaluation of a home. NCRC Read more
I’ve been very gratified by all the comments we’ve had, both public and private, about raising the standards for The Carnival of Real Estate. We did what we did because we were behind the wheel. We had control of the Carnival for this one week, and it would have been difficult and unseemly to take it away from us. But we didn’t know, going in, if we were going to incite admiration or riots — or simply indifference. Cathleen and I have the advantage of being stridently devoted to doing what we think is right, damn the consequences, but we really do hope to make an enduring change in the way this competition is judged.
No, this is not rocket science, brain surgery, world peace or any other presumptively momentous endeavor deployed fallaciously to diminish every smaller endeavor. But anything worth doing is worth doing well, wisely, completely, coming as close as we can attain to the sublimely perfect. Excellence is ennobling, and to make a habit of excellence is to lead a noble life. And as far from the earth-shakingly momentous as a Carnival of Real Estate entry might be, is is nevertheless a piece of your life — whether you are the writer or the reader — an irreplaceable portion of all the forever you will ever have. Whyever would you waste it?
Even so, the test of all this, going forward, will be what ZillowBlog — owner of The Carnival of Real Estate — elects to do, and then how each hosting weblog interprets any rules ZillowBlog might lay down. Practically speaking, nothing may change, and I am ordinarily a proud advocate of changing nothing. But if nothing changes in the rules and standards of the Carnival, what will change is the quality of the entries. Bad work drives out the good. If people who are thoughtful, talented and assiduous know that they will be held as the nominal equals of competitors who actually bring nothing to the competition, they will stop entering. The Carnival will come to be seen not as the harbinger of excellence but of its opposite.
That Read more
When I was young, I was convinced I was going to work in either editorial or advertising. I was a teenage photo geek, a Junior Jimmy Olson with thousands of dollars worth of professional photo gear slung over my shoulder. In college, I was publisher of the student newspaper. From the time I was very young, single digits, I was producing all sorts of printed material. And because I often didn’t have a budget, I learned how to do a lot of it by myself.
The net consequence of all this is that, by the time I had to get a real job, I knew how to write, I knew how to create images — and I knew how to do many of the back-end jobs associated with producing printed words and images. I looked at my job opportunities and saw that print production paid a helluva lot better than content creation. So I went to work in Wall Street (where the very best money was found) producing 10-Ks and Blue Sky Reports and Annual Reports. I worked a boatload of IPOs, and 102 weblog posts overnight is not a very big job compared to the 100+ hours of the revision cycle on an Initial Public Offering.
All of this was happening at an epoch we might name The Dawn of the Age of Connectivity. The law firms we worked for had high-end dedicated word processing systems, and they wanted to know why they couldn’t do everything “on disk” — in the dewy-eyed lingo of the day.
It fell to me to do this, mostly because I was interested and no one else was. The “disk” problem was a bear, and there were dozens of kludgey “solutions” to this dilemma over the years. But, understood as a telecommunications problem, mere capture of keystrokes was not that big a problem.
The big problem was expressing word-processed coding as typography — and if you are not fairly well-versed in typography, you are probably already saying, “What’s the difference?” And, indeed, the difference today is much smaller than it was when I was doing this work. Typography once Read more
Ardell raises some questions at Rain City Guide about my column in this morning’s paper on negotiating the buyer’s agent’s commission. I’m going to address some of her remarks here, but my fullest statement on the topic is quite a bit more comprehensive. In the newspaper, I get 350 words a week, with the result that I am splitting this one topic over 5 (or possibly more) weeks. I’m thinking, too, that we should create a category for these weblog posts, because both Cathy and I are writing quite a bit on the subject.
And thus to Ardell’s points:
“I find that most consumers would like we in the industry, to lead the revolution and win that battle for them, rather than being involved in the process of that change in the industry.”
I’m sure that would be nice, but I don’t expect it to happen that way. One of the reasons agents are so close with the co-broke information is that they’re giving up so much on the listing side. Buyers are the last sheep to be shorn — even though buyer representation is getting easier, not harder, and even though the prices of homes have risen dramatically over the years.
I don’t see any way for this to change across the board without buyers becoming educated and putting their education to work. One market segment who could help a lot are the For Sale By Owner sellers. They could implement my idea of conceding funds directly to the buyer, to be used at the buyer’s discretion for representation or other costs, with none of the risks a listing agent might face.
