Selling a home can be a challenging endeavor right now in Southwest Florida.  With an MLS chocked full of foreclosures and short sale listings, regular sellers are under constant pricing pressure each and every day.  A recent Chicago Tribune article titled, Stressing the positive in selling a home, or just plain stressing, offers a humorous look at the struggles of a recent home seller.

If you are selling your Fort Myers home right now, hopefully you have aligned yourself with a web-savy Realtor who can get extensive on-line coverage of your home.  Google your neighborhood, is your Realtor showing up on the first page of results?  If not, then it is time to use someone who is.  These are the companies selling in your community right now.  It just makes sense to partner with someone who is bringing the most buyers into the community.

Hopefully your Realtor partner has been frank and upfront about the true value of your home and set realistic pricing expectations at the get go.  In today’s market, it is a complete waste of everyone’s time to market an over-priced home.  Successful real estate professionals don’t bother with over-priced listings.  You want one of these individuals representing you, not the one who will say or do anything just to get the listing.

If your home is on the market and you are feeling blue, here is a highly-rated book that will provide some insight into the looking at the transaction from the buyers point of view:

See larger image Home Seller's Blues And How To Beat Them (Paperback) By (author) Joan Gale Frank List Price: $14.95 USD New From: $14.95 In Stock Used from: $13.05 In Stock

Buyers are slashing and burning their way through our current inventory, many of which are distressed homes.  Most have so many choices that logic is outweighing emotion in the current market.  Buyers are not falling in love with a property, but rather are falling in love with the hunt and the ultimate killer deal.

Over-priced homes are being completely ignored by our current pool of buyers.  While we mainly represent buyers, we do get inquiries from sellers about listing their property.  We will not accept a listing where the seller has unrealistic expectations about price.  We prefer to let some other firm spin their wheels dealing with that scenario.

A family trying to sell their home in Gateway for a job relocation is representative of the challenges faced by traditional sellers.  This family went well beyond the call of duty in marketing their home.  They made a very attractive blog about the property, got an article about the house printed in the Naples Daily News……but haven’t been able to sell the property. Why hasn’t this creatively market home sold since it was listed in mid-May? One word…..PRICE.  The asking price of this home is 279,900 or $123/SF.  Since this home was listed, 16 four bedroom homes with pools in Gateway have sold.  The average sale price of these 16 closed homes was $82/SF.    The bottom line on this home is that today’s buyers are ignoring homes like this priced at a 50% premium over comparable homes in the community……Sure glad it wasn’t our firm spinning our wheels for four months on this listing.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RLqLx1iYI

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-networking sites, 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.

Making Connections [Washington Post]

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.

Sprucing up your home’s MLS report a good idea [Naples News]

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:

1. Gauge your need
2. Where to find ‘em
3. What you deserve
4. Be wooed
5. Watch for red flags

Finding a good real estate broker [CNN/Money]

Real-time home valuation tool launched

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.

2 Web Sites Push Further Into Services Real Estate Agents Offer [NY Times]

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.

Staging Sells Homes [Brand Noise]

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.

Owners’ Web Site Gives Realtors Run for Money [NY Times]

Stage Magic [Sarasota Magazine]

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.

Internet Entrepreneurs Will Take Control of the Real Estate Industry [Business Wire]

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.

No time for greed [Herald-Tribune]

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.

A change that has occurred in Florida real estate practice is for title companies to hold escrow funds rather than a broker. The Florida Real Estate Commission (FREC), which governs the industry, and the Florida Association of Realtors both endorse this idea.

The FREC record keeping and reporting standards are very rigorous for broker escrow accounting, so most brokers would rather the funds be kept at the third-party neutral title company. This change in practice is very positive one for the Florida consumer.

Eye on escrow funds [Palm Beach Daily News]

Surprise surprise — a recent national survey of real estate agents revealed that 39 percent of all pre-approval letters issued by Internet based lenders are faulty or invalid. Additionally, nearly 30 percent of all mortgage broker issued pre-approvals are also faulty.

As down payment percentages shrink as more buyers enter the market, the quality of offers is declining. I consistently receive offers on listings with 100 percent financing contingencies. You just have to wonder about the long-term ability of this type of buyer to actually repay a mortgage, particularly one with an upward adjusting rate.

Some ‘Preapprovals’ Aren’t Worth Ink They’re Printed With [Washington Post]

Local vacant land investor Frances Snyder has acquired over 50 lots over the last two years, netting at least $400K in the process.

She is an avid letter writer and seems to have a continually changing sob story to try and convince land owners to sell her their property. Her pitch repertoire includes: acquiring land to build a school for the disabled; she has been depressed and needs to get out of a “small, two-bedroom villa and she cared for her mother for the past five years who suffered from dementia and Parkinson’s and passed away.

If you are holding vacant property, you will habitually start getting these types of letters from investors. In Lee County, it is very easy to check the Lee County Appraisers Property Line to verify if a party looking to acquire your lot is an investor holding multiple properties. I am amazed at how often these writers of deceptive letters have an extensive portfolio of property.

Lot buyer accused of ‘sob story’ pitches land [News-Press]

A question for the ages, do I cash out of my boom inflated property and downsize or relocate to a less expensive area? The Christian Science Monitor profiles several families as they ponder this question.

Home economics: Do you cash out? [The Christian Science Monitor]

A common practice among some many Lehigh realtors is to ask the buyer to pay for the title insurance policy and sometimes other closing costs as well. I am told this custom in Lehigh dates back to the days when lots sold for almost nothing and the title insurance and closing costs significantly eroded the sellers take. I get particularly annoyed when the seller wants the buyer to pay all closing costs and also wants to dictate what firm will handle the closing. Unless the property is seriously under-priced, I avoid buying property listed with these types of arrangements.

If there is anything that I learned in my nearly 20 years in the telecommunications industry, it is that customers want bundled pricing and a service provider (or seller in the case of real estate) that is easy to do business with. Having a listing chocked full of nit charges is not a way to entice me to take a close look at or buy the property.

I do not understand why listing realtors just don’t simply raise the price of the property by the amount of the closing costs and eliminate these customer negatives in their listings. To me this just seems like a basic marketing 101 practice that would only help to sell property more expeditiously. With most vacant parcels in Lehigh selling for over $40,000, it is time to get with the program and end this silly practice. As Bob Dylan so eloquently stated, “the times they are a-changin,” it’s time to turn the page.

Several local firms and individuals are reaching out to lot owners located afar with below market and often misleading purchase offers. With the recent price escalations in Lehigh, vacant lots that were selling for $6000 two years ago are now routinely commanding over $40,000.

Many of the original buyers of Gulf American plated lots in Lehigh and Cape Coral have owned their property for over 30 years and have not kept up with the recent valuation increases in SW Florida. It is unfortunate when a long-time property owner sells their property without seeking the advice of a good real estate professional.

Savvy buyers cash in big on cheap lots [News-Press]