by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 26, 2010 | This & That
Man was not meant to live on plants alone. It’s true. For the fruit and nuts enthusiasts in our midst, I point to the presence of your canines as proof that you are doing it wrong. While your squeamish frontal lobe may prevent you from supping on our furry friends, your crocodilian brain never stops sizing up the risk/reward of skewering the neighbor’s yipping mini-pin.
Rather than shy away from that which places us atop the food chain, we here at the Scottsdale Property Shop embrace our inner predator. As a matter of fact, you need to sharpen those base instincts before entering the Real Estate market in pursuit of housing prey. Let’s augment that testosterone deficiency and get you ready for the negotiation dining table.
List your home with the Slaybaughs prior to August 1st, 2010 and you’ll receive one complimentary membership to the Endangered Species of the Month Culinary Club! That’s right, enjoy the legally frowned upon Spotted Owl Stir Fry or the Komodo Alamodo from the privacy of your own barricaded domicile! Got a hankering for a Hairy-Nosed Wombat? A craving for a California Condor? We’ve got you covered … but only until August 1st!
*Promotion limited to one membership per depraved household. Antivenom and clandestine courier fees not included. This offer is patently absurd and excluded in all 50 states, US territories and pretty much everywhere else outside of Kuala Lumpur. Winning entrants will be placed on several watch lists and subject to possible excommunication from humanity.*
Bon Appetit!
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 23, 2010 | Home Selling, Scottsdale Real Estate
I have seen my share of thumbs down houses over the years. It’s a sad truth, but for every summer blockbuster, there is a Real Estate Gigli. Properties that look so promising in the MLS trailer fall flat despite the star-studded cast. Granite counter tops, stainless steel appliances, new carpet, manicured back yard … a quick read-through of the script tells you that the home should be a smash hit. Only when you see it on the big screen do you realize that the photos omitted the faux oak paneling throughout the entire downstairs, or the sunken conversation pit in the living room. You never know where Rosemary’s Baby may be lurking behind the pleasing marketing facade that a savvy listing agent has erected to entice showings.
Enter the Real Estate sneak preview.
Knowing all too well that I am performing preliminary recon, sellers will occasionally grill me as to my intentions when I arrive for a preview appointment. As I circumnavigate the home, they give me the unabashed hairy eyeball treatment reserved for ex-cons, Realtors, bankers, lawyers and ill-mannered guests who don’t sit on the plastic. Believe it or not, though, the preview does not merely serve as an arbiter of a buyer agent’s pass/fail verdict. It is a crash course in product awareness.
To those who would disallow Realtor previews because they anticipate the reports will discourage potential buyers from viewing the home, allow me first to offer a mild rebuke, and then to assuage your fears. First, disallowing preview appointments will have the opposite than desired effect. Like the producer of straight to DVD smut who would sooner pay a personal assistant a livable wage than allow an advance screening for critics, you are telling wily Real Estate agents that the house is a total clunker if you won’t let them in for a quick peek prior to an actual buyer showing. Thou doth protest too much, Ed Wood.
Moreover, you do you and your home a disservice by limiting Realtor previews. Salesmanship requires a deft touch. It is just not that easy to sell what one hasn’t seen. When I come through with my client, you want me to focus on the features with which I became acquainted during the preview rather than blundering about blindly. Knowing what specific hot buttons light my buyer up, all parties are best served if I have direct, first-hand knowledge of such. You know, the stuff that doesn’t necessarily make it into the MLS.
Is the second bedroom close enough to the master to make a suitable nursery?
Is the kitchen open to the family room or a candidate for expansion?
Is the yard private, but not overwhelming?
Worst case scenario? The home is not a fit for my clients, and I save everyone time. Surely you don’t want any more strangers stomping around your home than absolutely necessary, especially if there is zero chance that the property will work for them. To boot, I just might remember your house as a possible fit for the next buyer I meet.
Want to sell your house? Heed the marquee:
Coming soon … to a home near you … Realtor Paul Slaybaugh!
Pretty please, let him in.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 19, 2010 | Home Selling, Scottsdale Real Estate
Oh, but that little house was turned out the day it landed on the multiple listing service! The hardwood floors all scrubbed and polished. The smell of freshly cut lawn and bougainvillea greeting new arrivals as they stepped out of Mazda Miatas and Chevy Tahoes and Ford Fusions. The windows so crystal clear that the rogue speck of dirt eventually capitulated and moseyed along to a less lonesome locale. Everything was just so as you wooed prospective new owners.
