My deepest apologies for bringing down the neighborhood with this preforeclosure listing but the truth is, I got the job done for my clients in a difficult market. Not to mention my sales in the neighborhood remain the highest priced non-builder resales. But it begs the question, How much responsibility does an agent bear when it comes to home values? Can real estate brokers actually drive prices up or down or do we simply enable the transaction allowing the buyer to pay what the seller will accept?

Some people believe that the agents are bringing down the neighborhoods.  Thus, this anonymous phone call.

P.S. In case you were wondering. There is no such thing as an anonymous anything anymore. A Google search of the telephone number, his work number, gave me his employer. An insurance company. Insurance sales people are licensed in Colorado. A half hour cross-referencing names between the licensing database and neighborhood homeowners gave me his name and address. The FSBO around the corner that had been on the market for almost 2 years.

So what have I learned so far? I’ve learned enough C++ to know that I hate when things become very tedious. That really helped with pushing me towards learning more about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I was able to use C++ for an actual application though. I wrote a parser to convert an online directory of addresses to a comma delimited file so it could be used to create mailing labels. Pretty exciting stuff isn’t it.

I learned more HTML and CSS. No time wasted there. Besides all the CSS you come across playing around with blogs, you can also use it to help with designs of actual websites. Who knew? Hopefully, my site, ValueRents.com will be online sooner than later. That’s the website I’ve been working on in a round about manner for a couple of years. I dusted the concept off and developed a frontend for the site but still need to plug in some sort of backend. One day ValueRents.com will help landlords find the best properties then manage their rental properties from one location. I apparently have a few more things to figure out before it all comes together. I might make some attempts to redevelop the theme for this site. How hard could it be?

And to wrap it all up, a few classes in database design and SQL. I got to tell you, there’s nothing like bending raw data to your every whim. Hours of fun. I can’t even begin to explain how happy I am to finally stop using Excel to run calculations on the thousands of foreclosure records I have. Mysql and SQL Server are so much more fun. So maybe I can start using Excel for what it was intended–spreadsheets and quick and dirty charts.

So that’s what I’ve been up to while the real estate megalith cracks and crumbles. I’ll have more on that in coming posts. I can’t help but think though, where there are problems, there is an opportunity. I haven’t seen such great deals in Denver real estate since I moved here 8 years ago. Hopefully, the web development education I’m giving myself will help me take advantage of the dozens of opportunities I see every day. Time will tell.

1. Why Johnny Can’t Code and How to Help Him. by Curtis Barron  - What!  I find it hard to believe that my Dad’s post is the most popular post on my blog.  It’s actually kind of painful.  I wonder how much this speaks to the fact that niche expertise is the real strength of a search engine.  Thanks for the contribution Dad.
2. Money Magazine – Buyer’s agents Co-op and how to get a better deal buying or selling a home.  Ah yes, the outcome of my complaint about Money printing misleading  information about the Denver real estate market.
3. Thanks to Blogs. My only guess here is that this is the intersection of people searching my general interest and personal categories.  And of course, this post seems to have a penchant for automated spam.
4. What should be in a Comparative Market Analysis and how long will it be accurate?   This was my take on how to evaluate the value of a property, seems to be popular with investors and appraisers.
5. Apple’s New iphone, up to the hype?  Nothing like mentioning some pop culture to turn up the heat.
6. The Top Ten Most Common Complaints about Homes for Sale – Useful Feedback.  This is my take on the feedback you get, if any when selling a house.
7. Most Brokerage Business models don’t benefit the Agent.  It’s true!
8. Zillow Returns Power to the People with Site updates.  I still love Zillow.  I don’t think they’re going to make any real money for a long time but they’re headed in the right direction.   Oh, and I love the fact that if you mention Zillow in any post, there is a high likelihood that the hard working Drew Meyers will stop by. 
9. Where to spend my marketing budget?  This has become a lot more popular over the last 2 months.  I think agents are rethinking were they’re putting their money.
10. Blizzard of 2006 – Buried in Snow and loving it.  What I love most about Denver is that the sun comes out after it snows.  As long as the suns out, you probably don’t even need a coat.  It’s just when the sun goes down…. Brrrr…

And a few honorable mentions.

