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| February 2008 »
By John N. Frank
REALTOR® magazine is in the midst of producing another exciting look at young talent in the real estate business, our annual 30 Under 30 report scheduled to be published in June. And this year, we’re not stopping there.
The June issue also will include an article we’re tentatively calling Fabulous at 50+. As a 50+ editor I’m feeling really good about this project. It’s easy once you get past that fifth decade to sometimes feel over-the-hill as you watch many friends and coworkers come and go from your professional and private lives. This article will remind everyone how vital and successful we can be, at any age.
We’re looking for real estate pros 50-year-old and older
who not only have achieved long-term success in their careers but also have actively mentored and brought along young talent to keep the profession a growing and vital one.
We need your help to find candidates for Fabulous at 50+. If you think you have what it takes to be considered, send me an e-mail (jfrank@realtors.org) telling me why. If you work with or for someone you think fits the bill, let me know why.
Talk about how you’ve maintained success over a long period of time, how your strategies have changes over the years (if at all), what advice/help you give young proteges, and what benefits you derive from mentoring.
Be as specific as possible please. I expect a lot of nominees and we’re planning to feature five in our story.
I can’t wait to hear from you. Let’s show those youngsters what they should aspire to become when they grow up!.
BY STACEY MONCRIEFF
Many REALTOR® Magazine Readers are telling us they’ve never experienced a more challenging time to be in residential real estate. One reader wrote to say she opened the newly redesigned magazine and asked herself, “Is this all you’ve got?” She urged us to dig deeper to find strategies to help her and her fellow practitioners weather the slow market.
So I did just that, finding an article I wrote back in 1990 when my last name was still Waldron. The country was in a recession, and NAR membership had dropped below 700,000. California was seeing significant home price declines, the “Massachusetts Miracle” was derailing, and the Gulf States were still recovering from the 1980s oil bust.
Much of the advice that brokers and salespeople offered at that time is still germane today, so I’ve posted the text of the article, “Turn Up the Heat on a Cold Market” here.
One point you may find refreshing: In 5,000+ words, there's nary a mention of the Internet!
Of course, we're also working on more modern-day guidance for you — but still with a focus on the fundamentals.
Just after the NAR Conference in Las Vegas in November, long-time practitioner John Mayfield, CRB, posted this entry at the Council of Real Estate Brokerage Managers blog: "If there was
one echo I heard throughout the NAR conference this past week . . . it was a need for real estate agents to return to the basics!"
That's exactly the thinking behind the new Work Smart Series. We started the series with a budgeting article in January. In March, we'll cover prospecting. Later in the year, we'll look at listing and pricing, follow-up and referrals, and attracting and working with first-time buyers.
Share Your Survival Strategies. I'd love to hear from some long-time practitioners. Tell us how you survived previous market downturns and/or what you’re doing to keep business going this time around. You can post comments right here or send an e-mail to me at
Surviving the Slowdown. Your survival strategies will be a great help to fellow practitioners who are experiencing a down cycle for the first time in their real estate career.
BY MELISSA DITTMANN TRACEY
Recent news reports reveal home owners are going to great lengths to rescue their homes from foreclosure – even if it means dismantling the house and selling it off piece by piece. That’s what one Ontario, Calif., woman has recently been accused of doing.
The woman is accused of trying to save her 71-year-old historic home from foreclosure by selling its flooring, baseboards, and other fixtures on eBay. Police intervened when city officials complained the home was being desecrated.
“Until the bank takes it away, that’s my home,” the home owner Kim Shewalter told the Associated Press.
Other home owners, particularly in California, it seems, are looking to avoid foreclosure altogether, even if it means setting their home on fire rather than having someone take it from them.
The state reported a 76 percent increase in “questionable residential fires” in 2007, citing many involving home owner’s at risk of foreclosure who wanted to collect insurance money, according to a recent article in Fortune magazine.
As the saying goes, desperate times (or home owners, in this case) call for desperate measures …
BY ROBERT FREEDMAN
Every year or so NAR releases a profile of home buyers and sellers, and without fail the report is among the association's most popular research products for the year. It's no wonder, because it's full of data about the changing characteristics of consumers and their buying and selling preferences — that kind of information, if picked through thoroughly enough, can be a gold mine of industry intelligence.
The latest profile, released in the fourth quarter of last year, asked for the first time about the negotiability of commissions: who tends to bring it up, and to what extent the associate is willing to negotiate.
