Archive for the 'For Sellers' Category
Just the other day I was pulling comps for a seller in a specific neighborhood. Normally, this shouldn’t be like pulling teeth, but a trend that I have been noticing has been accelerating. Half of the listings in this neighborhood failed to mention the name neighborhood in either agent remarks or pubic description. This forced me to search by zip code. Since the neighborhood in question straddled two zip codes – I ended up digging through mountains of actives and solds – not to mention contracts/pendings as well as expireds.
Since the neighborhood I was researching straddled two zip codes – I had to go through a mountain of actives, contracts, pendings and solds, expireds and cancelled listings to fish out the relevant information.
So I have to ask the moronic question – Whatever happened to including the name of the neighborhood on the listing?
I don’t mean to sound snarky – but this is NOT rocket science. HEY! LISTING AGENTS!!!! Include the $#%!ing neighborhood in the listing!! This is quite literally the LEAST you can do. How hard can that possibly be?
Not local? It’s your job to find out for God’s sake. If you don’t have enough knowledge of the area you are listing in to find this information – then you have no business listing there. Do yourself and the seller a favor and decline the listing.
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It’s been said that numbers don’t lie – or do they? I love statistics. Heck, I worked as a molecular biologist in mammalian genetics. I defy anyone to find a scientific discipline that is more reliant on solid statistical analysis than that!
But…. as anyone in the sciences will tell you – statistics are only as valid as the data they are measuring. I saw more than my share of deceptive creative uses of statistical models. In the science/engineering disciplines “peer review” holds these “creative types” accountable and by and large it does an excellent job. In fact this is often where the rubber meets the road for most of the junk popular pseudo-scientists who whine that they can’t get published.
Sadly – I haven’t run into the real estate watch-dog equivalent of peer review.
Phil Faranda wrote a blog about REALTOR stats being open to the public. He sighted a post from Agent Genius about how when the Houston Association of Realtors started disclosing these stats – agent protest caused the program to be discontinued.
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We often hear an agent or brokerage bragging about being on the first page of Google. Many sellers see being on the first page of Google and other major search engines such as Yahoo and Bing as a moot point. It is not – but it all depends on the nature of the search. Being first for long-tail searches for real estate rather than general terms is key. (For those who don’t know what a “long tail” search means – be patient – all we be revealed) A page one Google search for some general search criteria – is meaningless – and that is where the confusion arises. Most of us strive to be on page one of a Google search – but that begs the question: The first page of Google for what search?
I might be on the first page of Google for the search term “real estate in the United States of America.”
What does that do for my seller in New York?
The answer is nothing – absolutely nothing. The same could be said for being on page one for “New York real estate.” That might get me a lot of phone calls, but it does nothing for a seller in a village or town in lower Westchester. People who are searching an entire state may not even be contemplating a purchase. Why are they looking? Who knows? And if – perchance – they are looking to buy a home in that state – they are a looooong way from buying anything. They are cutting a wide swath because they don’t know what they want yet.
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Consumers who have been searching for homes have been discovering something new and different when they do an address search on Google. They are suddenly swamped with web pages which amount to “listing sheets” of each address the punch into the search engine. The result is the mess seen on the right. A long list of web pages for a single address.
At first this might seem like real estate heaven for buyers and sellers a like. However, the number of these sites have been propagating like bunnies and the elation turns to confusion when the consumer picks up the phone to call the agent who listed the home.
Where is the Listing Agent?
You see, these listings are being sponsored by agents and brokerages that for the most part have nothing to do with the listing. Some may have no idea about the listing whatsoever. They engaged a service that covers several counties, and know nothing about the home in question. In fact their working territory might be 30-50 miles away or more – but they are eager to help the buyer or seller with their real estate needs no matter how little they know about the area.
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The Condo Inventory Overhang:
A few years ago a post like this would have been an afterthought. Perhaps it would have even been laughed at as overkill. The condo and cooperative markets were on fire as the prime entry points into a market in which a single family home was a out of reach for the vast majority of first- time buyers. The need to prepare and stage a unit was just not part of the picture. But alas, this is no longer 2005. It is now 2010 and we have an inventory overhang that is giving this market a hangover.
This overhang is, in many cases, due to overbuilding and that fact presents those who are on the resale market with a problem. Sellers are competing with an inventory that includes a large percentage of brand-spanking new – never lived in units. These are very, very tempting to the average buyer. Everything is finished, fresh and sparkling clean. These units are now being priced to sell and they are turn-key. No heavy lifting, no muss, no fuss. To add insult to injury, these new complexes are often chock full of amenities that put a pre-war cooperative and some older condo complexes to shame. From the stainless steal appliances and granite countertops they are tough to resist.
So how does a seller compete?
Whenever I go on a listing appointment, I generally find that the seller already has a “number in their head” about what their home should sell for. This number can come from various sources. It is – unfortunately – almost always higher than the current market can command.
In truth, I can’t blame sellers for this…their minds have been levered to continued price increases to such an extent that the current market has left most sellers blind sided.
