"Everybody respects her," an old friend once explained when I asked about his real estate agent. "She's a top producer." Looking back, I'm sure my friend had no idea what he was talking about -- he'd never bought a house and had little interest in real estate, but that didn't matter. He'd bagged a "top producer" as an agent. How could I not be impressed?
The question to ask yourself is this: Top producer for whom? The client, or the agency the agent works with? The real answer is usually the second.
When it was time to prepare her Mission District duplex for sale, Sue O'Callaghan gritted her teeth and reluctantly took the advice of those who said she needed to give it a new look.
Staging isn't an automatic slam dunk. More often than not, especially in San Francisco, it may be helpful. But there are cases when it isn't necessary, or may even be a money-losing mistake. Remember - if you spend $20K on staging to get a $10K increase in sale price, you've just lost money.
SEATTLE, April 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today launched a real estate consumer's bill of rights, along with a petition to the National Association of Realtors for consumers to sign and a program for real estate brokers and other real estate-related organizations to support.
The bill is a set of ten rights designed to ensure that consumers get complete and open access to information about properties and the process of buying or selling properties. Examples include the rights to choose the services you pay for, to have an open discussion about houses for sale and to see all the houses for sale.
Earlier today, real estate news service Inman News published the rights, which also are available at http://blog.redfin.com/redfin/2007/04/consumer_rights.html. Through May 1, 2007, consumers can sign the petition based on these rights at http://www.petitiononline.com/recbr/petition.html. Real estate brokers and other real estate organizations can participate in a program supporting the bill of rights by visiting http://www.redfin.com/rights. The goal of the program is to offer consumers a choice of consumer-friendly real estate partners.
This is just one more example of the onrushing shark-eat-dog world that real estate marketing is about to become. This will be even sharper and more vicious than previous examples, because brokers and agents will leverage the viral communicative power of the Internet to rapidly create and respond ever-more-innovative methods of slashing into competitors' markets.
East Bay cities such as Berkeley, Brentwood, Clayton and Walnut Creek experienced a nearly 25 percent drop in median home prices from February of last year.
This is followed by a lot of PR blather to the effect that this really doesn't mean anything (condo conversions, primarily resale homes, bounciness, blah, blah) but, in fact, it probably does.
Looking for homes can be a pressing matter -- especially when you're using a touch-screen.
TableTouch Inc., a San Francisco company, offers a technology that allows consumers to literally window-shop for homes on the Web by touching a window at a real estate office.
The company's technology features a computer display screen that is mounted against an office's window glass. A weak electrical charge allows the monitor to sense and react to the touch of the window just like the click of a mouse on a Web link -- similar to ATM machines that allow users to press a display screen rather than physical buttons.
Several real estate offices are using the technology, dubbed the StoreFront Browser Monitor. The cost of a 19-inch monitor is about $6,000 and a 23-inch version costs about $7,000, plus additional costs for accessories, usage reports and other options.
Come on, now. How often have you stopped in front of some real estate storefront and browsed the pictures arranged in dusty order behind the plate glass windows?
Now, like so much else in the real estate biz, technology has caught up with an old marketing tool, and transformed it. That Zephyr office with the new gimcrack is just a hop from where I life. I'll try to get a pic or two and post them this weekend.
(04-05) 12:17 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A Central Valley man who was a finalist for naming rights to the 49ers football stadium was sentenced Wednesday to nine months in prison in connection with a real-estate fraud scheme.
Tony J. Daniloo, 32, of Turlock admitted in December to embezzling between $2.5 million and $7 million from homeowners in the East Bay and the Central Valley. Prosecutors also said that he was responsible for more than $100 million in fraudulent loans.
I doubt this is the last rotten apple to fall from the dying tree of the housing bust.
There is no dearth of ideas for dealing with the housing crisis in San Francisco, where only 8 percent of the city's households can afford a median-priced house -- now going for $800,000 -- and where there are long waiting lists for affordable public and private rental housing. Real estate prices in the city are at the point where a family of four bringing in $110,000 a year qualifies for assistance in buying a home.
Short of removing rent control or drastic free-market surgery on zoning regs in NIMBY neighborhoods, there is little or nothing the City can do to lower housing prices or increase the housing stock.