The question was included in the survey at the request of the editors of REALTOR® magazine, and we're glad NAR's researchers agreed to add it because it opens up a valuable window into the relationship between practitioners and consumers.
The question revealed that sales associates are just as likely to bring up the issue of commission negotiability as consumers (they each bring it up about 40 percent of the time). It also showed that the issue doesn't come up at all about 20 percent of the time.
A Closer Look
We asked NAR's research analysts to run the findings through a finer filter to see if we could learn even more about what happens when sales associates are talking with consumers about the issue. The results are enlightening.
You'll be able to find some more discussion of what we found in the upcoming March issue of REALTOR® magazine in the Real Life section. But due to limited space in the magazine, we decided to run all the commission findings online .
What's of particular note is that REALTORS® are about 25 percent more likely to raise
the issue of negotiability than are non-NAR members.
Furthermore, consumers are a whopping 55 percent more likely not to know commissions are negotiable when they're talking with a non-REALTOR® than when they're talking with a REALTOR®.
What that suggests, if nothing else, is that REALTORS® are more apt to disclose to consumers what their options are.
Also of note is the relationship between consumers' experience in home buying and selling and their willingness to raise the issue. In general, the more experience they have, the more likely they are to raise the issue.
Therefore, it's no surprise that consumers in resort areas, where second homes are common, are among the most willing to ask about flexibility.
On the other hand, single females are the least likely to know that commissions are negotiable.
This gender gap could close in the future, though, because single females are among the fastest growing home buyer segment in the country, other NAR data has found. So, as their experience increases, so too should their knowledge of, and willingness to raise, commission flexibility.
By John N. Frank
Craig was at Real Estate Connect --- yes, that Craig --- Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist.org.
If you don’t know what Craigslist is, find out. It can be an important tool for displaying property listings (see REALTOR® magazine’s March cover story on Real Estate 2.0 for some examples of people using Craigslist for their listings).
Craig mentioned that his site only charges for job ads and for rental listings in New York City. He then chided some New York real estate pros for trying to avoid the $10-per-apartment listing fee by posting in the apartments for rent by owner section, which carries no fee.
Everyone works the angles in New York, Craig; welcome to the Big Apple.
Video Everywhere (Sigh)
People with video cameras were everywhere at Connect, including at least one who was using her camera on fellow panelists and the audience at her session.
I also was interviewing one techie who took a still photo of me and quickly put it on his Web site to show me how easy to use his company’s Web site technology is.
I’m not sure if I like everyone being able to instantly become a member of the paparazzi like that. Let’s hope some sort of video etiquette evolves to maintain some level of privacy for all of us. I like fleeting fame as much as the next person but there has to be some limits.
BY JOHN N. FRANK
Mark Lefanowicz, president of mortgage Web site E-Loan, discussed at Real Estate Connect last week how much more difficult it’s becoming to find financing for people with low credit scores. Last summer, E-Loan could counsel people who had scores around 540 (620 is generally considered the subprime cut-off level) on how to raise their scores to 600 and qualify for mortgages, Lefanowicz recounted.
These days, those scores need to be raised to 620 to 640 to get lender interest.
At the same time that lending standards have tightened, more people in the subprime score range are looking online for mortgages, he noted.
Roughly 70 percent of applications to E-Loan in the past were from people with scores above 620. Today, 50 percent of applications are from those with scores below 620.
Lefanowicz theorized the shift was coming because people with low scores feel less intimated looking for mortgages online as opposed to seeing a mortgage broker or other lender face-to-face.
Speaking on the same panel with Lefanowicz, Patrick F. Stone, chairman of The Stone Group, a commercial brokerage and development company headquartered in Austin, Texas, said one of the most important services a real estate professional can provide clients is to make sure they understand the provisions of any mortgage they’re taking on.
Borrowers don’t like asking questions at a closing when one document after another is being shoved in their faces, but that’s exactly when they should slow things down and understand the financial obligation they’re taking on, Stone argued.
Good advice to remember at your next closing!
BY JOHN N. FRANK
One message that came across in numerous sessions during last week’s Real Estate Connect conference, sponsored by Inman News, was that video has captured the “next hot trend” mantle for real estate Web sites and individual real estate professionals’ blogs.
Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president, digital operations, for The New York Times Company, spoke about how the Times was about to roll out video for its real estate ads.
