Posts by "Elizabeth Newlin" http://www.elizabethnewlin.com/ Realtor. Mom. Foodie. Blogger. Dancer. Wino. Kidder. Not in that order. Read more of my real estate stories and experiences at www.RealEstateTangent.com. Or don't. I don't care; it won't hurt my feelings. No, those aren't tears, I'm chopping onions, shut up!

Image courtesy of Flickr user kretyen

I read an article the other day on Inman with predictions for 2011. It’s a bunch of different agents from all over the country predicting what will happen with the market in the next year. You should totally go read it. Unless you don’t want to awake in the middle of the night screaming and drenched in sweat sobbing over and over again, ‘The market will NEVER stabilize. The horror, the horror!’ Then you might want to avoid it.

Actually, don’t even bother reading it. I will summarize it for you:

Susie Sunshine, from Rainbow Realty in Kansas, predicts the market will gradually get better this coming year. She thinks prices will go up a little bit and interest rates will stay low. Buyers will start to see that this is a great time to invest in real estate again. This is the year for the normalization of the market. She’s been saying this the last three years. She’s also heavily medicated on mood-stabilizing drugs.

Debbie Downer, with Cutthroat Condos in Nevada, says the market is headed for a double dip. She says if you made it through 2010, you will absolutely totally fail in 2011. She says the banks will foreclose on everything that’s even a month behind on payment and then sell the properties even further below market value, swirling prices down the toilet. Sure, there will be lots of bank listings, but you’re not an REO agent. And yes, some investors will buy properties, but you don’t have any investor clients. She predicts you’ll go totally bankrupt in 2011. She’s hoping to scare all of the other agents out of the market so that she can scoop up their business in 2011. Debbie’s a ‘Mean Girl.’

John Smith, an Everyman Properties agent from Michigan, is too busy rocking and weeping in the corner to respond to the survey. He lost his own home to foreclosure this year. He didn’t close a single deal from March through September. He has PTSD from hearing hard-luck stories from clients who can’t pay their mortgages. He is deaf in one ear from beating his own phone against his head after a particularly frustrating call with a short sale negotiator from Bank of America. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the next year, but he does know that he can’t get a job doing anything else. He’s been in real estate for 15 years and has no other marketable skills. And even if he did, there aren’t any jobs out there anyway. Please just hand him a beer or five and walk away quietly.

Basically, what I took away from the article (besides the desire to binge drink) was that no one knows anything. 90% of these people will end up being wrong, and the 10% who are anywhere close to right will be so out of luck.

Thus, I present to you my predictions for 2011:

• Short sale negotiators will be incompetent dillweeds wearing red tape like a prom dress.
• Buyers will want to purchase properties 20% under list price without questioning how it correlates to market value.
• Sellers will want $30K more than their neighbor sold his house for a week ago because they have the ‘tasteful granite’ and upgraded to a window seat option in the master when they built the house 30 years ago.
• Lenders will promise docs have been emailed to title and then 5 minutes later admit the file is still in underwriting.
• Title people will not set up the signing until they receive the docs even if you beg and bribe them.
• You will encounter at least one dead creature while showing property.
• There will be one house you will run out of covering your mouth and nose because you just can’t take the stench any longer.
• You will show at least one home that makes you wistfully wonder if you could afford to buy it if you just moved some money around and called that one lender who can work miracles.
• You will help at least one family buy a home you feel like is the very perfect thing for them now. The night after it closes, you will sleep like a baby.
• You will help at least one seller successfully short sell his house so that he can begin to rebuild his finances and move on to a brighter future.
• You will never, NEVER, be bored.

Posts by "Elizabeth Newlin" http://www.elizabethnewlin.com/ Realtor. Mom. Foodie. Blogger. Dancer. Wino. Kidder. Not in that order. Read more of my real estate stories and experiences at www.RealEstateTangent.com. Or don't. I don't care; it won't hurt my feelings. No, those aren't tears, I'm chopping onions, shut up!

Image courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver_2000

Being a real estate agent is totally screwing with my social life, again. It’s not enough that I unfailingly have to show houses at noon on Mother’s Day when I should, by all standards of decency, be three mimosas in (that’s simple motherhood math: I have three children, so it’s totally socially acceptable to have three mimosas or bloody marys, whichever I prefer, before noon on Mother’s Day) or at 4:00pm on Superbowl Sunday when I should be munching myself into a pre-awesome-commercials nacho cheese coma. No, I also have developed a weird inability to decipher the social norms of appropriate arrival times.