Willie Brown added thousands of new SOMA "loft" units, during a period when SF housing prices exploded. Face it, for some reason people still want to come and live here. Unless and until SF becomes capable of a free-market response to that fact, rather than the usual Big City-Big Government-Big Control methods, housing will continue to be ridiculously high compared to most other places in the U.S.
San Francisco - SAN FRANCISCO -- StreetAdvisor.com today announced an online community where homeowners, renters, and buyers can share and learn about quality of life on specific streets, along with the nuances, services and details known only by those who have lived there. StreetAdvisor is the easiest way to find out what people really think about where they live and where you might be looking to live.
Streetadvisor.com is an entirely new kind of online real estate community powered by crowd sourced reviews. It provides a real-life "insider" view, becoming the essential guidebook to finding the right street, written by the people who have lived there.
This looks like an interesting new wrinkle. If I'm reading it correctly, it is a sort of individual reviewer system for neighborhoods. Could be quite useful, but it also offers the opportunity for disgruntled residents to skew rankings - or unscrupulous boosters to raise them.
Project Blogger, a real estate blogging competition created by ActiveRain and sponsored by Inman News, officially kicked off on Monday.
The competition consists of 13 blogging teams in which an experienced coach takes on a blogging apprentice and shows him or her the ropes of real estate blogging.
This ought to be good for a minute or two. Of course, the real pro RE Bloggers won't be anywhere near this thing, but what the heck.
Under Lennar's shipyard redevelopment deal with the city, it is paying nothing for the land but it is making upfront investments to build the necessary infrastructure and has agreed to a profit-sharing formula with the city's Redevelopment Agency.
Having secured control of the shipyard, Lennar in 2003 joined a partnership that controlled Treasure Island Naval Station that was put together by Darius Anderson, a Democratic Party fundraiser and lobbyist.
Basically a pretty nice racket for everybody concerned. The City "contributes" something it got for nothing - and Lennar gets a potentially valuable asset for the cost of development. The City and Lennar split the profits.
Sweet deal. Thanks the untold millions of American taxpayers who financed the whole thing back in the day, and kept one of the biggest real estate plums in North America off the market for decades, then dumped it for essentially nothing.
And since I live literally across the street from the new development, who am I to bitch? It's going to juice the heck out of my own property's value, too.
The median price paid for a Bay Area home moved up in March, regaining much of the decline since last summer even as sales remained at the lowest level in 11 years, a real estate information service reported Thursday.
The median price paid for a home in the nine-county Bay Area was $639,000 last month, up 3.1 percent from $620,000 for February, and up 2.1 percent from $626,000 for March last year, according to DataQuick Information Systems.
This is the sort of thing that drives commentators nuts. Nobody's buying houses, but the median price is still somehow going up.
The answer is that not exactly nobody is buying houses, but the few who are are in great shape financially, and are buying at the top end, while sales at the low end crater - that's where all the liars' loans and extremely creative financing created the bubble in the first place.
The rich will always be with us, but the few houses they buy will not be enough to keep the rest of the industry from undergoing a prolonged slump and, possible, taking the rest of the US economy down with it.
Three MLSs in the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday announced the launch of a consolidated property-search database for their members.
The unified database, called Quattro, supplies subscribers with property information covering 15 California counties -- the MLSs serve about 42,000 agents and brokers and the region has about 5.6 million residents. The effort to establish the shared database was launched last year.
Eventually, every MLS in the country will be consolidated into a single database searchable by hundreds of characteristics. I'm guessing it will take about five years for this to occur.
Q: I am a real estate broker, and I think you must have been fooling in your April 1 column when you criticized agents who don't show their clients houses where the sellers offer low commissions. Would you answer financial questions without the expectation of reasonable compensation?
A: It appears that they don't teach logic in real estate school. If you were to ask whether I would give my readers false answers to their questions if an employer didn't pay me enough, then you would come closer to an appropriate analogy.
When you agree to represent a buyer, do you warn him that you won't show him what might be the home of his dreams unless the seller is offering a fat commission? If you do say any such thing, how long does the client stick with you?
It's time for real estate agents to recognize that the market is not about them -- it's about the people who want to sell or buy homes. The market cannot exist without buyers and sellers, but it probably can get by without agents, and certainly without unethical ones.