Charlie Young, chief operating officer with Coldwell Banker Real Estate, said that his company plans to do more with video on its Web site and elsewhere.
And even conference host and organizer Brad Inman was telling attendees to buy one of the new line of small video cameras that can plug directly into a computer’s USB port to instantly transfer property videos for use online.
A Generational Thing?
I have no doubt that buyers would be interested in seeing video of houses they might want to buy, but the discussions about video also reminded me of a basic difference between my generation (Baby Boomers) and all the Gen Y folks out there, including my grown children, who are either now or will soon be entering the housing market.
When I was looking for a house in late 2006, I got in my car daily and drove around the neighborhood where I wanted to buy looking for “For Sale” signs. My wife and I spent numerous weekends going to open houses, both to check out the market and to find a real estate pro with whom we wanted to work with in buying a new place and selling my old duplex.
I can’t imagine my children or anyone in their generational cohort doing that. They prefer to go online and do all their searching there. They believe so much in the integrity of the online experience that seeing a video of a house is just like being at the house for them, I suspect. It’s the same attitude they take to instant messaging a friend – they consider that the same as talking face-to-face.
That’s bound to have an impact on how you work with Gen Y clients. Something to think about.
The most-read real estate stories this week from REALTOR® magazine online’s Daily Real Estate News ranged from boosting sales to Bank of America's recent deal to buy Countrywide.
The stories, in order of their popularity, are:
1. How to Get a Quick Sale in a Slow Market
An analysis of the real estate market in the Baltimore area shows that even in a slow market some houses sell fast, and for the same reasons they did in a boom market.
2. Simple Ways to Market Yourself Online
Online marketing does not have to be expensive or difficult. Here are several easy steps that you can take to create a bigger Web presence.
3. Foreclosures Push Down Rents
Rentals for under $500? In some markets, rents are falling to bargain prices. Find out the 10 least-expensive rental markets.
4. Woman Sells Pieces of Foreclosed Home
An Ontario, Calif., woman facing foreclosure was evicted from her home by police, after officials discovered she was selling the home's historic flooring, baseboards, and other fixtures on eBay.
5. Bank of America to Buy Countrywide
The deal will make Bank of America the nation's largest mortgage lender and loan servicer.
To subscribe to the Daily or Weekly Real Estate News e-mail, visit REALTOR® Magazine Online.
BY WENDY COLE
 Even when the housing market was robust, succeeding in real estate required impressive drive and commitment. Today, it requires a combination of guts and creativity that deserve a full salute.
The 427 of you guys and gals under 30 (you know who you are!) who beat REALTOR® magazine's "30 Under 30" application deadline this week have created huge stacks of paper on my desk that now serve as tangible proof of the field’s enduring vitality. You all are the ones digging in and getting it done, refusing to let dour news headlines roil your spirit.
Now our heavy lifting begins as we wade through the piles to come up with the Class of 2008.
While total 30U30 applications were down about 30 percent from a year ago, this year’s group is deeply talented. Many of you have managed to rack up notably higher sales in troubled 2007, and have had the smarts to zero in on growth areas like foreclosures and short sales.
Some of you have diversified your businesses to include investment properties and insurance products. And others have figured out how extracurricular interests -- like rodeo riding and beauty pageantry -- can contribute to professional success.
Narrowing the field to 30 will be tough, but we’re not looking to do things the easy way any more than you all are. Congratulations for submitting those forms on time, and stay tuned!
BY JOHN N. FRANK
One of the more interesting sessions during Real Estate Connect in New York this past week started out sounding like some type of "gee-whiz techie fest." However, it ended up producing some very down-to-earth advice for real estate professionals, no matter their level of techie sophistication.
The session, “Technology Opportunities or Tomorrow,” was the last of the three-day Inman News conference on Friday. Instead of talking about flashy new tech toys, the panel told the faithful few who had waited for the session that the secret to effectively using technology in real estate is to find tech tools you’re comfortable with and reflect who you want to be as a real estate pro.
“Don’t do it all at once,” said Wendy Forsythe, vice president of broker services & product development with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate. Other panelists quickly agreed.
Sure, people are looking to Web sites for real estate information, but they also want to find professionals they can work with comfortably and effectively. So whatever you put on your Web site has to tell them who you are.