• Most Denver homes are overpriced.  I attempted to illustrate the difference between the list price and the sale price and drive home the importance of some due diligence on the part of the buyer. 
• Buying a home? Think before making your first offer. My opinion on what a buyer needs to think about before making an offer on a home.I truly hope people find my writing useful, informative and perhaps even entertaining on some level.   Thanks for reading.

I’ll admit it. I love to research. I don’t like surprises. I want to know everything I could possibly find out about the agent I’m dealing with and his or her client. How much business do they do? Is the agent busy or just faking it? What’s their style, what’s their office like? Do they need the money? How long have they been in the business? Do they have any listings? What have they sold? What’s their target market, if any? What does the buyer currently own? Are they selling anything? Where does the buyer work?…oh it goes on and on. Anything on Google?

I love to encourage conversation. Even aimless banter. I like the agents to like me and feel comfortable and confident dealing with me. They should; I wouldn’t do anything shady, illegal or even underhanded. But that doesn’t mean I’m not working for my client. If my client wants a certain goal to be achieved, that’s my aim and I work very hard to gain any ground I can.

Everyone gives up little clues about their motivations, but they don’t always know they’re doing it. That’s why I don’t want my sellers having any sort of contact with the other agents or their clients. It’s also why I don’t want my buyers being too interested in the site of the homeowners. Any sort of contact is compromising my power to negotiate. An agent should be insulation from these situations.

I think of real estate business like a high stakes game of poker. I can’t see the cards but I can read the signals. There are sharks out there while others are just minnows. I’m not a shark but I play one on TV. Which one are you?

When I read the Wired article about Joshua Green’s quest for “cognitive improvement”, it really hit home. I just haven’t been feeling like I’ve been operating at my peak lately. My brain just isn’t what it was ten years ago and I’m far too young to be saying that. It made me think that I probably could function at a higher level if I could keep my brain fit. If I trained my mind the same way athletes train their bodies, when I need to make demands of my mind, it would be ready. I’ve been implementing little things into my routine to test my theory.

There has been so much buzz lately about the Rubik’s cube. With the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness” and Will Smith solving the cube on Oprah, it popped into my head. “Oh, I have one of those.” He had Cube experts, so I found experts online. When I solved it for the first time, it took me about two hours. I’m down to about twenty-five minutes now but I don’t think any world champions are getting nervous. For me, it’s about exercising the analytical and spatial parts of my brain that don’t seem to get used as much these days. I expect the improvements will pay dividends in actual dollars one day soon. Looking for solutions? I personally found the Petrus Method to be my favorite but there are many solutions to fit many different ways of thinking.

Technorati Tags: Rubik, Puzzle, Petrus, Wired

I’m not sure how this helps MyHeritage.com get you interested in your family tree. But it’s a great gimmick to get some traffic to your website and put you on the map. A little P.T. Barnum to get the web traffic rolling. I’m still working on how to put some spin on a real estate website to drive a little traffic. Zillow did this pretty well with the introduction of the Zestimate. Exposure is an absolute necessity for success. Often though, even with a great promotion, the exposure won’t translate into dollars. Without it though, you’re destined to fade back into the crowd. Sometimes, when I need an idea to get more business, I think, “What would Phineas do?”

Don’t expect to get great matches on the facial recognition portion of this site right off the bat. You can expect half of them to look like a random drawing. Of course, I did add the Statler pic myself. Thought it would be funny but I find it just reminds me of getting heckled in high school during a school assembly. Something about looking like the guy on the Muppet show. It still hurts.

I love the snow, and Denver blizzards are so much nicer than the East Coast and Midwest blizzards of my youth. The snow is fun for the first couple of days, but it wears on you after a couple of days.

I love to look out and see a smooth white blanket over everything. It appeals to my desire for order. All the mismatching colors and hard lines created by the mismatched architecture now have a unifying theme. I curse the first person to walk through my nice snow. I know it’s just a couple of days before someone will stumble through my yard thoughtlessly leaving their stumbling footprints and breaking up the serenity.

I woke up early just to see it before anyone marked it up. I love knowing that you don’t have to do anything, because you can’t. Well, I could, but at least it’s a good excuse. I love to watch the people struggling to shovel their walks when it’s still snowing. I ask myself, “Why shovel until it stops snowing?”  I mean, you don’t have anywhere to go, do you? Do my neighbors want to be among the people who had to abandon their cars? With 22 inches of snow on the roads I’m pretty sure they don’t have the ground clearance. The snow is so pretty until you carve a few paths through it and mark it up; why not enjoy it for a moment or two?

