What do you do when you receive a full-price cash offer with a noon deadline on Saturday morning?
You take the deal and cancel the open houses.
Consider the evidence:
I’m watching the lockbox notifications and the agent had been there three times.
Twice I spoke on the phone with her, and also bumped into her at the property too.
The agent is known to be a competent, trustworthy high-producing agent in north county.
The buyers flew here yesterday from out-of-state just to see this property.
There might be two in the bush.
Solid buyers working with great agents know that they should move fast if they see a hot new listing. But there’s more to it than just moving quickly – anybody can do that.
Buyers need to know the comps, and feel comfortable about the values. They need to review the data again under duress, knowing they have a specific property they are trying to evaluate. Then their agent needs to be crafty and know how to present a case that makes it irresistible for the sellers to sign.
That’s why you want to Get Good Help.
Good agents want to work with other good agents who they can count on.
Sure, I was drooling at the idea of my open-house extravaganza at the beach all weekend. I probably would have had 100+ people attend each day. Why not do the open houses anyway? Because I don’t want to buyers thinking I’m shopping their deal, plus I’ll always remember doing open house after accepting an offer that morning, and a potential buyer making the point that pretending to have a property for sale only to squash the possibility of buying it once he got inside was disingenuous and unethical in his mind.
Besides, with the stock market bouncing around like a yo-yo and a pandemic threatening our very existence, are you going to take the chance of blowing this deal for the two in the bush who might pay a little over list? Risk it all for an extra what, $25,000? $50,000?
Homes on Carlsbad Blvd. north of Tamarack are at street level and those residents are looking through car windows to see the ocean – and it’s a sliver, relatively, compared the view from our listing. Our building is 25 feet above the street, and set back another 20 feet so any road noise is manageable. You barely see the cars passing by, and out of sight is out of mind.
A broker from The Agency is hoping to mobilize support against the National Association of Realtors’ controversial ban against pocket listings, drafting a new petition to urge the repeal of a policy that many agents feel will disrupt the market and hurt their livelihoods.
“It feels as if it was done without a whole lot of thought for the person impacted the most, which is the seller,” said Jamie Waryck. “I, along with several colleagues, find that very frustrating.”
NAR’s policy, which was approved in November and is scheduled to take effect May 1, requires brokers to submit a listing to the Multiple Listings Service within one business day of publicly marketing a property.
NAR argues it will help make the business more transparent, but brokers, particularly in high-end markets like Los Angeles, Miami and New York, argue that pocket listings help protect sellers’ privacy and allow agents to be more flexible with asking prices.
“A homeowner should have the right to work with a realtor and decide for him or herself whether the home is sold with full exposure to the public, with limited access to the public, in total privacy or through a combination of any of these based upon the homeowner’s personal wants and needs,” the petition reads. “The National Association of Realtors has decided to remove this right from you.”
Top L.A. agents have previously spoken out strongly against the policy, including Agency CEO Mauricio Umansky and Hilton & Hyland’s Gary Gold.
“I think we should be policed somewhat,” Gold said in October, “but not treated like children.”
I have to hand it to Brett and team in their preparation of this 1975-built home in Solana Beach. The flooring was removed downstairs, and they added a heavy epoxy paint to the exposed-concrete, which gave it a trendy-hip look to go with the colorful formica in the kitchen:
The list price is $1,850,000, and they already have four offers!
Our new listing in Del Mar, and great for multi-gen! A rare find of a 5br/4ba, 3,708sf home with two master suites – one on each floor! Fully remodeled with dual-pane windows, dual-zone HVAC, tankless W/H, new paint, hardwood floors, Craftsman kitchen, owned solar system with 240 outlet for your car charger, and full blown panoramic ocean view overlooking the Torrey Pines Reserve – wow!
LP = $2,495,000
Sunset Open House this Friday 4-6pm, and open 12-3pm this Saturday & Sunday, February 8th and 9th.
As a top Hollywood talent agent for over 40 years, Deborah Miller Lakoff represented big names like William Devane, Ned Beatty, Bob Uecker and Julio Iglesias. For proof, one could just look in her garage.