Here are some other ideas for your Web site:
- Fast response. If you’re someone who wants to be available 24/7, put instant messaging on your site so they can reach you anywhere, anytime.
- Add some flash. If you enjoy playing with cameras, video is the hot trend for real estate sites these days. Create videos of your properties or give small vide cameras to your sellers and let them do their own video tours.
Grow Your Network
The great power of the Internet is its reach. More people can find you there than might ever meet you at the weekly Chamber of Commerce meeting.
But whether they find you online or in the real world, they need to get to know you and the level of service you can provide before they decide whether to work with you.
That won’t change no matter how much technology comes along.
The most-read real estate stories this week from REALTOR® magazine online’s Daily Real Estate News ranged from tips to enhancing your Web site to starting a niche in REOs and NAR’s latest forecast for the housing market.
The stories, in order of their popularity, are:
1. 10 Ways to Give Your Web Site an Edge
Packing your Web site full of information that is well integrated and useful will help you stand out. Find out how to do it.
2. 10 Most Expensive Cities for Renters
New York leads the pack with average rents at $2,922. Find out what other cities made the list and the average rents in these high-priced rental areas.
3. Rate-Cut Likely at Fed's Next Meeting
Analysts say the question isn't so much "if" the Federal Reserve will trim key rates at its January meeting, but by how much?
4. REO Niche Gains Popularity
As nationwide foreclosures continue to rise, more practitioners are specializing in REOs to remain profitable during the housing slowdown.
5. Existing-Home Sales to Hold Steady in Early 2008
NAR's latest forecast shows existing-home sales rising later this year and continuing to improve in 2009. Read other NAR forecasts for existing-home sales.
To subscribe to the Daily or Weekly Real Estate News e-mail, visit REALTOR® Magazine Online.
BY JOHN N. FRANK
REALTOR® magazine’s managing editor is reporting from Real Estate Connect NYC, taking place in New York, Jan. 9–11.
One of the main messages that keeps surfacing at Real Estate Connect this week has been how different the New York real estate market — and specifically Manhattan — is from the rest of the country.
While headlines talk of housing downturns in places like Miami, Las Vegas, and Southern California, Manhattan remains extremely strong.
Pamela Liebman, president and CEO of The Corcoran Group, one of the largest real estate brokerages in New York, noted in a panel discussion Thursday that Corcoran had a record year in 2007. Liebman stopped short of predicting a record 2008 but added that people waiting for the New York market to slow down are missing some key factors that make Manhattan different, such as:
- Foreign buyers. With the U.S. dollar weak, American real estate is a bargain for overseas buyers. And if overseas buyers have enough to buy a place in the United States, chances are they want to be in a major city like New York.
- Financial hub. New York real estate is partly driven by the health of the financial industry and the size of bonuses Wall Street firms give out each year. With those firms troubled now, how large those bonuses will be in the near future is open for debate. Last year bonuses were high and so real estate benefited.
- Low inventory. Buildings that were once abandoned now have been rehabbed. Parts of town that people once wouldn’t want to walk through — like the Bowery area of lower Manhattan and the Williamsburg section in Brooklyn — are hot housing markets now simply because of their locations close to the action.
Give Buyers a Reminder
But even a hot market can cool, and Liebman’s advice on that topic has value for real estate pros everywhere, not just in New York.
“Get buyers to focus on why they’re buying,” she said.
Instead of buyers thinking about real estate as an investment play, they should be reminded of why they want to move — a new child, the need for more space, and so on. That will help them get their priorities right and ultimately buy a place they can happily call home.
BY JOHN N. FRANK
Real estate professionals should be looking to technology to cut their operating costs in response to tough market conditions this year, said Brian Boero, a partner with 1000watt Consulting, who spoke Wednesday at Real Estate Connect, a conference sponsored by Inman News.
Boero ran through 50 tech tools that can help real estate pros lower their expenses while also making them more efficient and more responsive to customers.
Among his recommendations:
- Take all business processes online, using such free tools as Google Docs and Web sites that provide free conference calling service. This will cut software expenses.
- Distribute property listings as widely as possible. Use Web sites that will do such distribution with little or no charge.
- Use blogs to build your reputation.
- Use measurement tools to know how many people come to your Web site and/or blog and to see what items on a site get the most interest.
- Go paperless, using digital forms and online document storage so you can retrieve documents even when you’re not in your office.
Stay tuned to the blog for more news from this week's Inman Conference.
