The home-selling business is known for being the Wild, Wild West.
There are a few rules and ethics filed away in a drawer somewhere but there is no enforcement unless you do something really bad, like this guy – who only lost his real estate license a couple of months AFTER he was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail.
So when the Clear Cooperation Policy went into effect in May that stipulated an agent could input a listing into the MLS as ‘Coming Soon’, as long as they didn’t show it to anyone until it was marked as an active listing, many of us scoffed.
But apparently for our local association, this is the hill to die on:
During the short-sale era, agents defrauded banks out of millions of dollars, and all the association did was to produce a video of realtors talking about how to do short sales properly.
Bidding wars are regularly abused by listing agents who tilt the table in favor of themselves or a favored realtor, and the association doesn’t offer any solutions.
And the Clear Cooperation Policy still allows off-market listings to be sold within the same brokerage – and never offered to outside agents or the public.
There are plenty of more egregious violations of the consumers faith and trust, so why is the association selecting this rule to be the one to enforce, and issue heavy fines? They are dependent upon other agents ratting out the violators, so it’s not like there will be a MLS police, but will they start enforcing any other rules – and issuing heavy fines – while they are at it? The agents who get convicted of other violations only get a letter in their file for six months.
If agents want to show their Coming Soons, they can always join the San Diego Association of Realtors instead, where the fines are limited to $500. Or if the purpose of your Coming Soon is to test the market, just enter your new listing as Active instead and answer your phone for a couple of days and you will have ample evidence of how the market feels about it.
Here’s another tepid response to an issue that bugs consumers and agents alike:
I thought that Prop 19 would get lumped together with Prop 15 and cause voters to consider them both to be a change/threat to the original Prop-13.
Though Prop 15 is losing, it appears that Prop 19 has passed:
California Proposition 19
(100% reporting)
YES: 51.5%
NO: 48.5%
If passed, the initiative goes into effect on April 1st, so we should see seniors start to list their homes for sale in March. Look out for those tens of thousands of housing opportunities!
In April, I thought we would see a big cooldown in October fueled by uncertainty leading into Election Day. Instead, we had the most NSDCC closings as we’ve had in any month this year (374 so far), and we have almost as many pending listings as active (541/470)!
The post-election relief should add to the momentum, and with Covid-19 putting a damper on holiday plans, we might see sales plow right through into 2021 – and start the selling season early! If we just had more homes to sell!
Zillow’s estimates of appreciation over the next year:
Carmel Valley, 92130: +7.2%
NW Carlsbad, 92008: +7.7%
SE Carlsbad, 92009: +7.2%
Encinitas, 92024: +7.2%
Del Mar, 92014: +6.9%
La Jolla, 92037: +7.2%
Rancho Santa Fe, 92067: +6.9%
Santaluz/4S/Del Sur, 92127: +7.1%
It looks like Zillow expects 7% price appreciation for our area, which is wildly explosive for them. I looked up a an old blog post where their forecast numbers were virtually all 1s, 2s, and 3s for several years, and the actual increases usually exceeded the Zillow guesses.
Relatively-speaking, they are suggesting full-blown frenzy conditions!