“Has anyone seen the Buyer Agent fee show on the Buyer’s Closing Statement when the transaction closes?”
This is the only way a HUD-1 is produced in Arizona. If it’s not being done that way in Washington — one HUD-1 for everyone — I can’t imagine why. In any case, the buyer can negotiate for full disclosure of all funds.
“Seller pays his agent and buyer pays his agent, is the only rational answer…”
But it’s not actually true. For a represented home, the seller sets Read more
Here’s a simple fact, one of the most important reasons why homeowners need professional representation to market their houses: Diogenes himself could not find an objective seller. It’s not enough to detail everything that’s wrong with the neighbor’s homes, the more important job, in a listing appointment, is to tell the Realtor why this home is worth much more than mere facts would indicate. The average American is slightly above average, and the average American bathroom remodel is worth tens of thousands of dollars more than you ever might have guessed.
This is to be expected. It’s simply not in our nature to discount for subjectivity where we are most in need of such a discounting. My kid’s smarter than your kid, and Helen herself is but a shadow to my best-beloved. This is only too human.
So: Zillow.com has a problem. People treat its silly Zestimates as though they were appraisals, even though anyone should know they can’t be appraisals. You could say caveat lector, but readers of Zillow.com’s web site have to dig pretty deep to find any caveats. What they find instead are big type and goofy pictures entreating you to… treat its silly Zestimates as though they were appraisals…
There is an obvious solution to this problem: Put up a disclaimer in even bigger type that says: “Ahem! A silly Zestimate is not an appraisal, which cannot be done without an objective, on-site inspection of a property.” That would be honest, and it would be sufficient to advise Zillow.com users that an Automated Valuation Method cannot reliably establish the value of real property.
This they will not do, possibly because it would cause those users to wonder why the hell they’re bothering with a tool that is admittedly useless. So rather than admit the nakedly obvious truth, Zillow.com has elected instead to propagate thousands of tiny lies.
In a comment posted here on September 1, David G. from Zillow.com broke this news:
Lastly, just a heads-up that we’ve decided to let homeowners edit and publish corrected home facts on Zillow.
That shoe finally dropped last night. Rich Barton, Zillow.com’s chairman and CEO, made the Read more
Rory Siems at Laguna Niguel Real Estate Blog has a post on using business cards for collateral promotion. I think this is a fantastic idea. In cost-benefit terms, the business card form factor may be the perfect print ad medium. It’s pretty lousy for conveying a lot of information, but it is an extremely portable, pocketable format for inciting interest and directing that interest to where the details can be delivered in detail.
We use business cards whenever we want to target-market homes or individuals. I can hold my own hand for the design — kludgey but proficient — so we can turn a new set of cards around in 48 hours or less. They’re inexpensive to buy, to ship and to distribute, so we can put 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 cards on the street in no time at all.
A primary application is ‘Open House’ announcements. We don’t do ‘Just Listed’ cards. We’d rather have potential buyers come and see the house for themselves. If we can clearly identify the neighborhoods where our buyer should be living, we’ll broadcast ‘Open House’ cards house-by-house. The cards above are typical ‘Open House’ cards. We always use the back of the card. The back copy you’re seeing here is very similar to the back copy we use on our personal business cards.
We do do ‘Just Sold’ cards, because we want for the nearby neighbors to apprehend the quality of effort we bring to our listings. Every card we do for a listing will promote that home’s custom web site, of course. The flyer boxes we use have a special pocket for business cards near the top. That way, if someone doesn’t want to take a flyer, they can take a card instead. Often, we will use the home’s card in the ‘Take One’ flyer stand inside the house, as well.
The image above to the right is the back of a ‘Just Sold’ card. I believe in the power of the written word. Almost always with a card like this, I’m going to use the front face to sell the specific idea and the back Read more
This is from email I had earlier this week:
Jim Cronin from The Real Estate Tomato and I were just talking about real estate blogging being what real estate websites will begin to morph into. He sent me to your blog and I was wondering if that has been productive for you as a lead generator.