 BY WENDY COLE
I'm finishing up a piece for the magazine on foreclosures, but none of my sources mentioned anything about a particular segment of victims who are as innocent as they are overlooked in the subprime crisis.
The e-mail I received about the "Foreclosure Cat" Art Exhibit this Saturday, Jan. 12, at the Loveland Art Studios in Loveland, Ohio, brings into vivid relief the poignant tale of some 60 kittens and cats, rescued last May, after a man evicted from his home walked away without telling anyone about the felines that he left behind without food, water, or medicine.
Animal rescue advocates soon launched a campaign to find permanent new homes for the animals, while artists nationwide signed on to create portraits in every imaginable medium of each abandoned cat. Some of the cats are still awaiting adoption. To find out more about the project, bid on the art, or apply to adopt, visit the Web site.
BY JOHN N. FRANK
One of the things I’ve enjoyed since joining REALTOR magazine last July is the amount of contact we have with our readers. We get lots of e-mail and letters, and that’s a great thing. One of the primary missions of quality journalism is to promote discussion by providing information people need to and want to know. Getting feedback from readers helps us do that.
With that said, though, I have to say I was a bit surprised by the number of e-mail messages we received in reaction to a story in our December 2007 issue outlining the views of various presidential candidates on real estate and real estate-related issues.
Several readers objected to the pictures we used of the candidates. They alleged we were somehow trying to steer our readers to vote for a Democrat because the Democratic candidate were smiling in their photos while the Republicans were not.
Let me put that issue to rest. As I’ve already written some of the concerned letter writers, all those photos were supplied to us by the candidates. We in no way wanted to influence anyone or indicate support for any candidate by the pictures we used.
Nor do we expect readers to be sycophants for the real estate industry. (One letter writer chastised us for being too parochial.) We realize that you won’t choose a candidate based
solely on issues deemed priorities by the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®. What we were trying to do was simply to help readers make informed decisions as the presidential primaries and election approach.
The 2008 presidential election already is one of the most fascinating of the last half century because it’s been that long since an incumbent – either president or vice president – hasn’t been running for a party’s presidential nomination. Not only isn’t there an incumbent candidate, but there are many, many candidates in both parties and their standings seem to change with every poll that’s published or broadcast.
By early February, after many states have held their primaries, each party’s likely nominee should be clearer or perhaps even decided, but the outcome of the presidential race will still be very much undecided.
That being the case, it is vitally important that everyone who is eligible get out and vote in this presidential election. I am constantly amazed and ashamed at how few Americans turn out to vote in national, state and local elections.
One of the reasons I became a journalist is because I truly believe that the free flow of information is essential for a democracy to function. Just as essential is an involved and voting citizenry.
We have the right to disagree about whom we support to run our country – pitifully few people around the world can say the same in their countries unfortunately. But with that right, I believe, comes the duty to be involved and that means a duty to vote.
The last presidential election was the first that my son, now 23, was eligible to vote in. He was sick in bed at college on Election Day, but he later told me that he had felt so strongly about the outcome of the election that he dragged himself out of bed to vote. I was incredibly proud to hear that.
I cast my first presidential vote as a college student in 1972. For those of you not around then, the Vietnam War was still very much ripping the country a part. In my native New York City, students would regularly clash with construction workers in mob violence that left both sides bloody and battered. Families were ripped asunder and there were times when it appeared the country would be thrown into utter chaos such as that which had reigned in Chicago, where I now live, during the 1968 Democratic convention.
But even in the midst of all that, people voted for presidential candidates and agreed to abide by the outcome of the election, and, because of that, our country survived and grew.
Whom you decide to vote for is completely your choice, but please, please vote. And keep those letters and e-mail messages coming. In this election season, there’s going to be lots to talk and write about.
The most-read real estate stories this week from REALTOR® Magazine Online’s Daily Real Estate News ranged from a look at increasing a home’s value to ideas for green remodeling and a report on existing home sales.
The stories, in order of their popularity, are:
1. 5 Simple Ways to Increase a Home’s Value
2. How Green Remodeling Pays Off
3. A Good Time to Home in on the Commercial Market
4. NAR: Existing-Home Sales Inch Up in November
5. Mortgage Broker-Licensing Laws Enacted
To subscribe to the Daily or Weekly Real Estate News e-mail, visit REALTOR® Magazine Online.
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