“There was a massive collection of stuff” stored there, says Fred Meyer, who is Ms. Miller Lakoff’s nephew. In addition to autographed memorabilia and keepsakes, there was furniture, books, records, clothes, family heirlooms, photos and formal dinnerware.
Last year, Ms. Miller Lakoff decided to move from her 2,300-square-foot home in Marina del Rey, Calif., to the 4,000-square-foot house in San Diego where her husband, Sanford Lakoff, lives. (Theirs had been a long-distance marriage for 10 years.) In the next few months, the couple plans to downsize again and move into a roughly 2,000-square-foot apartment in a retirement community. But before any of that could happen Ms. Miller Lakoff had to get rid of a lifetime of accumulated things and sell the house where she had lived for 35 years.
The first hurdle was to decide what items would make the trip to San Diego. Ms. Miller Lakoff and Mr. Meyer, her nephew, worked on that task together. “You need someone who can persuade you to get rid of a lot of stuff. Fred was that person,” Ms. Miller Lakoff says. She resold some of her clothes, record albums and books to second-hand shops, and donated much of her furniture to two young families that had just bought a home. Mr. Meyer digitized photographs and distributed many of his aunt’s heirlooms and keepsakes among family members. “Everybody was thrilled to see this stuff,” he says.
The second—and bigger—challenge was deciding what to do with everything else. For this, she called in reinforcements, hiring Greg Gunderson, president and owner of Gentle Transitions, a Manhattan Beach, Calif., company that specializes in helping people downsize and move.
Mr. Gunderson called in a number of dealers and collectors who purchased some of the high-value items, with all of the proceeds going to Ms. Miller Lakoff. Finally, Mr. Gunderson’s team also packed up everything and did a final “clean out” of the house so it would be ready for the next owner. The whole process took between 2½ and three months and cost $2,300, says Mr. Gunderson. He charges $75 an hour, adding that a typical move to a one- or two-bedroom apartment in a retirement community ranges from $3,000 to $6,000.
The daunting task of downsizing has led to an array of companies and services that promise to make the process easier. Much of the focus is on getting rid of things and coordinating the move. But the real service is persuading people to “let go” of items they’ve held on to for decades.
“There are ways to honor the memory of something without having the physical piece in front of you,” says Mary Kay Buysse, executive director of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, a trade organization with about 1,000 member companies.
When helping their 89-year-old mother downsize in Greenwich, Conn., David Borie and his sister, Mary Zara, turned to a Darien company called The Settler. Their mother, a retired artist and interior designer, had chosen the move-management company to help her deal with the contents of her 6,000-square-foot house and coordinate her relocation into a 2,000-square-foot apartment in a Stamford, Conn., retirement community. The company put color-coded stickers on items to designate their status—if they were going to be moved to the new apartment, given to a family member, sold, donated or thrown away.
Before any artwork was removed, Mr. Borie made giclée reproductions (high-quality prints made with an ink jet printer) of some of the pieces their mother had painted, along with a lesser-known portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. (Washington is a Borie family ancestor, a seventh great uncle.) He and his other three siblings each received the reproductions and also had the option to get a giclée print of a painting by another ancestor, Adolphe Borie.
The four siblings supported The Settler’s objectives, but to minimize any quibbles, the company listed all of their mother’s possessions on a spreadsheet and let the children rank them from 1 to 75. The Settler’s staffers used a draft system to ensure that items were distributed fairly.
“Nobody got everything they wanted, but we each got some things. And nobody felt someone else got the advantage,” Mr. Borie says. He declined to divulge what the The Settler was paid, but owner Pinny Randall says her company’s services typically range from $10,000 to $15,000.
There were some emotional moments throughout the process. Mr. Borie and his sister worked hard to ensure that their mother was comfortable with downsizing.
His recommendation: Start the process early, when things are less likely to get muddled. And children should be sensitive to psychological struggles when a parent is asked to let go of a lifetime of memories and leave a home they may have occupied for up to 50 years.
