Bio-Disco

by | Jan 19, 2011 | Buying at Trustee Sale, Unbelieveable | 12 comments

Hat tip to SM who sent this along from Marilyn at the ocregister.com:

A two-story house on the Seacliff Golf Course in Huntington Beach is the worst example of “malicious vandalism” of a foreclosed home that a top Realtor for bank-owned properties says he’s ever seen in Orange County.

The home, at 6581 Racliffe Circle in the guard-gated The Peninsula at Seacliff community, went back to the bank at $1,782,214 at a foreclosure auction last August after no one bid on it.

The roughly 3,000-square foot house now is undergoing about $250,000 in repairs, says broker Tom Moon of Pacific Moon Real Estate, who has the listing.

Among the destruction: Chemicals and cement were poured down drains, a Jacuzzi was left running for what may have been months, with most walls in the house splattered in mold, and a floor caved in from the weight of a huge pile of wet clothes and other junk.

The day I went by, workers in special bodysuits and masks doing mold remediation would not allow us into the house for safety reasons. As is typical with some foreclosed homes that are found stripped and trashed, the Realtor and the bank cannot prove who did the damage. And with a lack of eyewitness accounts in these cases, police rarely get involved.

 

Lazy Ray the Rat

by | Jul 1, 2009 | Local Flavor, Unbelieveable | 42 comments

The Wall Street Journal ran the story yesterday about the San Diego MLS sending in the wrong sales data to C.A.R. for the last year.

I don’t know what’s funnier; that Sandicor never checks their own work, or that apparently no one in the western world cares enough about what C.A.R. has to say to notice a major discrepency for a year.

Nothing about this escapade is surprising though, if you know Ray Ewing, CEO of Sandicor.  The realtors are the actual owners of Sandicor, who runs our Multiple Listing Service, and we need somebody to run it.  Enter Ray Ewing.

Back in 1992 when Sandicor was formed by the eleven SD association of realtors, it was the first, and the largest in the country to do so.  If Sandicor would have boldly set out to provide the a first-rate MLS website and assist realtors with helping their clients, they could served a greater good. It has never happened.

Instead, in May, 2008 the Sandicor folks changed the entire MLS system, allegedly ‘upgrading’ from Tempo 3 to Tempo 5.  It was an unmitigated disaster, and still to this day a vastly inferior product.

When a certain blogger complained about the new system, it caused a local news reporter, Zach Fox, called Ray Ewing for comment.

Ray was happy to look up the records and tell Zach that I had taken one of the last Tempo 5 training classes (gave Zach the date and time) and suggested that if I would have gone to additional training I might know what I am talking about.

It is that type of arrogance that is undermining our realtor community every day.  

Sandicor has not developed their own public website, like many other MLS providers have done around the country.  Instead, people like Redfin, Zip, and even one of our own realtors who developed sdlookup.com have kicked Sandicor’s butt with a better distribution of MLS information. 

Ray is good about issuing fines though, and bad-mouthing agents to the press.  Apparently his control over the MLS and the data he provides is still a challenge.

I AM GRATEFUL for Ray’s work.  He is expediting the demise of realtors as we know them.

Consumers are sick of the lack of transparency, the lack of data analysis, and lack of real-time facts to make decisions with.  Ray’s failure to provide any of the above will hasten the creation of an upstart public MLS, and make Sandicor, and most realtors, useless to the community.

I look forward to that day. 

I’ll still have a job helping people analyze properties and their value, and putting deals together.  How about you Ray?

And Ray, what are you going to say to the thousands of realtors who you have failed so miserably who will be out of work? 

 

Pin It on Pinterest