Indeed. A lot of this comes from the agent gold rush ignited by the housing bubbles around the country. Especially in places like California, a lot of people leaped to acquire real estate licenses because they saw friends and relatives grabbing 25K - 35K commissions on quick sales of high six figure properties. Of course the motto of these new agents was often "Show me the money." To pretend that these folks were getting into the biz out of a sense of responsibility to buyers and sellers is naive in the extreme.
Since all real estate markets differ across the United States, I would like to keep the real estate figures the same with one local market: the San Francisco Bay Area.
Flashback: It's 2003 and less than 1 percent of all home loans taken out were negatively amortized. Zoom forward to 2005 and we will see in the San Francisco Bay Area that percentage increased to almost 30 percent of all loans originated. That number grew even more in 2006 to 39 percent of all originations.
The problem we will have in 2008 will be because of the high percentage of loans originated back in 2005 that allowed homeowners to make small minimum payments, which causes the balance of the loans to increase. The problem is that many of these loans only allow the homeowner to make the minimum payments to 110 percent or 115 percent of their original loan balance. This means that if someone took out a $500,000 loan they could make the minimum loan payments until their balance grew to $550,000.
With balances compounding and growing faster than $1,200 a month (in some cases growing faster than $1,800 a month), there are people whose loan balance could increase by $50,000 in as short as 2.4 years or in other cases a little over three years. This is how we will build up to dire situations in 2008 when many of the loans that were originated in 2005 will start to reset. Homeowners could face mortgage payments that spike as much as 300 percent after these loans reset. Yes, payments can more than triple!
If you currently have a negatively amortized loan -- also known as an option-ARM or pick-a-pay loan -- there is a good chance you have a prepayment penalty attached to it. The penalties vary within different banks and different states. But in the scenario above for the $500,000 loan, the penalty could be in the range of $15,000 to more than $20,000. This penalty could make refinancing illogical or in some cases, not possible.
And this is his conservative, least harmful scenario.
Residents who are California Dreamin', believing the Golden State is among the best places to live, most likely reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, a new poll reveals.
In a Field Poll index on how residents view living and working in the state, 67 percent of residents in the nine-county Bay Area say they consider California "one of the best places to live."
Apparently all those self-esteem programs they keep pushing into the local schools are having some effect.
Even with all the publicity about subprime lending, real estate ownership in Northern California is taking unusual forms in order to adjust to prices that continue to put home ownership out of reach.
....The pressures that have long existed on real estate in urban areas such as New York and Tokyo have now spread to San Francisco and are making their way to Napa. In order to adapt to the high prices of living units when demand far exceeds supply, consumers and providers have become innovators.
As usual, caveat emptor. Some of these "innovations" could well be hazardous to your financial health down the road.
The 49ers on Tuesday night took what the team hopes will be a substantial step toward a move to the South Bay, unveiling a complicated financial plan to build an $854 million stadium in Santa Clara next to the Great America theme park - a number somewhat lower than had been reported in recent days.
The recent Gavin Newsom-sponsored plan to somehow inveigle the 49ers to build a new stadium on the toxic waste dump of Hunters Point was a non-starter from the git-go.
The Niners, the majority of whose fan base lives down on the peninsula, are desperate to get out of the crumbling edifice at Candlestick Point and build something big, new, convenient, and not in San Francisco. Newsom's "plan" is nothing more than a thinly-disguised CYA attemptto make it appear that the City actually tried to keep the Niners. But they are outta here, and have been outta here for a good while.
The San Francisco Decorator Showcase celebrates its 30th year in grand style by remaking the four-story mansion at 2901 Broadway on top of Pacific Heights. Designed in 1927 by award-winning architect Henry Clay Smith for industrialist Milton S. Ray, the mansion is opening to the public for the first time beginning today.
Go see how the other one-thousandth of one percent lives.
Then make an offer to buy the place here. Make sure your offer is at least 55 million bucks.
Here you go - yet another "reality" tv soaper about real estate agents.
I can't help but wonder if this isn't the kiss-of-death equivalent of a Sports Illustrated cover in the sporting world, or a Time cover in the political world.