As an agent, I’m hyper-aware of the time on the clock at all moments of the day. I think of the day (and well, let’s be honest, my life) as a giant scheduling puzzle. Every day I look at my calendar and my to-do list, and I fit the pieces together. I have a listing appointment at 9:00am in Maricopa and then 3 houses to show at 11:30am in Chandler. At 5:30pm, I have a final walk-through to do in Gilbert. In and around these, I have a 50-minute commute to Maricopa and then another 25 back in to Chandler and from there 30 back to my house. I have to have the children to the bus stop and dropped at school at 7:18 am and 7:32 am and then picked back up at 2:30 pm and 2:40 pm. Then I have another 30-minute drive to Gilbert and 30 minutes back. During any free time existing between fixed-time appointments, I must turn in a new listing contract and upload photos, plan my blog for the next day, return client emails and phone calls, request feedback on shown listings, make sure children do homework and prepare dinner. In order to make this all happen, at every minute of the day I’m checking the clock and recalibrating my timeframe.

Each activity has its own uncontrolled variables. Some days the bus is late. (Some days, it just doesn’t come. Not that I’m bitter about that. It totally wasn’t me who slashed the octogenarian bus driver lady’s tires on her personal vehicle Monday afternoon and you can’t prove a thing.) And then I’m late to drop off child number two, making the 9:00am appointment in Maricopa tricky to pull off. If it looks like I’m going to be more than five minutes late, I’m on the phone, calling to warn that client I’m running a touch late. We all know the fastest way to lose a client is to make them feel like they’re not your most important client. How does your lateness make them feel? Like proper hygiene to a 12-year-old boy: unimportant. It also makes them feel like telling you to take your commission agreement, fold it five times and cut little triangles out of the edges so that it looks like a pretty snowflake. Because it’s as good as a snowflake in the desert. I know I’ve learned this lesson the hard way more than a time or two. I’d much rather lose a client because she Googled me, read my writing and thinks I’m a little snarky for her taste than for tardiness. At least snarkiness is something I have no control over. (I was born this way. It’s in my DNA.) There’s no excuse for tardiness.

So over the years, I’ve developed an almost sixth sense about time. I can feel in my split-ends when I’m sliding from the comfortably on-schedule zone into the red zone of potential lateness. I start to get sweaty in that extra-smelly, cold, nervous way. (Shut up! I’m not the only one with smelly nervous sweat, I know. It’s a medical condition. Stop making fun of me.) My foot gets heavy on the gas pedal, and my eyes uncontrollably twitch toward the clock every three seconds. When it’s an especially important meeting (a first-time showing or a high-dollar buyer), I inevitably have to pee as soon as I edge into the red zone. Excessive earliness makes me almost as tense. When traffic is unusually light or my previous appointments ran short, I often park three streets away from where I’m meeting a client and squeeze my eyes shut in the hopes they won’t drive by and see me waiting out the clock on our appointment time. That would probably be embarrassing.

This physical need to be smack dab on time (I like to be opening my car and placing my left foot on the pavement when the clock in my car blinks over to the agreed-upon meeting time) has become so ingrained over the last five years I’ve been in real estate, it has begun to make me forget that in real life, sometimes the goal is not to show up the very minute an event is slated to begin. Parties, for example, generally aren’t meant to be attended within 30 seconds of the time printed on the invite. I’ve shown up to more than one in the last couple of years only to find the hostess removing food from the oven with curlers in her hair, shocked my promptness. I showed up at 1:58pm to a 2:00pm bridal shower a few weeks ago only to find not a single car parked anywhere near the house I was aiming for. I hid in a nearby Old Navy until 2:10pm, and there were three other people in attendance. It goes the other way too. You have to be 20 minutes early to movies, apparently. Being at the door at 7:50pm for the 7:50 movie assures you a seat in the front row or no ticket at all. Who knew? The same principle applies to weddings. If it starts at 5:00pm and you’re not in attendance by 4:45pm, you run the risk of walking the bride down the aisle. (Which is super humiliating and I do not recommend it. I think that one bride was just extra crabby because I looked prettier than she did, but it was still a poor showing on my part.)

You know, the more I think about it, though, I really think the problem is not with me. I think my promptness makes a lot more sense than all of these fake, built-in times. We Realtors strive to arrive when we say we will (sure, we’re known for being late, but that’s really not our fault). Party planners and wedding invitation makers should take a cue from us and just tell us all what time they really want us to walk in the door. I should be 20 minutes late for maximum fashionableness? Why don’t you just include an arrival time chart on the invite so I know:

6:55-7:05 pm = Losers and Creeps (or REALTORS®)

7:06-7:15 pm = Lame at Best

7:16-8:15 pm = Acceptably Chic

8:16-10 pm = Too Cool to Care If They Miss Anything Fun

That would really make my life easier. Please? Join me, fellow agents, in this cause. It’s not just me, right?