For the first point, I’m with Jim wall-to-wall. In every second of my spare time, I am preparing to repurpose all of our content to weblogs or weblog-like pages. Last weekend my son Cameron reformulated our content engines to make them site-independent (and therefore appearance-independent), and I want him to take a second pass at everything to build content that will look like an Ubertor site to people but will search like friendly old HTML 3.0 to Google. There are other weblog-like things we’re doing at the transaction-management level. It would be reasonable to say that in due course weblogging will be the defining metaphor of our internet presence.
For the second point — has weblogging been a productive lead generator? — I don’t know. A fuller answer is more complicated than that, but the whole issue is trumped by an even larger point: I don’t care.
I want to approach business as a vendor in the same way I approach it as a customer. In other words, I don’t want people treating me as a lead, as a link in their food chain. As soon as I start to feel like a salesman’s prey, I get creeped out. I don’t have to feel that way for very long to get gone. On the other hand, if I feel that you are looking out for my interests, offering me the sage counsel I have sought — and perhaps the advice I hadn’t known to ask for — then we have a sound basis for going ahead with a transaction.
There’s a lot of mercenary weblogging advice out there right now, and much of it strikes me as being doubly-dysfunctional. Yes, weblogging has huge SEO advantages, but if you go out of your way to write SEO-attractive copy, you will have Read more
I had a great letter today from Bob Hunter of the Muljat Group about our policy forbidding dual agency. I’ll quote the whole thing first:
Greg, my wife and I are agents in Bellingham, Wash and I have a question relating to your position on dual agency. Our brokerage is a 100% desk fee operation. The broker takes no cut from any commission. Why would a transaction between two agents from this office harm either of the parties? I have read your website (twice) and think I understand your philosophy (since your make it very prevalent marketing appears to be a pretty important motivator also). Still, in our situation I’m not sure how the clients are harmed.
We have tried different strategies, I represent one client, my wife the other, referring one client to another agent in our office, representing both clients. We have not yet referred to an agent out of our office. In all the years of doing this, we do more dual agency than the industry standard, I can think of only one instance where the buyer ‘felt’ his interests were not being represented fully. The transaction would have the same result with separate agents but any bad feelings are negative. In retrospect we should have contributed money to his cause which would have alleviated any feelings of misplaced loyalty.
If dual agency is outlawed and if the consumers rail against it, then it is a moot point, but I am still interested in your opinion of our office dynamics and why it is not equitable or ethical.
I read your blog regularly and hope to start my own.
thanks
Bob Hunter
The Muljat Group Realtors
Dual agency has a bad reputation for three reasons, only one of which is wholly deserved. That one is true double-dipping agents or brokers who are looking for the biggest payday regardless of who gets hurt. Second is the public’s perception of dual agency, which is colored to some degree by negative opinions about real estate agents generally. But third is the conviction, justified or not, on the part of buyers and sellers that dual agency resulted in unfair Read more
Executive summary: This is long, and it’s written (I hope!) for ordinary people, not real estate professionals. But I want for real estate professionals to be aware of this argument, because I think it solves several of the knottier problems affecting our industry. Here’s a quick summary of the essay:
- Buyers should negotiate the buyer’s agent’s compensation in detail and prior to looking at any homes
- Sellers and listing agents should concede funds directly to the buyer to be disbursed at the buyer’s discretion to compensate the buyer’s agent
Either of these two reforms, or ideally both, will finally, fully empower buyers as supervisory employers of real estate agents in the way that sellers always have been.
If you discuss this in your weblog — and I think you should, in order to hear what your clients think — I would appreciate it if you would either link back to this essay or use the Technorati tag “compensation for buyer representation” (that exact keyword, without the quotes), so that I can track the conversation.
–GSS
Securing the home-buyer’s place at the table: How two simple reforms can finally result in a full, uncompromised form of buyer representation…
I was at a real estate seminar a few years back and the instructor happened to ask what kind of commissions Phoenix-area Realtors were getting on their listings. “Six percent,” someone said. “Five percent,” said someone else. “Five percent.” “Five-and-a-half.” And then a very beautiful young man, not quite overdue for his second shave, stood up and said, “Seven percent.”
“Just keep thinking that way,” the instructor replied. “Someday you’ll make yourself believe it.”
This is a true fact of real estate, widely if not universally known: Sellers negotiate commissions. Routinely. As a matter of course. “How much do you charge?” is often the first question blurted out at a listing appointment. You undoubtedly already know this, as well, if you’ve ever sold a home in your life — or talked to anyone who has. Yet for some reason, people persist in pretending that the six percent commission is still ubiquitous — if it ever was.