You sold your home that very first weekend. Enchanted the buyers through your concerted efforts to distinguish a well-loved home from the abandoned dreams that haunt the competing bank-owned and short sale properties, you did. Bent on purchasing the best bargain on the block when their plane touched down at Sky Harbor, the nice relocating couple from South Dakota instead rationalized the higher price tag of your owner-occupied home against the great unknowns that plagued the lower cost, distressed property options. After several celebratory glasses of wine, they recast the entire episode with your home starring as the greatest value proposition on the market.
It is now day 14 of the escrow period. The home inspection, a week in the rearview, couldn’t have gone any better. You were never all that concerned about it. You change the A/C filters regularly and have the units serviced semi-annually. You resealed the foam roof with elastomeric last May. You even placed a home warranty policy on the property prior to hitting the market to fend off any unexpected eventualities, you clever fella, you. Now, having agreed to correct the double tab at the main breaker box (damn landscapers), replace the faulty GFCI outlet at the pool equipment and fix the malfunctioning shower diverter valve in the hall bathroom, you let out a well-deserved sigh of relief. Knowing that you have an honest to goodness sale firmly in place, you turn your attention to other pressing matters that had been relegated to the back burner.
And the lawn grows a little taller as the mower doesn’t make it out of the shed this week. The carpet in the hall gets a little matted down from the higher than normal traffic and a missed date with the vacuum cleaner. Aside from little Johnny’s peanut butter fingerprints on the lower third of the living room picture window and the fogged up corner of the breakfast nook window by the doggy door, the glass is still pretty passable. The contents of your cabinets and drawers are strewn about the den and family room, but you have to break a few eggs to make a moving omelet, right? Besides, you already found your buyer. No more agents calling to pop in for a showing with ten minutes notice.
Thus begins the great unraveling of your sale. You see, in 2010, you do not just stage your home for potential buyers. Matter of fact, buyers don’t even possess the most discerning eyes that will take in your abode during the sale process. Nope, those hawkish peepers belong to a black-hatted professional who holds the fate of your transaction in his number-crunching hands.
Once you strike a deal, you better keep the joint gussied up for the appraisal, Jack.
Besieged by stringent regulations and menaced by fire-breathing underwriters, appraisers are no longer encouraged to hunt for validation of the accord reached on the open market by a willing buyer and seller. That’s so 2006. These days, the poor SOBs have more incentive to impugn a home’s value than defend it. This is not a knock on their collective competence, but an indictment of the constraints by which appraisers are currently bound. You counter this institutional bias with the same measures you employed to overcome the price objections of your buyer.
You have to resell the house.
Do not discount the human element in a supposedly objective endeavor. Consider the properties that most Real Estate appraisers spelunk on a daily basis. Bank repo after bank repo, the job should come with a snorkel and a mobile decontamination unit. Given the wide disparity in property condition in the market, the silver lining to cloudy times is an ability to add value to your home though no greater expense than meticulous housekeeping. It’s your agent’s job the sell the objective proof (most viable comparable sales, list of upgrades / features, comparisons between the subject property and comps, etc), and it’s your job to sell the feeling of mom, baseball and apple pie.
Clean and “not-jacked-up” is the new granite counter tops and travertine floors.
There may not be an input column in a uniform residential appraisal report for “squeaky clean” or “not infested with hobos,” but latitude is given to appraisers for affixing additional value to a property based on conditional comparisons to the properties selected for the analysis. The dialed-in condition of your home will stand out in full bas relief against the tired housing din. It is especially critical if you don’t have all of the snazzy upgrades. You are relying on the impression of value for lack of more readily quantifiable measures.
Don’t give in to inertia prior to what has become the penultimate part of the escrow process. Treat the appraisal as a showing appointment instead of the contractual procedure that it is and you give yourself considerably better odds at a soft landing at the closing table with the same purchase price with which you began.
Scented candles, they aren’t just for buyers and third dates anymore.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 16, 2010 | Stuff To Do
No plans for the upcoming weekend other than consciously staving off spontaneous combustion from the privacy of your own air conditioned home? You might want to check out the “Winter In July” event taking place this Saturday (7/17) morning at the Phoenix Zoo. Between the hours of 7 – 11 AM, the zoo will do its darnedest to make you forget that it’s hotter than molten lava sunscreen by importing 25 tons of man-made snow for kids (and the young at heart) to play in, and an additional 35 tons for the animals. Observe special feedings around various cold concoctions for the big cats (follow the link below for specific times). Watch the elephant get a hose-down courtesy of the Tolleson Fire Department. Witness with morbid fascination as marmots are cryogenically frozen and sold at the concession stand as otter pops (I kid, I kid. Don’t call PETA). A slip-n-slide will be in full swing, along with the splash pad and water cavern play areas.