Posts by "Elizabeth Newlin" http://www.elizabethnewlin.com/ Realtor. Mom. Foodie. Blogger. Dancer. Wino. Kidder. Not in that order. Read more of my real estate stories and experiences at www.RealEstateTangent.com. Or don't. I don't care; it won't hurt my feelings. No, those aren't tears, I'm chopping onions, shut up!

Image courtesy of Flickr user kvanhorn

A – Appraisals aren’t the black-and-white system of valuation I thought they were before I got into real estate. And they can kill a deal faster than you can indignantly shout, “But that comp backs to a major road!”

B – Basements are like four-leaf clovers here in Arizona: almost impossible to find, and even when you do, not as great and exciting as you thought it was going to be.

C – Commission checks with small numbers are sometimes more satisfying than the illusive five-digit ones. Collecting a check for that short sale you spent a year crow-barring through the system can make the measly $1500 you take home feel a bit inflated.

D – DocuSign has saved my life. If I had to actually sit down with one particular client every time in the last 18 months he wanted to write an offer on a short sale he was going to eventually cancel on (23 offers, people!), I would have FUDed him a year ago. Luckily, we DocuSigned all but the first one, and now we’re finally closing on a property.

E – Empathy goes a really long way when things start to get rocky. Most people just want to feel like someone understands what they are going through and that their emotions are legitimate. A little bit of empathy can usually calm the most irate client.

F – Flats are vital. High heels are for hookers and real estate agents in the movies, not actual agents who have to troop through the rocks on the side of each and every house they show to get the lockbox open. Nicely sculpted calves are not worth landing on my butt in the spider-webby weeds around the hosebib.

G – Granola bars in the glove box. These have saved me from swooning face first into a murky green pool many a long showing day.

H – Health insurance was a luxury I should have appreciated more when I was working the corporate 9 to 5.

I – Insanity generally runs along a genetic line. So if you’ve encountered it in someone, expect to find it in her brother when he’s referred to you.

J – Juggling is not a circus act. It’s a survival technique.

K – Kindness begets kindness. That pushy lady on the PTA could be your next client if you play your cards right. Probably best not to slash her tires after the meeting because she shut down your proposal for a cotton candy booth at the fall festival.

L – Land-leases are totally asinine. Stay far, far away from them.

M – Money can fix a lot of things about a property, but far from everything. Money can’t make a house not back to a busy road, make a backyard big enough to put in a pool or raise low ceilings in a two-story house.

N – Never calculate your paycheck before the house has closed. Doing so will only cause the deal to fail in new and spectacular ways. Chickens are best left uncounted.

O – Open houses account for not even 5% of what I actually do–contrary to my impression of what real estate agents do before I became one.

P – Price is king. You can’t get away from it. Any properly priced property will eventually sell. It’s determining the proper price that’s the tough part.

Q – Quality wins against quantity in any circumstance: houses, clients, square footage. (Well, except for wine. But that goes unsaid, right?)

R – Restroom breaks in vacant houses are a bad idea. It’s best to wait for the next occupied house where you can be sure to find running water and toilet paper. (Yes, I’ve learned this one the hard way. Shut up.)

S – Sewage smell. No, nothing died in here; the water hasn’t been run because it’s vacant, so the sewage traps dried out and you now smell the sewer. Doesn’t it make you grateful for the convenience of modern plumbing?

T – Termites. They’re the only thing that can kill a deal faster than a bad appraisal. And unfortunately, no property is immune to the creepy little tunnel-building creatures.

U – Unicorns are more common than buyers who you’ve met on the internet who are coming into town for one day and will actually buy a house like they are promising. You will give them a free tour of the valley from Surprise to Queen Creek and never hear from them again.

V – Vacations breed deals. Schedule a vacation, and you will be immediately inundated with work that cannot wait. It can’t be a fake vacation, though; that doesn’t work. It has to be one you put a huge deposit down on and can’t cancel.

W – Wine cures all ills. (I was going to use W for water in copious amounts during showings, but who are we kidding? Wine is more important to my sanity.)

X – Xanax. What wine can’t cure, it will. (Negotiating real estate is not for the faint of heart.)