Still, once the job is done, many downsizers say they feel a sense of liberation and relief. “Cleaning your shelves and getting rid of things is just a wonderful thing to do,” says Sheri Koones, author of the recently published “Downsize: Living Large in a Small House.” Three years ago, Ms. Koones downsized from a 6,800-square-foot home in Greenwich, Conn., to a 1,700-square-foot home there and got rid of 90% of what she owned.
The SP:LP ratio has been very consistent for those selling a home under $2,000,000 – you can expect to get pretty close to your asking price. Above $2,000,000 is a different story.
Mortgage rates had averaged 3.99% in 2017. You can see how the lower-end buyers became less concerned about getting a discount as rates started rising in early 2018 (they reached 4.59% in May, 2018):
This is another place that listing agents manipulate the data. When marking their listings as sold, many will lower the list price to match the sales price in order to make it look like they sell their listings for ask.
And that isn’t the only request Beverly Hills-based realtor Aaron Kirman makes to the owner of an oceanfront Dana Point house on CNBC’s new “Listing Impossible,” which premieres at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 15.
The eight-episode real estate series produced by Authentic Entertainment, a division of Endemol Shine North America, follows the powerhouse agent and his team as they take on big-ticket homes in Orange and Los Angeles counties that have languished on the market for too long.
“I am up against people that are winning and losing every day, and I felt like the world doesn’t see real estate in an accurate way on TV,” said Kirman, president of Compass’ luxury estates division who in 2019, alone, sold $500 million in real estate. “I wanted to show sellers mistakes not to do, so they could win, whether they live in a multi-million-dollar house or a $60,000 trailer.”
The series, filmed from late 2018 into spring 2019, features the jaw-dropping homes of attorneys, business executives and celebrities who aren’t used to being told what to do.
Kirman knows how to break a hard-to-sell logjam with high-priced staging, landscaping and lowering the asking price. But that hard truth is greeted with stunned looks on the faces of his potential clients.
And, naturally, there’s pushback.
“Aaron, they’re not that bad,” Renetta Caya, owner of the Dana Point property that was listed at $13.9 million for three years without one offer. That was before Kirman and his team entered the picture and told her they didn’t like her couches.
“They’re pretty bad,” Kirman insisted.
The house sold in October 2018 for $8.807 million, property records show.
Let’s touch on this topic one more time as a new season opens up.
While our 2020 market should be promising, the actual results won’t be as obvious.
Reasons to be optimistic about this year:
Rates are really low, though we expect that now and it won’t set off a frenzy.
Prices have been moderating, which gives the buyers some confidence.
We are overdue for more boomer inventory.
But don’t expect to see a bunch of hot buys hitting the MLS.
Now that the N.A.R. has laid down specific rules for off-market sales, agents are going to take advantage.
While every brokerage will have an internal network to promote new listings within the company prior to MLS-input (which is allowed), the individual realtor teams will run their latest hot listings through their stable of buyers first, before giving the rest of their company a crack at it. Only when those attempts have been exhausted will a listing find its way to the MLS.
It may only be 5% to 10% of the market, but it will be the very best 5% to 10% – those listings that every buyer wants. Without seeing those hot buys flying off the MLS within days, there will be less urgency and a false malaise setting in with those who are judging the market just based on the MLS activity.
The public won’t have a clue, either. They will be forming their own opinions about the market based on what they see on Zillow, never knowing there is a secret pre-marketing – and selling – of the best listings. It will only be those who attend open houses who will get pitched to leave their contact info to receive their off-market buys (it will be the most-heard pitch of the year at open houses).
Don’t sellers object? Not really, not when it is presented as a better alternative to having strangers traipsing through their house at all hours with little or no notice. It also becomes the happy option in between selling to Zillow for less and taking a chance on the open market.
Are the off-market sales valid comps? Everyone is going to assume they are, so let’s include them and figure they may have fetched a little more on the open market.
The rest of what happens in 2020 should look similar to what we had in 2019 – with the amount of inventory dictating the outcome. Even though buyers may be more active early on, as Diana claimed today for a second time, the higher-end areas should find the buyers being more deliberate, especially if they can’t get their hands on those prime listings.
