I spent some timing being a good little consumer down at Barnes and Noble catching up on all the magazines I can’t afford to have delivered to my door.
My eye was drawn to the Best Ideas of 2007 Article in Money Magazine. The section with advice for buyers could not have been more inaccurate. While I’m not in the habit of writing long winded letters to editors. I couldn’t help myself. Below is my email to the editor…I deleted the name of the Broker in question in the interest of not ‘throwing him under the bus’ directly. Follow the link to see who it was and we’ll see if there is a correction in an upcoming magazine. For now, we’ll call him Uncle Frank. We all know that you have an Uncle Frank that has a tendency to exaggerate.
Written at 1 in the morning, this is probably not my best work and wrought with error but you’ll get the point.
To whom it may concern,I wanted to let you know that I really appreciated this months Money Magazine article for best ideas of 2007. For the most part I found it very accurate especially the advice for Sellers. The advice for buyers section struck me as rather off base from my experience as a Realtor and so I decided to do a little research.There is no way UNCLE FRANK is getting 15% below the list price for his clients.As a Denver Realtor, I have access to the local MLS statistics that I check regularly with religious fervor. Knowing what is going on in the market is extremely important. Among the things I check on a regular basis for each area is the separation between what a house is finally offered at on the MLS and what the ‘net to seller’ offer is. As a general rule for most areas of Denver, the net offer price is within 1-5% of the listing price. So needless to say, the claim that he was getting his clients 15% has to raise an eye brow.Metrolist that runs the primary MLS for Denver requires that statistics be recorded for property sales. Usually the agent the is representing the buyer is recorded along with this. As a rule, Realtors should not openly criticize other Realtors. So, for the record, I imagine the 15% was a typo.UNCLE FRANK is showing 7 purchases between 235K and 340K over the last 365 days. The average Sold price to List Price is only 98.18%. The net price to list price is 97.13%. So his clients on average were getting about 1% in concessions (some got none) and the offer was usually within 2% of the final list price. The only thing approaching 10% was the net sold price to the original list price. That was showing as 91% of the list price….