For $695 up front, plus $12 per $10,000 of sale price, plus 2.5-3.5% of the sale price paid to a realtor who brings the buyer who buys your home, you can...well...see the flyer below, you get the idea.
Shameless self-publicity
My brokerage, Century21 Simplicity has a great new program for home owners wanting to sell their home and pay about half the cost of a full-service listing.
For $695 up front, plus $12 per $10,000 of sale price, plus 2.5-3.5% of the sale price paid to a realtor who brings the buyer who buys your home, you can...well...see the flyer below, you get the idea.
For $695 up front, plus $12 per $10,000 of sale price, plus 2.5-3.5% of the sale price paid to a realtor who brings the buyer who buys your home, you can...well...see the flyer below, you get the idea.
Getting off the rollercoaster...
I recently had an article published by the Metro Area Realty Club, an online magazine for real estate agents and investors. This is it:
With all the ups-and-downs of the last few years, real estate agents, buyers, and sellers have been left feeling like they've been run over by a rollercoaster. We've all seen the news:
"Pending home sales have risen 6.4percent."
"Single family home re-sales have declined by 2.7percent."
"Home inventory currently stands at 9.9 months."
"Existing home sales 10.7percent below the pace of August 2007."
With so much change from month to month, it's shouldn't surprise anyone that the whole industry is feeling a little ill. Sure, there are those few super-agents riding in the front car with their arms in the air, screaming that this is amazing...but for most of us, we'd settle for a smoother, calmer, more predictable ride.
At my neighborhood's HOA meeting last month, over 50 of the 189 homes were represented, and I fielded questions about the housing market, and what changes in the coming months might have an impact on home sales. My neighbors seemed to be concerned with how much their home is worth this year vs. last year. My response to owners was that unless you sold your home, or re-fied, in those years, the historic 2007/2008 value of your home is irrelevant, and comparing an irrelevant number from two years ago to a made-up number last year to a (hopefully) real number this year just created confusion.
As any statistician will tell you, more data points means greater opportunity for variance between adjacent points (or in this case, years). Comparing 2009 prices to 2008 prices to 2007 prices is confusing, and not very helpful to people thinking of selling their home in late 2009-2010. Actual data from actual transactions are the only numbers that matter (though not all sellers want to see it that way.) Unless we're going to change prices on our listings every month, or week, or day, as the market fluctuates, we need to look at a broader picture. More data points are necessary, from a time when all houses were created equal, before the bubble had inflated, all the way back to the beginning of the neighborhood.
My neighborhood is fifteen years old, so I found home sale prices for 2009 and compared those prices to the original purchase prices when the same homes were built and sold in 1994-97. That's really the only way to compare apples-to-apples. I found that homes consistently saw an increase in value of 24-28% over the original purchase. Solid start number, solid recent sales numbers.
While sellers might want to know that home values have increased 7% since the beginning of 2009, or decreased 3% since the middle of 2007, most were happy to know that the value of their home, even in the current market, was more than they had invested. There were, of course, a few owners who had refinanced in 2006 for a price that the market may never be able to support in my neighborhood without the kind of reckless appraising and refinancing we saw just a few years ago.
Overwhelmingly, though, there was a sense of getting off the rollercoaster, of finally starting to feel our legs under us again, of being satisfied with a ride that, while it may never make us giddy with excitement, it won't make us want to throw up, either.
With all the ups-and-downs of the last few years, real estate agents, buyers, and sellers have been left feeling like they've been run over by a rollercoaster. We've all seen the news:
"Pending home sales have risen 6.4percent."
"Single family home re-sales have declined by 2.7percent."
"Home inventory currently stands at 9.9 months."
"Existing home sales 10.7percent below the pace of August 2007."
With so much change from month to month, it's shouldn't surprise anyone that the whole industry is feeling a little ill. Sure, there are those few super-agents riding in the front car with their arms in the air, screaming that this is amazing...but for most of us, we'd settle for a smoother, calmer, more predictable ride.
At my neighborhood's HOA meeting last month, over 50 of the 189 homes were represented, and I fielded questions about the housing market, and what changes in the coming months might have an impact on home sales. My neighbors seemed to be concerned with how much their home is worth this year vs. last year. My response to owners was that unless you sold your home, or re-fied, in those years, the historic 2007/2008 value of your home is irrelevant, and comparing an irrelevant number from two years ago to a made-up number last year to a (hopefully) real number this year just created confusion.