As a matter of disclosure, we routinely Read more
Mike Price at Mike’s Corner is kvetching about clumsy Realtor lingo, and while I’m with him on the main point, I have turf of my own to defend.
Sez Mike:
I’ve often wondered what consumers think when they are subjected to the same goofy tag lines and incomplete sentences that seem to proliferate the inventory of any MLS.
Indeed. It’s possible to overthink this stuff, though. I think most of what passes for experience in residential real estate is nothing more than thoughtless imitation — monkey-see, monkey-do, monkey-don’t-ever-test-the-results. I wrote about tin-eared Realtor marketing last fall, taking particular note of ‘riders’ on real estate signs.
But: I think there is more to this than clumsy cliches versus just-the-facts-ma’am. If that’s the only choice, I’ll take the facts. But my own preference is to express, as best I can, the features of the home as benefits and the benefits as the story of a life enriched and perfected by the home. We call this rhapsodizing, and the listings I like best are for homes about which I can wax rhapsodic at first glance. Most homes don’t seem to glow of their own light at sunset — ain’t that poetic? — but, even then, I’m looking to sell you your life in the home, not the mere details.
In an ARMLS listing, I get exactly 680 characters to do this. We give up space for the address of the home’s custom web site, so, ultimately, I get about 100 words, maybe 110. As you may have noticed, I can write more than 110 words.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
Your Moroccan oasis in the city… The style is Spanish Eclectic, but the details come straight from Marrakech. In the midst of the brutal Phoenix summer, you’ve found a refuge that is… cool, shady, refreshing. From the lush gardens front and back to the interplay of light and shadow in the 1935 residence, from the luxury of the Kitchen, Master Suite and Guest House to the simple understated elegance of the Living Room and Formal Dining Room, from the travertine and hardwood floors to the Moroccan arches, this Read more
Cathy brought home the Sunday newspaper, and I spent a few minutes pulling out the sections I wanted to read. Which sections? The circulars from Best Buy, OfficeMax, Staples and CompUSA. We buy the daily newspaper never, and the Sunday paper maybe twenty times a year. I have absolutely no use for the news part of the newspaper, it’s just the package the real news comes in: What can I buy where for how little money?
In fact, I read the Arizona Republic and the Las Vegas Review Journal every morning, along with with whatever other news seems most apposite to my dealings. But I read everything on-line. And as much as I hate the hoops I have to jump through to read newspapers on-line — this by comparison to the extreme convenience of my RSS feed reader — reading them on-line is by far superior to wrestling with the antique form-factor in which they are sold.
Moreover, I do not intend to ever pay for a newspaper again unless it contains advertising circulars that can save me money. In the long run, even those will come to me in a format I like better, even if it’s only email, and that will be the end of the Sunday paper at our house.
There’s a disintermediation message in here, by the way: When I was a young turk in the graphics industry, the old timers would tell me that computers could never replace print because, after all, you can’t print a coupon on a CRT screen. It betrays something about their belief in the added value of works of the mind that they thought the thing of greatest worth that could be printed was a coupon, but — guess what? They were wrong anyway. Staples, for one, can’t seem to stop emailing me electronic coupons.
But here’s where I’m really heading with this: In general, I do not intend to pay for ordinary information. Period. If you want my money, you have to deliver something that I can’t get anywhere else — and that I can’t get along without. Or you have to deliver it Read more
Act I — Why Realtors hate discount listings…
People think ordinary on-the-ground Realtors hate discount listings because of the discount. That’s may be true of many real estate brokers, but real-life Realtors have two much better reasons to hate discount listings. First, the Buyer’s Agent will have to do all the work for both the buyer and the seller. And, second, in so doing, the Buyer’s Agent might well inherit the liability of being an Undisclosed Dual Agent. The Buyer’s Agent has the choice of either answering every question from the seller by saying, “I do not represent you” — thus causing the transaction to grind to a halt (which is a violation of the Buyer’s Agent’s fiduciary duty to the buyer) — or by saying, “Even though I don’t represent you, here’s what you do.” If the seller later decides he was ill-advised, it won’t be the discount Listing Agent who gets sued.