Y – Yard size is totally relative. A buyer in from Wyoming is bound to be horrified. One in from New York will be thrilled.

Z – Zillow sucks the big toe of a jolly green giant. And yet the general public will always believe what the computer-generated algorithm thinks a house is worth over the agent they hired. This will remain one of the great mysteries of real estate.

Posts by "Elizabeth Newlin" http://www.elizabethnewlin.com/ Realtor. Mom. Foodie. Blogger. Dancer. Wino. Kidder. Not in that order. Read more of my real estate stories and experiences at www.RealEstateTangent.com. Or don't. I don't care; it won't hurt my feelings. No, those aren't tears, I'm chopping onions, shut up!

I have a REALTOR® friend who fired a client a couple of days ago. It was a decision she’d agonized over and come to the precipice of doing several times over the last few months, but for one reason or another, just hadn’t yet. He was a “buyer” (yep, I put that word in quotes because he was one of those no-sense-of-urgency-buyers who is waiting for the right property to come along, AKA: Mr. Nothing Better to Do than Look at Property on the Weekend), and she’d been showing him property for the last year and a half. He had made several offers but hadn’t ever gone under contract because his offers were all laughably low. He was one of those guys who couldn’t be convinced that he was wasting his (and his agent’s) time with an offer $15K under asking when the property already had four offers on it, one of which was full-price and cash. In any other situation, people who can’t follow clear logic and make sense of an obvious foregone conclusion are “crazy.” In real estate, they are “deal hunters” and “bargain shoppers.”

I know that firing clients is part of any savvy agent’s arsenal. Not every REALTOR® can help every buyer or every seller. Sometimes a client is beyond help and sometimes he is looking to take advantage of his agent. Knowing this doesn’t make the act any easier. For me, the pain of firing a client is two-fold.

To begin with, the agony of letting a potential paycheck walk out the door hurts me in my most sensitive and delicate region: my wallet. I work hard and spend money to obtain new clients (not to mention all the general begging and calling in of favors I do to my friends and family to get them to refer me). Which all makes telling a client I already have to take a hike feel counter-intuitive, to say the least. Not to mention, of course, the (usually considerable) time and money I’ve already invested in this client for which I will never reap any benefit or even break even on if I let them go now. In a business where nothing comes easy or free, it’s hard to know when to cut your losses.

My conscience takes the remainder of the blow. I cannot help but feel responsible for carrying out the wants and desires of my clients, no matter how ridiculous and unachievable they are. “So you want a house with a unicorn farm out back, beach access, diamond-encrusted countertops in the kitchen and within a 20 minute drive of your office in Scottsdale, for under $125,000; is that right? I’ll get right on it!” And that family of six currently living in a three-bedroom, 1200-square-foot house in Maricopa who needs to switch it for something five bedrooms and in Chandler for exactly the same price really NEEDS my help. I have to be able to make something work for them, right?

But the point is: a client-firing is often in order. I know I have better things to do with my time and gas than shuttle around someone who will likely never make me a penny in commission. My agent friend who did it the other day came up with the perfect recipe for firing success, in my opinion: Facts, Ultimatum, Departure (or FUD, if you prefer, as in, “I’ve got to go FUD a client. I’ll call you after to autopsy the sitch.” But maybe that’s just us). Here’s how it works:

• Facts – In the first step, you present the results of what you’ve already been through together as REALTOR® and client. Example: Bill, over the last eight months, I’ve shown you 352 houses, and you’ve never made an offer. We’ve looked in Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe, Avondale, Casa Grande, Queen Creek and Anthem. You’ve seen fixer-upers, move-in readies, single levels, two stories, condos; nothing was exactly right.
• Ultimatum – During the second step you present the client with an outcome you can live with and ask them for a guarantee of this scenario. Example: “I can only continue showing you property if you can guarantee me that we will see 10 more houses next weekend and make an offer within 97% of the asking price (as that is what the average house is going for at this time in the market) on one of them. Do you see that happening?”
• Departure – This is where you make your grand, but amicable exit. Example: “Since you don’t think that what I need out of our relationship is a possibility, I feel we need to part ways. I wish you good luck in your future ventures!” (At this point, it’s fine to think, “I hope the next agent you sucker into showing you houses eight hours a week for the foreseeable future has the good sense to get rid of you sooner than I did!” But generally speaking, it’s more graceful not to actually speak them aloud and slam down the phone.)

When done correctly, the firing of a client should be a relief that you’re only gladder you did with each passing day. A FUD done right is a beautiful thing.