Business Week reports that lenders are stepping up their efforts to collect on deficiency judgments of mortgage defaulters. The article reports that banks are seeking deficiency judgments in both short sale and foreclosure scenarios. This stepped up approach by lenders has come as a major surprise to many who have completed a recent short sale transaction.
In the state of Florida, banks have five years to file the deficiency judgment and then 20 years to collect it. To get paid, banks can seize wages and bank accounts and also put liens on other assets.
The NY Times has an informative article about seller expectations and the consequences of listing a home for sale at an unrealistic price point. In our market, distressed properties are the baseline which are setting the pricing bar across most communities and sectors.
If you are selling in a community that has short sale or foreclosures, these distressed units will generally be the price leaders in the community. Until these distressed price leaders sell, traditional sellers should expect buyer offers to reflect pricing based on these distressed units. Getting an offer based upon distressed pricing is a bitter pill to swallow, but unfortunately is what we are dealing with right now.
Our site offers pricing information on over 600 communities in the Greater Fort Myers area. It is a great resource to stay up to date on asking prices in your community. If you are considering a sale of your property and looking for an objective opinion of value, please drop us a quick note.
If there is a silver lining in the SW Florida real estate bust, it is that I no longer get stacks of low-ball mail solicitations for vacant lots that I own in Cape Coral.
Today, a different sort of Cape Coral vacant lot solicitation was sitting in my mailbox. It was an offer from the Cape Coral Lot Owners Association to become a member. According to the letter, up-to-date lot sales information is the major value proposition of membership.
The irony of this value proposition for me is that this information is available for free from multiple different sources. Most Realtors will provide sales comp information at no charge. The Listingbook Service offered for free by Realtors will even allow you to get real-time notification of new listings or sales and not have to wait for a report. Also, the Lee County Property Appraisers site, www.leepa.org has a free report generator that can provde on-demand reports of vacant land sales by municipality or zip code.
With plethora of information currently available on the Internet for free, I am not going to part with $45 to join this association. I think that the model of charging for information that is readily available for free on the web has passed.
Market stats recently released by the Greater Fort Myers and the Beach MLS substantiate what we are seeing in the trenches. Sales in December 2008 were up a whopping 181 percent over December 2007. In December, 1,034 homes sold, up from 367 a year ago.
Buyers are back in a big way and the market is screaming right now. Even though we are just 1/2 way through the month, we have had more closings in the last 2 weeks than any month in the last 3 years. The market is being driven by foreclosure and short sale listings and distressed property is dominating the Southwest Florida market right now. Banks are generally setting prices for below “regular” listings, which is leading to quick sales for REO properties.
The true challenge in this market is the uphill battle faced by good old regular sellers trying to market a home in this environment. If you own a piece of Southwest Florida property and don’t absolutely have to sell, now is a good time to be on the sidelines.
A recent Washington Post article titled, Working Harder For Every Sale, chronicles several Realtors going the extra mile to sell a clients home. I applaud the creativity and initiative put forth by these excelling realtors.
Recent statistics from the National Association of Realtors suggest that 82% of all real estate purchases begin on-line. If you have a home to sell, one of the best ways to narrow the field in selecting a listing Realtor is to Google your subdivision or neighborhood name + the term “real estate.” The firms listed in this Google search result are the true players focused on your community in the on-line world.
Picking a Realtor with a truly dominent web position is the best decision that you can make for getting a home sold in this challenging market.
The Washington Post discusses the rapidly growing importance of web 2.0 practices in the real estate industry. Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as:
a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networkingsites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.
The Southwest Florida real estate market has definitely been effected by Web 2.0 practices. When I started this blog back in 2004, it was one of the first in the area to discuss the real estate market. More often than not, I was asked “why would you want to blog about real estate?” Today there are hundreds of Realtor blogs covering the Southwest Florida market.
Two of the more popular and widely trafficked Web 2.0 real estate sites are Active Rain and Trulia Voices. Active Rain is a community of real estate professionals who blog, chat and interact on the site. Realtors flock to Active Rain as their blog posts on this site often rank strongly on the search engines. Trulia is also popular with Realtors who answer customer questions in a bulletin board fashion.