Act II — The hidden secrets in MLS listings…
Given that IDX systems (like ours) are ubiquitous, precisely what is it that the NAR and all the brokers are fighting so hard to keep secret in MLS listings. I’m sure things differ among MLS systems, but the two big secrets the NAR wants to keep from non-MLS-members are these: 1. The number of Days on Market. That’s the Listing Agent’s secret. And 2. The contact information of the Listing Agent. That’s the Buyer’s Agent’s secret. In the latter case, you might think what is implied is that Buyer’s Agents in general believe that they stink so bad that their clients would betray them in a heartbeat if only they knew how. That’s only half the issue, though. The other half is the fear that, if the buyer knows how to approach the Listing Agent directly, the Listing Agent will make a sweetheart deal with the buyer in order to double-dip on the commission while disintermediating the Buyer’s Agent. This is why MLS systems have rules regarding Variable Commissions, since, in that circumstance, the Listing Agent is disclosing to Buyer’s Agents (but not to their clients; this is another secret datum) Read more
David G. from Zillow.com replied to my post yesterday which argues that Zillow.com Zestimates are bunk, which I had proved to my own satisfaction in an earlier post. I’m revisiting the topic — to everyone’s delight, no doubt — because I want to drive the point home, and because I want to illustrate how a business like Zillow.com could do a better job — which would nevertheless still fall short of Zillow.com’s fraudulent promises.
I’m going to draw from a few places. This is David G:
So, why is it inappropriate to comment on your “debunking Zillow” series? Well, frankly, I think you’re entitled to your opinion and I respect it. I may disagree with you; but how does saying that help this conversation?
I cannot for the life of me imagine how anyone could reason rigorously about the argument I made and yet disagree with it. You cannot evaluate a house without seeing it. That seems to me to be beyond dispute. I’d be amazed if Zillow.com were to admit it, but they cannot deny it.
There’s more here, of course. No one with any sense at Zillow.com would buy or sell a home without a professional opinion of value.
But give the man credit. He doesn’t deny the truth. He just doesn’t quite admit it:
In many respects, I actually agree with you; Zillow does not replace visiting a house and its comps or a strong knowledge of the local market.
On the other hand, take a look at these promises, made on Zillow.com’s home page:
What is Zillow promising if not “knowledge” of the values of homes it has never seen?
Do you think this is ambiguous? This is from the Zillow.com “About Us” page:
Why not help consumers by giving them access to the same kinds of information and tools agents use?
Do you get the impression that what is meant here is “visiting a house and its comps or a strong knowledge of the local market”? I don’t.
David G. again:
Also, I find your argument applies equally to any AVM.
AVM is Automated Valuation Model. And David is 100% correct. All AVMs are equally fraudulent if they claim to Read more
Ardell has a story today about a multiple-bidder contest that occurred I know not where. As described, the situation would have been an Undisclosed Dual Agency in Arizona — even though both of the clients betrayed were buyers. Two agents of the same broker engaged in a bidding war, which means that the broker himself was pitting two of his own clients against each other, to his own benefit and contrary to the interests of both.
The story put me in mind of our own recent seller’s market. It was a lot of fun to be on the listing side. List on Thursday and the offers start coming in before the photos are integrated into the listing. Put everybody off until Monday, just let ’em pile up. Cathy wrote software to compare net sheets on an apples-to-apples basis, so we could winnow a stack of 30 offers down to the two or three most worth looking at and just ignore the rest — with the seller’s permission, of course, and always with a note of thanks faxed to the buyers’ agents.
But being on the buyer’s side was no fun. The house lists at 10:20 on a Sunday morning, heaven knows why. We’re there by 11. The lister says, “We’d love to have your offer, but it’s only fair to let you know that we already have five — and I’m expecting six more. Pound out a contract on the laptop at Denny’s, stealing power for the portable printer. Huge earnest deposit, non-refundable. Huge down payment. As-is. No appraisal contingency. Double-think and double-think and double-think the price, figuring out exactly where everyone else is so we can be a couple thousand dollars higher. Race it back to the lister by hand.
Hustle back to the office, where the fax machine is already spitting out the bad news — the worst news, really. Not a rejection. Not a counter. No, the worst possible fate in a market that crazy: A Multiple Counter Offer.
The buyer says, “A counter is a counter, right? Acceptance is transmittal, right? That’s what you told me. So all we have to Read more