Senate Bill 464 - which the State Senate will vote on any day now - would rectify this abuse and return the Ellis Act to its original intent. This bill simply says that a landlord must own property for at least five years before using the Ellis Act to evict tenants. It's simple and fair, and it hurts only real estate speculators.
The vote is expected to be close - and unbelievably, the bill may not pass because a senator from San Francisco, Leland Yee, has indicated he may oppose it. No other city in California has been hit harder by the Ellis Act than San Francisco - yet our very own senator may kill this bill.
Good for Yee. God forbid that a property owner should be able to manage and operate his own property without the government forcing him to do so against his own best financial interests.
Um, well. I could be persuaded that the automatic six percent commission just might be a tad high, in these days of SF Bay area median prices approaching seven figures, but one percent?
Um, well. I could be persuaded that the automatic six percent commission just might be a tad high, in these days of SF Bay area median prices approaching seven figures, but one percent?
Usually, when something sounds too good to be true, it is. But as more people are facing the possibility of foreclosure -- losing both their house and their credit in a process fraught with humiliation -- a little-known transaction known as a short sale may seem like a dream come true. Short sales occur when a lender allows a homeowner in default to sell a house for less than the total value of the loan. In most cases, the lender then forgives the remaining portion of the debt.
The mere fact that strategies like this are even being discussed should tell you how bad things are getting in some markets.
"We truly believe that if a blog doesn't lead to more new business, then it's a waste of time," said Rusty Lindquist, vice president of broker and agent products for a la mode, Inc. , a real estate technology company based in Oklahoma City. "If blog visitors aren't being treated as leads, then blogging is really a waste."
Lindquist believes his company has come upon an idea that squarely answers the question on every broker and agent's mind: "Why am I doing this if it isn't going to help my business?"
A la mode recently introduced a blogging tool -- and made it available at no cost to all of its website customers -- that enables blogs to be posted on its agents websites. The blogs have been integrated with the company's lead capture system and its suite of online marketing tools.
This means that someone who subscribes to a blog is automatically converted to a lead and will begin receiving personalized marketing information from the agent. Additionally, the site owner is notified when a visitor subscribes or posts a comment to a blog and a lead is generated. In fact, listings can even be integrated and published on an agent's blog.
If I thought this would happen to me if I visited a real estate blog, I would never even think of going there in the first place. Certainly I would never revisit such a place - and their "lead" marketing dreck would get a high listing in my bozo filter.
I was talking with a friend today and he suggested that proprietary vendors have a "right" to their business models, just as open source vendors have to theirs. When I questioned him on whether anyone has a "right" to a certain way of making money, he backed down, but it's telling that he even made that mistake in the first place.
More on the coming revolution in real estate fees.
May 22 - KGO - If you've ever gone shopping for a home, you know square footage can be a touchy subject for realtors. 7 On Your Side has a consumer alert about how the square footage potential buyers are given can sometimes be wrong.
Maximizing square footage is often important to buyers. In this high priced bay area real estate market, getting shortchanged on that can cost a buyer hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Phillip Hwee says he's out $110,000 thousand dollars, Ben Bedi said it cost him $191,000 thousand dollars and Benjamin Chui says he lost $240, 000 thousand dollars.
This goes on everywhere. I've measured my own condo every which way, and I still come up short about 200 square feet from what is listed on official documents. Maybe they meant the back patio, but I don't see that space as being part of the house.
For an outfit like Google, $50,000 isn’t much - this is, after all, the corporation that bought a full-size SpaceShipOne replica for no apparent reason. But for Redfin, a $50,000 loss is a show-stopper, and the real estate company shut down part of its “Sweet Digs” blog after being fined that amount.
The blog had offered property reviews, but the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) “deemed our reviews (particularly the harsh ones) as an advertisement,” according to Redfin’s Glenn Kelman, and “advertising another broker’s listing” is against NWMLS rules.
So the NWMLS whomped Redfin with that $50,000 fine.
The guilds in all industries are fighting desperately to keep their monopoly status, and to destroy criticism and competition from the internet and the blogosphere. They will fail. But they'll do a lot of damage as they go down.
Median Selling Price: $220,900
Median Asking Price: $276,002
That $56,000 gap signals a fundamental sickness in the housing market, one that will need to be worked out over the next few years.
"Hardtack," a proprietary real estate tracking tool, unearths an interesting disparity between what the national figures are reporting, and what the nominal "median" price is. The housing market won't begin to recover until those two numbers are about equal - and, my guess, much lower.
