BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Month: September 2006 (page 11 of 15)

September 15, 2006

Friday morning real estate links . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Marlow Harris has a fascinating post on the barriers faced by Muslim buyers and real estate agents. Not to get too philosophical, but this actually ties in with Pope Benedict’s remarks earlier this week: Where Judaism and Christianity each represent measured compromises with Greek culture, Islam is in certain respects an anti-Hellenistic counter-revolution. (I can do this at a much more fundamental level, but you have to buy me beer.)

The Real Estate Bloggers address The new real estate paradigm — for real estate agents, citing the Mike’s Corner post I mentioned the other day. On the point, if you haven’t read it, take a look at my own entry on this topic, Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent.

And The Phoenix Real Estate Guy posts a very funny rant on completely useless MLS listings:

I should probably cut the listing agent some slack about the photos. This is a new construction home after all. It was listed 569 days ago but was just completed in July. So the listing agent has only had 19 months to download a photo of the lot, the view, the home under construction or some sort of visual. Maybe a floor plan? And since it’s only been complete for 2 months, why should there be a photo of the never seen before pool design?

Indeed.

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 15, 2006

Here are some blogs that stay on top of real estate

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me from today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). I wish I could deliver an SEO boost to the weblogs mentioned here, but I doubt that will happen. First, the paper didn’t create links for the web-based version of this story. And second, the Republic hides everything behind a for-pay wall within a few weeks.

Here are some blogs that stay on top of real estate

We publish a respected real estate weblog called BloodhoundBlog. In consequence, I am very aware of the goings-on in the real estate blogosphere.

A weblog, or blog, is a regularly updated Internet-based journal, in some ways akin to a diary. But a blog is also a conversation among the bloggers and their readers, who can comment on and discuss the blog entries.

But there is an even larger conversation going on, blog to blog, all of which are linking to each other and to the entire Internet. By following the links, you can explore an issue thoroughly.

There are dozens of excellent real estate blogs. Here are some I visit every day:

  • Rain City Guide. Meta-brokerage mega-blog, a nice combination of very smart writers.
  • The Real Estate Tomato. Color and zest, a savory combination concerned mainly with high-tech real estate issues.
  • The Future of Real Estate Marketing. The daily bible of real estate technology.
  • 360Digest. Marlow Harris is a serious mind. Not dour or joyless, but never frivolous or shallow. A voice commanding attention.
  • Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog. If Daniel Rothamel is the future of real estate, we’re in safe hands.
  • Sellsius° blog. This is light opera, rarely grand opera, but it is deft and delightful.
  • Real Central VA. Jim Duncan walks a fine line between local and global interest, between real estate customers and real estate industry insiders.
  • Searchlight Crusade. Dan Melson ranks with me as one of the most informative people on the Internet. When he’s done with a topic, there is nothing more to be said.
  • MoCo Real Estate News. Run by Mohave County Realtor Todd Tarson, another young agent who fills me with for hope for the future. Mohave County is booming, and Todd also has great insights into state-level real estate politics.

Visiting weblogs Read more

September 14, 2006

Ask the Broker: What compensation does a buyer’s agent have to disclose . . . ?

by

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

September 14, 2006

Ask the Broker: Why would an MLS/IDX system forbid commingling with listings from other sources . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Giving my prominent proboscis a good hard tweak, a certain pseudonymous Scarlet Pimpernelesque semi-retired real estate weblogger asks: “Are you trying to say that the MLS’ are not fascist dictatorships???” The question refers to a weblog entry I posted last night chastising Trulia Blog for hyperbole in its complaints about MLS exclusivity. I actually have a lot, lot, lot to say about MLS disintermediation — but not now. For now, I’d like to take a swing at the issue Trulia raises, treating it more seriously than they did.

Here is the relevant rule from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service’s IDX policies and procedures:

12. An IDX Broker may not modify, enhance or manipulate a Shared Listing. In addition, listing information from other sources may not be combined with IDX Listings. For instance, property listings from other multiple listing services, for sale by owner properties and properties not in the MLS may not be combined with the IDX Database.