View larger map
Sweat your way through another Saturday if you like, but that’s on you, bub.
For additional information, schedule of events, directions and more, visit the Phoenix Zoo online.
Hope to see you there. I’ll be the guy throwing snowballs at the Komodo dragon while my kids gleefully club each other unconscious with giraffe-shaped icicles. Good times.
by Paul Slaybaugh | Jul 13, 2010 | Home Buying, Scottsdale Real Estate
The current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor buyers. I repeat, the current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor buyers.
Allow me to explain. For months, if not years, you have been told that the glut of housing inventory here in the greater Phoenix area makes for a buyer’s market of epic proportions. Why, the ancient Greeks themselves would write songs about the opportunities that abound for any would-be hero with a hankering for a house. The only problem with this suggestion? It’s just not true.
What is a buyer’s market? Most would define it as a preponderance of available supply and an accompanying dearth of demand. Let’s take a look at both aspects of that equation.
In a perfect financial world, a buyer waits for the market stars to align in just such a manner before swooping in to claim a nest at a fraction of the “normal” cost. It all works great in theory, but real world application necessitates that the prospective buyer be subjected to the same set of variables that has drawn down the pool of demand at large. It’s a buyer’s market when few have the wherewithal to actually buy.
Appraisal difficulties and tightened lending regulations are contributing to a somewhat artificial suppression of demand. The “want” is present in the market. Consumers want to buy houses. They want to take advantage of the greatly reduced pricing and sublimely low interest rates. Homeowners want to refinance their houses so that they can stay in them, thus contributing to the lowering of the overall supply.
Want has nothing to do with it. Without ability, all of the consumer confidence and desire does not translate to actionable demand.
So to clarify the lead-in to this post, the current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor ALL prospective buyers, as the “buyer’s market” connotation suggests.
Further, the favorable conditions for those who are in positions to purchase do not necessarily translate to negotiable strength. Well-heeled cash buyers, W2 employees with verifiable income, solid credit history/scores, etc will find that they do not call the shots to the extent that they were led to believe. The bargain bin of bank-owned foreclosures is incredibly crowded. You are elbow to elbow with competing consumers when a new shipment arrives. The mom & pop resellers, by and large, do not have the equitable flexibility to negotiate the 30-50% off of list price that many buyers envision. The short sale properties with the absurdly low price tags are, more often than not, pie-in-the-sky figments of the listing agent’s imagination. You submit an offer 10% off list price to the bank, which in turn proves to be 40% off the BPO (Broker’s Price Opinion) that is performed three months later. The bank tells you they will gladly approve the sale – for 75k more than you offered.
While the inflated inventory levels in the housing sector are cited often enough, it is not widely reported that the number of unencumbered properties available for purchase is far less. In a market that is most assuredly not of the “see house, buy house” variety, the redaction of readily purchasable properties (due to competition in the low end, and lien encumbrances across the full pricing spectrum) tilts the negotiation playing field back towards center. Neither party has a clear cut advantage when facing each other at the negotiating table.
The truth of the matter is that most of the savings that you can expect to uncover have already been factored into the asking price by the time a listing is brought to market. Sure, there will be those that require substantial negotiation, and plenty others still that simply fail to sell. Never underestimate one’s ability to overprice a house. These aren’t the homes you are most likely looking at, though. The ones that buyers are flocking to in droves are those that present the best value opportunities. And why not? Just be prepared for the competition that you did not think existed in this ballyhooed “buyer’s market.”
Trying to cobble “x” percent off the list price in circumstances in which others are offering “x” above the list price will only lead to frustration. Don’t get greedy. Do what it takes to lock up the lowest pricing the Valley has seen for seven to eight years (longer in some areas) while interest rates continue to hover around 5%, and you are well ahead of the game.
And lastly … smile. You are the guy that so many lament not being right now. You know, the hypothetical guy who spurs such proclamations at office parties and cocktail hours all across Scottsdale:
“If I had two nickels to rub together right now, I’d buy every house on my block for less than I paid for this albatross back in ‘05.”