Another Web 2.0 practice popular in the market are web sites dedicated to a specific property. Both Realtors and FSBO sellers are building dedicated web sites to promote specific properties. This site, focused on a Cape Coral home, is an example of a FSBO seller who created a website dedicated to marketing a single property.
Who wants to ride around town for two days with a realtor and look at properties that don’t meet your needs, but are “on the tour.” Customed IDX MLS search portals like the one on our Greater Fort Myers Real Estate site are empowering prospective home buyers to seize control of the search process and narrow their focus. I am truly amazed at the number of listings that are saved and forwarded every day by users of our site. Truly, self-service Web 2.0 real estate is a big step in the right direction for the real estate industry, which has historically been rather technologically challenged.
Great column by Chris Griffiths in the Naples News for home sellers about inspecting your MLS listing. Making a few key changes to the listing information can greatly improve your house’s chances of selling.
A stale, incomplete or inaccurate listing in the MLS system truly hurts your chances of sucess. Poor MLS listing photos, which are common on our market, are also a downer as chronicled in this video.
Key takeaways from the column:
Price your house based on current transaction activity, not what happened last year
Make sure your listing has multiple high-quality photos, a single poor quality photo doesn’t cut it
Have your agent add key attachments to the listing like disclosures, addendums, floor plans and condo docs
If you know your MLS number, you can review a summary of your Greater Fort Myers and the Beach MLS listing on our sister site.
If you think Feng Shui is a steamed dumpling then you better keep reading the rest of this post. Staging a home prior to putting it on the market is definitely the rage throughout the real estate community.
Locally, many sellers of luxury and high-end properties have dipped their toe into the home staging waters. In a recent tour of luxury homes for sale in Fort Myers waterfront communities, the lion’s share of homes priced over $1m were staged to some degree. Staging isn’t just for luxury homes, it can prove very beneficial in marketing homes across all price ranges.
Congratulations to our very own hometown stager, Kathleen Garvey of Enhanced Interiors & Home Staging. Kathleen won the first ever Stager Idol Competition, which was sponsored by the Real Estate Staging Association. Way to go Kathleen!
New site for selling pre-construction A day in the SW Florida real estate trenches rarely passes without speaking with someone that has made a deposit on a pre-construction condo. The conversation usually goes something like this:
client: Hey Mark, Whatdoya think about (fill in blank with project name), I bought a condo there?
me: what are your plans, are you going to live there? rent it out or flip it?
client: I am going to sell it or if it doesn’t sell at a profit rent it out…. (no one ever seems to live in these places)
Since the days of flipping these properties at a serious premium are over, what is the best course of action? While each scenario is different, a new site Sell Your Pre-construction.com provides an outlet for investors to market pre-construction investments directly to consumers. The site charges property sellers a flat $199.99 to advertise a property. What a great idea, I wish I had thought of this!
In a long overdue move, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has launched a blog titled NAR in the News, to discuss how the media covers the nation’s largest trade association. The blog will be produced by the NAR Public Affairs Division.
The NAR has lately been routinely hammered in both the mainstream media as well as by many bloggers. NAR in the News will provide this organization with a vehicle for shaping the real estate news. I do think that the general media has been most helpful in forcing the NAR experts to back-off some of their more optimistic opinions of late. Chief Economist David Lereah has really toned down his optimism in recent presentations.
I am most interested in the coverage of the ongoing battle between technologists and the NAR over the closed nature of our industry’s MLS infrastructure. At some point this issue will become the holy grail of the real estate industry as third parties use technology to pierce this wall.
With the sheer number of real estate professionals operating in the area, selecting one is like a box of chocolates, You never know what you’re gonna get. It is important to honestly evaluate the merits of utilizing the convenient neighbor, relative or fellow church member to represent you in this important transaction.
CNN/Money has an informative article that provides five tips for picking the right real estate agent. The five tips covered are:
Real-time self-service property valuations just got a little easier for web-savvy home owners. Zillow, a web-based property valuation tool, launched today.
The service, described as a Kelly Blue Book for homes, provides an estimated value of a home utilizing information culled from county tax records. An especially useful feature allows the homeowner to adjust the value based upon the amenities of a particular home.
Zillow is well positioned with $32M in venture funding and is led by the founder of travel site Expedia. Zillow is free for the user and expects to generate revenue from location specific advertising sales.