Why would ARMLS have such a rule? I can offer some reasonable conjectures, but before I do, I should like to make a meta argument: Whether or not you agree with anything I might say, it remains that MLS systems have every right to make their own rules however they choose. If the rules make sense to the membership, they don’t have to make sense to you. In other words, quibbling with me, here, gets you nowhere.

So why might an MLS IDX system forbid commingling with listings from other sources?

How about to protect the MLS brand? Or to avoid confusion between fully-cooperating listings and de facto exclusive listings? How about to preserve the cooperative system that is the sine qua non of MLS listing?

Here’s an even better reason: To maintain the quality level of displayed listings. We make fun of MLS listing quality, but egregious listings are funny precisely because they stand out (which is what egregious means). MLS listings are amazingly detailed compared to FSBO or RealtyBot listings. The simplified ARMLS feed, which any agent can download on-line, contains 213 unique fields — and it excludes the photos, their captions, the virtual-tour link and Read more

September 13, 2006

Bedtime links: Lawyer-free real estate, Zillowing Redfin, dancing with the dinosaurs, the map to mash-up excellence and memorable truths about Real Estate 2.0 . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Christine gives a nice run-down of seller-only agency as it is practiced in New York State. This is not very far from the way things used to be done in Arizona, except that, because of Article 26 to the state constitution, lawyers are not required to effect the transfer of real property.

Sellsius° whispers a plan for Zillowing Redfin.

Daniel is swinging for the fences, and he plans to look at at least one more pitch. The topic: NAR, MLS, IDX, VOW, DOJ (wasn’t that a song in Hair?). I think this is a classic example where doing nothing would have resolved the whole problem within a few months: NAR implements VOW policy as planned with opt-out provision. Dinosaurs opt-out. Young turks counter-market: “Why are they hiding your listing?” Dinosaurs opt-in. What we’ll get, eventually, will be years late and much worse.

Joel kicks the tires on the Windermere map mash-up: Windermere’s Property Point hits a home run.

We began this day with a thoroughgoing article from The Realty Bloggers about Real Estate 2.0 that happened to say nice things about BloodhoundRealty.com. We’ll end the day the same way, with a rigorous call to arms from Mike Price at Mike’s Corner that also says some nice things about BloodhoundRealty.com. Saying nice things about us is incidental. Saying true things memorably — this is irreplaceable…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

September 13, 2006

Is Windermere’s the best MLS map mash-up so far . . . ?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dustin at Rain City Guide is pointing to this new Windermere MLS map mash-up.

“Ho hum,” you say. “Been there. Done that. Gave the tee-shirt to my kid.” Maybe so. My take is that this is the best map-based MLS search that I have seen so far, but I am not confident that I have seen it all.

Things I like:

  • Almost no wasted screen real estate
  • A super-accurate zoom feature
  • Excellent Ajaxification without waiting between every change in settings
  • Details are exhibited in a tabbed section using about 25% of the browser

The sliders at ShackYack.com are very cool, but they’re painful to use because everything refreshes in real time — plus ShackYack wastes huge portions of the screen, as do Trulia.com and PropSmart.com. Are there any other players in this same league?

Windermere has MLS feeds from wherever it has franchisees — 35 systems so far, mainly in the Western United States.

Go play with it. My take: Totally rocks…

Technorati Tags: , , ,

September 13, 2006

Cute little Trulia pleads, “Can’t we share the hate?!?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Displeased, perhaps, that outfits like Redfin.com draw all the negative attention, Trulia Blog asks:

Does the MLS continue to believe that fascist dictatorships work?

Inasmuch as an MLS system is a mutually-voluntary membership organization composed of self-selected volunteers, each of whom voluntarily agrees to abide by a set of rules voluntarily established by the membership as a whole, it easy is to understand how Trulia Blog would mistake MLS systems for the second-most murderous branch of Totalitarian Socialism in history. They’re like twins!

An MLS system is a club. Whatever bad things we might think to say about a club, a club is still far more benign than even the most benign of governments. Why? Because you can quit a club, where quitting a government is difficult at best, impossible at worst — and almost always fatal under Totalitarian Socialism. If you haven’t seen a huge pile of bodies stacked up behind the local MLS office — there’s a reason for that.

There are three things you can do about a club you don’t like: 1. You can try to change it from within. 2. You can try to change it from without. 3. You can turn your back on it and up your own organization.