The first thing I often hear is that “I need to get X out in order to buy my next home which I can now get for Y because its gone down in price. The trouble if the property you want to buy has gone down so much in price, chances are the property that you want to sell has gone down by a similar percentage. Wishful thinking is often the culprit here. Markets are fluid – that was fine when prices were going up – but it also holds true when prices decline.
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Back in the bull market days of 2005-2006 the notion of needing to “stage” your home for a faster sale was nearly laughable. But home sales in the Westchester market are not what they once were. As most seller’s are painfully aware – this is not 2006. There is ample inventory on the market, prices are down and buyers are increasingly picky. Things once deemed insignificant now become major stumbling blocks to a successful sale.
Increasingly, listing agents, myself included, are encouraging sellers to stage their homes prior to putting them on the market. That includes, but is not limited to painting, pointing up and arranging furniture in a way that maximizes the potential of the space and creates a neutral atmosphere. We ask that seller’s depersonalize the space so that buyers can “mentally move in.”
Although I am not one to spend a homeowners money needlessly, there are times when I feel staging is essential. Staging is most beneficial in the following cases:
An Empty Home:
When the sellers have moved out – they tend to leave an empty shell of a house that used to be a home. That house can tend to lack personality and be all too forgettable to a prospective buyer. Right now there is an excess of inventory that is completely unfurnished and after a while they can all start to look the same to buyers. If a house is in danger of becoming that forgettable – it needs staging in order to stand out in the eyes of buyers.
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The housing market in White Plains has taken a drubbing since the stock market crash of 2008. Although some adjacent areas are showing small signs of stabilization, the same can not be said for the city of White Plains. This is ironic because White Plains was at the epicenter of the housing boom for Westchester County.
White Plains NY Cooperatives:
Cooperative prices were actually up slightly over the same period in 2008. However, this slight uptick might be do to an increase in the proportion of 2 BR units in the sales statistics. The previous quarter showed a grim 17% price reduction and recent sales in specific complexes indicates that this downward trend is continuing. Since 2 BR units are suddenly far more affordable, buyers are finding that they can afford a larger unit. Sales volume is down 17% over the previous year and the current inventory of 9 months indicates a buyer’s market undergoing a price correction bordering on double digits.
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It is very interesting that just as consumers are demanding ever more hyper-local content and knowledge from agents that we are also seeing another distinct trend in the opposite direction: the tendency to list and sell to larger and larger geographic areas.
The contrast between old-school hyper-local agents and the newer nomad agnet was driven home to me while I was working with two listing agents who still work exclusively in small niche markets. I was at a closing with one of them and she implied that since I had the entire city of White Plains to cover, why didn’t I simply refer out the client who finally bought in Scarsdale?
Can a real estate agent be too local?
I knew that the attitude about staying hyper-local is alive and well though it appears to be a staple of old-school real estate. Still, I was more than a tad surprised. Scarsdale is not the moon. It is the town directly adjacent to the west side of White Plains and about a whopping six miles from my front door to the center of the village. If we followed this line of thinking to its most extreme would mean that a buyer potentially moving from New York City to Westchester NY would have to have as many as five or six agents to explore all the possibilities open to them that were within about 30 minute commute. For the consumer this seems most unwieldy if not highly impractical. Could you imagine the mountain of agents all crawling over each other for the buyer’s attention? What a mess. Not to mention a monster of coordination.
From the agent’s perspective, there could also be a danger to being too local. What if something happens to that small segment of the market you represent? If your geography/price range are razor thin – you are setting yourself up for trouble. This was clearly seen this year when agents who specialized in small high-end markets got creamed because jumbo loan issues bit them in the backside. Another listing agent I encountered was used to selling about 10 major properties a year – but this year had only managed a single sale.
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This is a story about selling your home during a housing recession.
Sellers with homes listed today will be able to identify with some of the antics that buyers in a bear market will pull. But this is about a listing that was active 14 years ago in 1996 – during another deep housing recession. I wasn’t a real estate agent at the time, I was a seller. My mother had just died after a prolonged illness and I was listing her house for sale. The house in question was a beautiful 1932 Tudor sitting on prime property with sweeping golf course views in wonderful residential area in White Plains. There was a good deal of emotion involved since the home in question had been designed by my Grandmother and built by my Grandfather.
Although I wasn’t an agent I was smart enough to read the newspapers and so I know it was a crummy market. The house would have been worth roughly $600k just a few short years ago – but in 1996-1997 I was hoping for about $550k – but knew I would probably only see a litte more than $500k. Gut instinct told me to rent the place, but my co-executor was adamant that the house had to be sold.
Nothing prepared me for the crazy home buyers that came through looking for a “deal.”
90% of them were bottom-feeders looking to steal a house – and looking for ANY excuse to chisel the price to the bone. My beleaguered broker came to me with all sorts of concession requests – some of which made sense. But more often than not, the requests bordered on the absurd. Some of the more hilarious issues are worth noting because when we see frustrated sellers – we need to be aware that their pain is real and that some of the crazy concessions being asked by buyers can be truly ridiculous.
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