All my neighbors have shoveled their walks three times since the blizzard started. When it’s snowing an inch an hour, it just doesn’t seem worth it to me. There were 40 mile an hour wind gusts with blowing snow and it was actually pretty cold. They all looked pretty miserable. It makes me feel smarter than the crowd. I waited until it stopped; it took about 15 minutes to shovel a path for the mailman, but he won’t be coming today. They canceled that too.

For all the people that don’t live here and don’t understand what Denver’s like: it’s a great little city, very un-intimidating. Its usually presented to the rest of the country as a cold place, but it’s not usually that cold. If the sun’s out, it’s warm. The sun makes 30 degrees seem warm, especially if you’re here from the Midwest where there is no sun from October 15th to March 1st.

There is usually very little precipitation here. So for a city that claims to be a mountain town, people really don’t react well to snow. From the look of the cars stuck on US-36 (Boulder to Denver) you would think this was the Carolinas.

The roads won’t be clear until the temperature comes up. They don’t even really try. In Downtown Denver and on the freeways, they put down magnesium chloride on the main roads, but that’s about it. Maybe in a couple of days they’ll plow the side roads and leave the traditional 2-3 inches they leave for traction. Seriously, they leave snow on the roads because they worry that if they scrape it down all the way the thin layer would become ice. Where most states go with a scrape and melt approach, Denver takes a skim, melt and evaporate approach. Sometimes they’ll drop sand at intersections. It took a while to get used to the plows driving around with the blades actually up but I’m sure it saves taxpayers money on not having to buy new plows. I shoveled my walk around noon today, scraped to the concrete. There was a little bit of snow and ice left when I stopped but it’s 3′oclock now and the walk is completely clear.

To make it worse, many of the people that live here don’t know how to drive in it. They moved here from California or Florida and are not accustomed to the snow. Others moved from the Northeast and Midwest where they scrape the snow off completely and put down salt. They only worry about ‘black ice’ that they can’t really see. “Oh, but I have four wheel drive!” Unfortunately, while four wheel drive is great for getting you going forward, it does very little for slowing you down when the roads are all ice and snow.

No, I’m in no hurry to get out with all the bad drivers in a hurry to go nowhere. Most of the roads in and out of town aren’t clear.

Since I’ve moved to Denver I’ve got to experience the number #2 and #4 most severe blizzards in Denver’s history. The great part about Denver is that it will probably melt right after Christmas.

If I knew he was actually going to read it, I probably wouldn’t have sent it off at 3 A.M so unedited. Oh well. He mentioned when he confronted the other agent about the corrections, the agent mentioned he was misunderstood and actually he had had a client (singular) that got that much below asking price. It just wasn’t recorded in the MLS. hmmm….

Realtors are all so secretive and protective with their information, it makes it difficult for the media to get the truth. The public can smell it when they’re being fed a line. The media knows it too, that’s why they’re all over the industry propelling this belief that Realtors take money from homeowners that they don’t deserve. It’s just really difficult to get correct information about what’s going on. A little more transparency when it comes to how Realtors are paid couldn’t hurt, could it? I have found that dispelling misconceptions about this is a never-ending task. Perhaps by being more open, the public understanding of the business will expand from ‘you’re just a salesperson’ to ‘you’re running a business’. The truth is all the information about how agents are paid is easy to get to; just ask a successful agent. It’s the starving ones that will be afraid to tell you what they’re making on the sale for fear of scaring you off.

Personally, I feel that since Realtors put the information into the database and have created their own network, they have the right to dictate who has access to the MLS. (of course I’m a Realtor and a little biased since I want people to use me) I think that controlling a large data base of home prices can be balanced out with having a central MLS public site much like we have in Denver (REColorado.com) where the public can have access to information regarding everything that is for sale. Sales data on the other hand, is public record and anyone who wants to, can collect it down at the county recording office like the title companies do.

In addition, here in Colorado you’ll find a wide range of options for real estate services to suit just about any budget. You just come to expect that, in most cases, you will get less service as you pay less money. But at least you have choices. If the public has choices, that’s a good start. Now Realtors just need to work on the honesty and trust part.