I have had nothing but good things to say about Trulia.com so far, but after this stunt, I have this much to add: Trulia, up yours!

Technorati Tags: , , ,

September 13, 2006

Could Valley resale home inventories really only be 15% over normal?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Interesting notes from John L. Wake’s Arizona Real Estate Notebook:

Dr. Jay Butler, the head of the Arizona Real Estate Center at ASU, made a presentation yesterday at the Industry Partners Conference, an annual meeting of real estate industry folks – agents, escrow officers, mortgage brokers and many others.

Looking at listings for sale as a percentage of the total number of homes in the Valley (the housing stock), Dr. Butler said the normal number of listings today would be 32,000 to 35,000. I found the actual number this morning to be 41,014 (all home types) in Maricopa county. So, listings are high right now… but not super high.

Given that we have added an enormous number of houses to our inventory over the last three years, I had wondered what our baseline normal should be by now. It will be a couple of years from now before we know if Dr. Butler is right (yes, those words did emerge from my fingers!), but his projection seems to correspond to the observed data: Our surfeit of available homes is not so large as to induce fire-sale pricing.

John has a very rich weblog, including excellent city-by-city graphing of Dr. Butler’s median home price numbers.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

September 13, 2006

Real estate connections: Deep thoughts, podcasts and dead bugs on the headlights . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato waxes philosophical, wondering, Is Big Brother Dead? A stray thought to the contrary: Panem et circenses?

The Realty Bloggers have a smart reflection on the slow but on-going ramping up of on-line real estate vendors.

There are two fun developments in our friend Richard Riccelli’s trial-by-FSBO-fire. First, he was approached by John Keith, an enterprising Boston Realtor and weblogger, who, having read about Richard here, offered to help him with a limited-service MLS listing. And second, Richard has a Strange New Respect for the idea of pushing the whole job of marketing a house off onto a professional. It’s not something he could actually do, of course. He’s too much a perfectionist — and the work product he produces for his home should be very instructive. But he understands now why someone else would delegate all that work, happily paying the fee.

Jim Duncan at Real Central VA asks Should buyers forego inspection in a hot market? His answer: “Hell. No.” I agree wall-to-wall, but there is a middle ground here: Inspect, retaining the right to cancel upon inspection, but specify that the home will be purchased with no seller-supplied repairs. In the Arizona Association of Realtors Residential Purchase Contract, we have seller warranties for all the major systems, so the buyer’s exposure is relatively minimal. (The AAR produced an “as-is” addendum that waives these warranties, making it entirely useless.) None of this matters in Arizona right now, where smart sellers repair absolutely everything before they list their homes for sale. But it’s a way of doing an “as-is” transaction without giving up everything.

Three from Sellsius°: The Future of Residential Appraisers links to an article discussing the further encroachment of Automated Valuation Methods on the appraisal industry. If I were building an AVM (ahem), I would hire the best available appraisers to point out the bone-headed mistakes in the software, then keep them working as an on-going Quality Control effort. As it happens, we are refinancing our home right now. I comped it for the lender, then Zillowed it to see how far off-base Zillow.com would be. Read more

September 12, 2006

New BloodhoundBlog feature: Ask the Broker . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A lot of the searches that land on this weblog take the form of general real estate questions. “What is an earnest deposit?” “How long is a typical escrow?” “What is dual agency?” But search engines don’t answer answer questions, they simply shuffle up web pages that have have a high degree of keyword correspondence. Those pages may answer the question — or they may be totally off base.

So: It occurred to me that I could make asking questions easy. If those questions happen to be blogable, so much the better. If you ask a question about a confidential matter, I will answer it privately — and I will keep your name and email address confidential in any case. But if you have a real estate question of general interest, I would be honored to answer it here on the weblog, so we can all kick it around. In the long run, I might build a FAQ out of the questions — a monument more lasting than bronze.

Got a real estate question? Click on the button in the sidebar to the right and ask away. I’ll get to your question as quickly as I can.