While I am excited about any tool that empowers the real estate consumer, I do believe that a service wholly dependent on county tax records will have a time lag associated with the information. Here in SW Florida, I have seen delays ranging from one to three months between the time when a transaction closes and when the county database is updated to reflect the transaction. I find MLS databases to be a better source for current sales information.
How many resale homes have you visited where every wall is painted builder white and clutter dominates every available horizontal surface?
An emerging trend in selling a home is the process of staging property prior to putting it on the market. Thank you to Brand Noise for this piece on home staging.
Home staging is the hot new trend in the real estate market. Before a house is put up for sale, a professional home stager prepares the home by performing a complete home makeover, designed to sell a home faster and for top dollar.
While homes at the high-end of the market are to some extent stages here in SW Florida, this trend has not yet caught on in the more moderate price range. As the market continues to favor buyers, expect staging to be the rage in ’06.
Fascinating story from the America’s heartland about a real estate revolution. Two cousins in Madison Wisconsin with a rudimentary web site now control 20% of the residential re-sale market.
The site FSBOMadison.com, allows homeowners to advertise their home for a one-time fee of $150. The fee includes a listing on the site and a yard sign installed by one of the cousin’s former gym teachers.
Professional redecorating to accelerate sale Real estate agent Charlotte Hedge tried for six months to sell the 1920s waterfront sea captain’s house. Narrow hallways and small rooms made it difficult, because “people couldn’t visualize what to put in these nooks and crannies and little rooms,” she says. So Hedge tried a hot new marketing tool: She had the house professionally staged with new furnishings and accessories. The result? “It sold within a week,” she says.
A press release from issued today by Lead Lease caught my eye, Internet Entrepreneurs Will Take Control of the Real Estate Industry. While I don’t think much of the expensive hosting services offered by Lead Lease, I couldn’t agree more with the headline that technological innovators are sure to significantly impact the real estate industry.
The comment in the press release about Realtor branding is pretty interesting. Hoards of Realtors have built websites that create themselves as the brand. The only problem is that home buyers doing a search don’t care about a branded Realtor, they are interested in communities and amenities.
The site Trulia is going to make a big impact on how buyers locate potential properties. With its impending success, others are sure to follow. Although it has not yet made much of an impact in SW Florida, Craigs List is playing a significant role in real estate advertising across several major markets including San Francisco, Boston & New York.
After spending the majority of my career in the technology sector, I am continually amazed at the lack of technical innovation in the real estate industry. Simple automation tools that are taken for granted in corporate America like desktop faxing and data sharing between systems are nearly non-existent in the world of real estate. I often ponder this industry’s complete dependence on faxes and the number of faxes required to complete a transaction.
I am considering a number of tools to link buyers and sellers and facilitate transactions, sure beats complaining about the ongoing pain of entering listings into two MLS systems here in SW Florida because our local boards don’t communicate very well.
Harold Bubil of the Herald-Tribune comments on seller greed in his recent column.
Economist and Sarasota resident John Tucillo puts it bluntly.”Sellers are always the last to know” when the market has turned, says the former chief economist of the National Association of Realtors.
“In many markets across the country, listings are up,” Tucillo writes via e-mail. “Prices have risen to the point where some buyers are discouraged; the rent-vs.-buy calculation is convincing others to move from ownership to tenancy; and sellers are getting greedy (either rushing into the market to beat the slowdown, or overpricing their homes).
As market forces begin to favor buyers, sellers need to modify their decision making to be aligned with current market conditions. This is going to be a difficult process for many in SW Florida that have grown accustomed to quarterly double digit appreciation rates.
Check out Trulia.com, a site dedicated to real estate search. This site developed by some smart Stanford grads, represents the next generation real estate experience. Trulia appears to me to be what the off-spring of a marriage between Google and Realtor.com would look like.
The truly fascinating aspect of Trulia is that it uses data obtained from individual agent and broker sites, bypassing the strong arm of the multiple listing services. I believe that technology like spiders, RSS and GIS mapping utilized by Trulia will be more effective at creating MLS competition than any government lawsuit or legislation.
You heard it here, there is a whole wave of Trulia optimization coming to the real estate industry. Realtors will soon become very focused on optimizing their site and listings to be friendly to the Trulia web spider.
While operational now in California, Trulia plans a national launch. This one feels like a winner to me.