For an upcoming article in Money that will likely be discussing the topic of the day, saving money buying and selling your home, I provided some answers to a few questions regarding the range of buyer’s agent co-ops and bonuses being offered to bring a buyer here in Denver. With all the misquoting going on these days I hope it comes thru clearly. If not, you can be sure that I’ll be talking about it.

 

“I love Zillow.”  “I liked them before they were big.”   

Saying that I was a big fan of Zillow.com from the start is kind of like saying, “I liked Dave Matthews before he got big” (My wife, a Virginia native, loves to say that).  For one, nobody believes you, and second, nobody cares.  Regardless of what people would think of me, I’ll say it. I love Zillow, specifically, the Zestimate™.   If you haven’t been following along, Zillow has come of age. I personally like to go on the record with my likes and dislikes ahead of time. I keep a record whether I’m right or wrong. I feel that there are a couple of components missing that will have to be incorporated quickly if Zillow wants to become a fixture in real estate. One of them is probably the most important.   It’s built off an assumption.  

Assumption – People are inherently lazy. If someone doesn’t have to do something, they won’t.  If it doesn’t look easy, they will put it off for later (and probably never do it!). Bottom line – people will choose the path of least resistance. I know this doesn’t apply to the hard working bloggers out there or my clients that are reading this but it’s true of the majority of people. 

1.      Brokers/Agents don’t want to spend all their time uploading their listings to Zillow.

2.      People want to see everything that is for sale and don’t want to go all over the place to find it.

Solution –   Make it easy.Easy for Brokers – Until Zillow can automatically pull in the IDX data or data that is being posted on websites (My Ihouse website automatically feeds Yahoo, Oogle, and Trulia with a click of a button, but I hate the website designs), Zillow will never gain even 50% of listings out there because, in my opinion, most brokers/agents are lazy (no offense).  Also, most agents are not web-savvy. (I’ve read the average age of a real estate agent is in their 50’s, does this say web-savvy to you?) They don’t want to be entering their listings over and over again for each site, they want easy.  Easy for People (especially buyers) –  People (The mob) is even worse.  If you’re a FSBO listen up!  When I get a listing, it gets posted all over the internet.  It’s on the local MLS, the local MLS public page, Realtor.com, Yahoo.com, and every other site that draws from the IDX.  I also post them on craigslist, my website, and some homes even get their own website but where do you think the actual phone calls and emails come from? Most don’t come from the internet, at least not yet.  It’s a given that a broker will sell a listing if he lists it at the right price on the MLS.  He could get slightly more for the place if he expertly markets the home property to play up its high points.  The majority of  buyers in my view, a little better than 75% of home sales in Denver, come from cooperating with another local agent and the rest come from leads to the listing agent.  This means to me that buyers wander around the internet until they’re sucked into the net of marketing put out by good agents.  When someone looks at the MLS, they believe they are seeing everything for sale.  Because of this, people either make the move to purchase or wait because there was nothing they wanted to buy. They saw it all.  It’s all on the MLS.  Therefore, if Zillow wants to compete, it needs to feel like it covers everything. Agents want their listings posted on Zillow.  As long as Zillow is not branded by another company, brokers will want it done.  For Zillow to be a long term success buyers need to have the feeling that looking at homes on Zillow saves time.  If it’s good for buyers, it’s good for brokers.  Make it easier for them because people don’t need Zillow to buy a home right now.    Buyers will come because they don’t want to feel like they’re being ripped off and they want to compare the Zestimate™ with the list price. Though, I’m sure some come to see the cool bird’s eye views of the home, most people want something more tangible.  (I can’t see my house.  I was disappointed.)  As long as there are some buyers on Zillow, I will post all my listings there but I don’t think most agents will go thru the trouble.  So I think this is priority number one for Zillow, making it easier to get the listings up and running.  Zillow hasn’t made any wrong moves yet so I’m sure there is a whole team of people working on it.

And for anyone who still hasn’t heard about the most interesting thing to happen this year in internet real estate, please see my previous post, the ZillowBlog or follow this link to DrewMeyers extensive list of responses. 

Technorati Tags: Zillow, Real, Estate, Zestimate, Home, Value, Business                          

 And of course, I have to thank the creators and contributers of the WordPress movement.