Caveats: I am not an attorney, an accountant or a trust, financial or tax adviser, and my body of real estate knowledge is in many ways limited by my real estate experience, all of it in Arizona. But there are a lot of people who visit here who can help me fill in the gaps, and, together, we can pursue a fuller understanding of the art, the science, the business and the passion that is real estate…

Technorati Tags: , ,

September 12, 2006

Economist Elliott Pollack’s housing market analysis

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Phoenix and Tucson housing market analysis from Elliott Pollack:

The economic fundamentals that have allowed Greater Phoenix to prosper have not changed.

Our long term forecast remains positive.

Note this slide:

That’s ostensibly bad news, since our affordability is down substantially over the last 6 years. But what’s interesting to me is that the cities Phoenix drains population from are all substantially less affordable. That doesn’t mean things will necessarily go well here, but it tends to argue that they will be worse there.

Pollack’s estimate is that we have about two years to absorb excess inventory in greater Phoenix.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

September 12, 2006

Only in the Valley of the Sun is a home built in the 1950s considered historic . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

There’s a charming story in today’s Republic about the push to designate a small subdivision of tract homes in Scottsdale as an historic district:

With roomy kitchens and big kid-friendly yards, the homes were built during Scottsdale’s boom. Soldiers were returning home from World War II and Motorola came to town. People needed a place to live.

“Everybody around here worked for Motorola,” said Darlene Petersen, 76, a longtime community activist.

Forty-seven years ago, she and her late husband moved from Davenport, Iowa, into their home on Wilshire Drive near 73rd Street. She was a registered nurse. He was a printer displaced by a strike.

They both found jobs in the boomtown. Darlene spent more than 30 years as an operating room nurse, and her husband got a job as a printer.

The Petersens paid $11,000 for the 1,500-square-foot house that came with concrete floors and no cooler. Still, they were enticed by its Midwest-style front porch and the wide covered patios across the back. And there was the generous backyard, where geraniums and vines flourish under the shade of a very senior mulberry tree.

“People say it is so relaxing back here,” she said.

The name of the neighborhood is “Scottsdale Estates 4.” That by itself tells you that these are production homes, neither historically distinctive nor esthetically distinct. Properly speaking, it’s a neighborhood of tear-downs awaiting a higher and better use.

But the Valley of the Sun is so afraid of being looked down on by older cities that it races around adopting all the silly policies that make those older cities sclerotic and uninhabitable. We won’t be satisfied until more people move out than move in, just like the cities celebrated in all the hip urban planning books.

But, even so, it’s cute and charming and funny that, in order to have “historic districts,” we have to make hallowed museums out of homes that would be considered fairly new anywhere else…

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

September 12, 2006

Republic: Year-over-year median prices down in some areas . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the Republic‘s read on yesterday’s housing numbers, a much more dire interpretation:

Valley home prices dipped again in August, even falling below last year’s levels in some areas.

It is the first time since the Valley’s housing market turned red-hot in late 2004 that the monthly median price of existing homes in some areas is lower than it was the same month the year before, according to the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University Polytechnic. And if the August median price of $262,500 holds steady or declines this month, the region’s median price will be below the September 2005 price of $263,000.

Jim Rounds, a senior economist with the Scottsdale-based consulting firm Elliott D. Pollack & Cos., said price declines in many parts of metropolitan Phoenix are just beginning and could continue until early 2007.

Also, he said, “new-home price reductions are right around the corner” for the Valley as the housing market’s oversupply issue is corrected.

This much is interesting:

For the first eight months of 2006, there were 47,515 used-home sales Valley-wide, which isn’t close to the 78,935 recorded in 2005.

Last year isn’t a perfect comparison because of the investor-buyer frenzy that has left the housing market with a hangover this year, but home sales this year have also fallen below 2004’s more normal level of 68,020. They are closer to 2003’s pace, when 47,255 used homes changed hands.

The boom in Phoenix real estate started in March 2004 if not earlier, so 2003 is the last normal year for comparison purposes. In other words, the Phoenix market is essentially normal on the buyer’s side.

We have a surfeit of inventory on the seller’s side, but we don’t have is the kind of fire-sale pricing you would expect if most of those sellers were actually motivated to sell — as opposed to being interested in selling if the price is right.

The interesting — and possibly dispositive — question is whether new-home builders actually will cut prices. They’re discounting heavily against list prices for inventory homes right now, but that’s a matter of clearing a finite amount of standing inventory. If pre-built homes are selling Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

Media Contacts