As any statistician will tell you, more data points means greater opportunity for variance between adjacent points (or in this case, years). Comparing 2009 prices to 2008 prices to 2007 prices is confusing, and not very helpful to people thinking of selling their home in late 2009-2010. Actual data from actual transactions are the only numbers that matter (though not all sellers want to see it that way.) Unless we're going to change prices on our listings every month, or week, or day, as the market fluctuates, we need to look at a broader picture. More data points are necessary, from a time when all houses were created equal, before the bubble had inflated, all the way back to the beginning of the neighborhood.
My neighborhood is fifteen years old, so I found home sale prices for 2009 and compared those prices to the original purchase prices when the same homes were built and sold in 1994-97. That's really the only way to compare apples-to-apples. I found that homes consistently saw an increase in value of 24-28% over the original purchase. Solid start number, solid recent sales numbers.
While sellers might want to know that home values have increased 7% since the beginning of 2009, or decreased 3% since the middle of 2007, most were happy to know that the value of their home, even in the current market, was more than they had invested. There were, of course, a few owners who had refinanced in 2006 for a price that the market may never be able to support in my neighborhood without the kind of reckless appraising and refinancing we saw just a few years ago.
Overwhelmingly, though, there was a sense of getting off the rollercoaster, of finally starting to feel our legs under us again, of being satisfied with a ride that, while it may never make us giddy with excitement, it won't make us want to throw up, either.
New web-name rules for Realtors
So the NAR has enacted Standard of Practice 10-12, as reported here.
Article 10-12 states that Realtors cannot "use URLs or domain names that present less than a true picture, or register URLs or domain names which, if used, would present less than a true picture."
Primarily it's going to hit those companies and individuals that use MLS in their URLs.
MLS refers to a Multiple Listing Service, which is a service on which Realtors share listings, giving broad exposure to listings for sellers, and bringing together listings in one location for potential buyers to browse. They're legal, and they're where most people find a new home.
The problem comes in when a Realtor or brokerage uses the letters MLS in their URL - the article cites northwoodsandlakesmls.com - a brokerage which lists its own and other brokerages' listings. It is not, however, a Multiple Listing Service. Imagine if a company like Hotwire or Priceline was owned by Delta; and instead of pulling the best flights from all airlines, it pulled flights from Delta, and added a small sampling of flights from other carriers. That's about what the deal is with the use of MLS in URLs.
I admit I got pretty angry at the response from some of the Realtors and brokers in the article, especially Marc Rasmussen of Sarasota, FL, who says that the code is being enforced too late, and Kimberly McKinley of Colorado, who says: "I've not had anybody say, 'Oh my gosh, I thought I was on the MLS,' " she said. "I think (NAR) might be getting to be a little overprotective of the public and they're hurting us -- they're hurting the Realtors and brokers. NAR is supposed to be there to promote us."
My objection to the first comment is that just because something is hard to enforce does not mean that we shouldn't bother. My objection to the second is threefold:
1) Most people don't know what the heck an MLS is. They just find a house and click the picture of the realtor next to it and make an appointment to go look at it.
2) I like that the NAR is being overprotective. If the NAR had been a little more protective of the public in the last two years, maybe by making it harder for Realtors to promise the earth to underqualified home-buyers, we might not have the crazy levels of foreclosures and the market deflation we're experiencing now.
3) The NAR is not there to promote us Realtors. Primarily I expect that the NAR should regulate the behavior of agents and brokers - because plainly there are a lot of Realtors and brokers who can't - or won't - regulate themselves.
I wonder sometimes if some Realtors are aware of how the general public perceive their industry. While some Realtors work hard, the last fifteen years in Atlanta have been like shooting fish in a barrel for most Atlanta Realtors. I know that the perception is that we basically get people to consent to giving away 7% of their home's value and all we do is put it online and hope someone decides they like it. Which is not inaccurate for a some of my fellow Realtors.
What they need to realize, in a hurry, is that people will buy and sell homes even if there were no Realtors. We exist to facilitate those transactions on behalf of those clients, not the other way around.
Sometimes it is hard to do the right thing. But isn't the right thing the only thing we should be trying to do?
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