Real Estate, Really

I received a call from an out-of-area realtor mid-morning. The phone connection was broken and static, but his enthusiasm was real: "I have a really good offer on your listing!" he said. "I will send it over now." "Fantastic!" I replied. "I will take a look at it and get back to you with any questions or concerns." I paused to ask the question I always do: "Are your clients pre-approved for a loan or will they be paying cash for the home?" "No. A loan. They are pre-approved, and I will send the information with the offer." "Sounds good." Then we hung up. A while later I received the offer. Only it had the wrong date on the purchase agreement...one from weeks earlier. What I knew by this was the offer form he used to write up on my listing had probably been used several times before and the information changed. He'd just forgotten to look at the date. So, I called him and asked him to please redo the offe...

When acquaintances contacted me to let me know they were relocating back to California, I was happy to help them find a home to purchase. Preliminarily, I knew they had a foreclosure a little over two years before. They'd purchased the loan with an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage), which means they had a locked in low interest rate for the first couple of years, but then the rate went up according to the fluctuating federal rates. Their house payment rose so high it became difficult to make the payments.Their two years out from foreclosure is typically not quite enough time for many banks to loan again--three to five years is normal. They had been informed by well meaning banking friends to just stop making payments on their property. This is never really the smart thing if you want to keep your credit score anywhere near above water. So, in this case, they'd just walked away from their home. They didn't have a banker or loan broker working with them and asked if I would rec...

One of the stipulations on the offer that came into me from the realtor making it on my listing was a sixty day escrow. The loan officer from the out of state bank the buyers were using said he needed that much time for processing. It seemed odd to me because I'd looked over the financials presented to me at the time of the offer and the buyers looked really solid. My clients were relocating and were amenable to accepting the offer, so we did. I had the name and phone number of the lender after he reached out to me the first week of escrow. He was aggressive and chatty. I asked him at the time why he needed so much time for their loan. "We have gobs of loans to process right now," he replied. "A bit of a backlog."  Hmmm.  As you can imagine, not much happened the first couple of weeks in terms of moving the purchase forward. It's my responsibility as the listing realtor to check in with what is going on; it's the responsibility of the buyer realtor to...

The remarks in the MLS listing sheet said: 24 hour notice to show. No lockbox. Can only be shown on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 11-6. Cash only considered. Bring your pickiest buyers.  The commission to the buyer's agent was 2%, which is less than the normal 2.5-3% offered. There is only one picture of the property online taken of the front of the home with a cell phone camera. My clients want to see this home because it's in a neighborhood they love. My guess is the seller and their realtor know this is a sought after community with good schools and freeway accessibility so they phoned in the terms. Remove all obstacles in your way Here's the thing with terms: the more restrictions there are to showing and purchasing the home, the fewer interested buyers there will be. In this online information era, buyers look to the internet websites like Realtor.com or Zillow to preview homes they'd like to see. If there is only one picture, and it's substandard...

When my client and I walked through the vacant property in Long Beach, we were impressed by the natural light that filled the kitchen and were delighted by the quaint layout of the older home. My client really wanted to purchase one of the cottage homes so prevalent in downtown Long Beach, and this one was very cute but off a fairly busy main thoroughfare, and it was vacant. The windows were nailed shut--couldn't be raise--and there were double locks on the front door. We meandered toward the outside, and as we walked down the back steps, we noticed some damp clothing hanging off the railing. Hmm. We also noticed the door into the garage was open. Not knowing exactly what we'd find, we tiptoed through the door to discover a homeless shelter had been created in that space. There was a wine bottle languishing half full on a dirty blanket, some orange peels, a couple of empty cans and a candle sitting lopsided from having melted unevenly. More woman's clothing was strewn arou...

At some point in time, every realtor will have clients who want to make sure the Feng Shui in their home meets their Fung Shui birth elements. Feng Shui (pronounced Fung Shway) means Wind-Water. It's a Chinese science that is important to many people in the creation of balance and harmony in their living spaces. The belief is that our ch'i, or life force, flows in a way that produces personal prosperity and health. There are five elements of Feng Shui: wood, earth, fire, water and metal. Good Feng Shui is called sheng ch'i and bad Feng Shui is called sha ch'i. Feng Shui provides the way to manage and predict ch'i in our lives. Ch'i shouldn't flow too slowly or too quickly into our lives. Therefore, there's a need to balance it. Feng Shui is person specific depending upon birth date, so often clients will have differing needs when it comes to the home address (numbers involved) or even the direction the home is facing, as there are good directions and ...

SPOILER ALERT : A heartbreaking story for realtors reading this blog entry. They came into an open house on a Sunday afternoon excited about finding a new place for the both of them to start over. They were single in their mid-50's and engaged to be married in a few months. The three of us spent over an hour talking about what exactly they wanted to find, where they wanted to be in the community and a timeline for purchasing. At the time, each lived in a home they would need to sell in order to buy the new one. By the time they were ready to leave, I had become their realtor of choice and we'd come up with a game plan for looking at homes and discovering the resale value of the homes they needed to sell. In the ensuing weeks, I took my new clients on many home shopping excursions. As a rule, they spent at least thirty minutes to an hour walking a home and talking about its possibilities. They were serious about finding just what they wanted. Between our trips to look at ho...