Your Exceptional Life

Tick tock, tick tock.  It’s been 10 minutes.  If you haven’t been reading this blog, you really are behind the real estate market.  I’ve been dead on all year. The only thing I missed was back in 2006 when I said the market needed to adjust, I thought it was going to adjust around twenty percent.  I missed that one bad.  In some areas the adjustment is 40%.  Here’s something I didn’t miss:  the inventory has dried up.  Yep, there’s nothing out there.  My broker had 50 offers on a ricky ticky piece of junk.  I hated the house.  Split level, laminate flooring throughout, 1970’s kitchen, smelled bad, I hated going in to the thing.  Other agents formed a conga line out the door on this one.  No, it wasn’t the worst house in a great neighborhood.  It wasn’t the lowly ugly duckling in the preferred school district.  As a matter of fact, most people leave that neighborhood if they want their children to go to decent schools.  It was the last kid left to be picked for dodgeball.  I didn’t show the thing once.  And I’ll be glad when it’s gone.  Fifty offers.

I did a BPO on a property up the road last week.  Within a one mile radius there were 22 homes for sale.  Of the 22, one was REO, 2 were regular sales and 19 were short sales.  What’s the message?  Banks aren’t taking them back as quickly and they aren’t dumping them on the market like they did last year.  They finally figured out that flooding the market was a self defeating proposal.  The problem is other agents aren’t conveying this information to their clients.  They’re doing exactly what they’ve always been doing, selling.  Wrong.

I met a guy yesterday who wanted to see one of our listings.  A very nice young man who hasn’t really settled on an agent, he’s just bouncing around.  Thirteen different agents have written on thirteen different properties for him.  He said to me, I just want to get a house and be done with this.  I told him I could get him the house, but did he want to over pay for the house?  He didn’t.  I explained the market to him and told him that I spend a lot of time knowing what real estate is worth.  If he was going to overpay with me, he was going to do it completely informed.  But I preferred he didn’t and was just patient with the process.  What?  So I don’t get a sale today.  Big deal.  Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  It’s about paying what makes sense for the client’s personal situation, the home and the neighborhood.  The fundamentals never change.  It’s about a client for life.  I don’t want to sell just this guy’s starter home, I want to sell him his move up home when he meets the right girl.  I want to sell him his next move up home when his family grows out of that one.  And if I’m still alive and in business, I’d sell him his downsized retirement house.  Along the way, I’ll help his friends out too, his brother, his Mom, the guy he works with, his sister in law and that’s all worth not making a sale today.  That’s all worth waiting for the house that makes the most sense for him.  That’s worth taking 15 minutes out of my day to teach him about the market.  Because the more my clients know, the better I look.