Julie Emery, a real estate agent who authors the Piedmont Real Estate Blog, attended a Tranzon real estate auction in Fairfax last Thursday. This was my favorite part of her review of the auction:
"I was also struck by some of the comments by Tranzon, both the auctioneer and the gentleman providing the descriptions of each property. Comments like "You know this is going to be worth $350K in a year or two" and "The value on this can only go up" were shocking to this REALTOR who has been trained to never misrepresent value. And, the interesting thing is that I think those kind of statements were actually counterproductive. You could hear some of the scoffing after these comments as the potential buyers seemed to be reminded of the current state of the local real estate market and the folly of such predictions".But the whole post is informative.
7 comments:
I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this: "Comments like "You know this is going to be worth $350K in a year or two" and "The value on this can only go up" were shocking to this REALTOR who has been trained to never misrepresent value."
Never ever? Not even if, say, by misrepresenting value your commission would increase significantly? Or the sale wouldn't go through at all? You never insinuated to some desperate couple hoping for a safe place to raise a family that if they didn't buy now they'd be priced out forever? You never urged people to say whatever they needed to say to get the loan, assuring them that they could just refinance next year? Or maybe you never directly talked about price, but your appraiser knew that failure to hit the right number meant there wouldn't be any more work in the future...
I'm sorry, I'm sure there are some realtors who never did anything like that, but I've never met one. The whole thing just makes me so angry...
Gruntled,
Do you really believe what you've just said? My dad was a realtor and I can tell you he NEVER acted in the manner you're saying. Yes, there may be a few who act like that as there are in any sales oriented profession, but they are not the successful ones or the ones who stay in business long. In any sales-related profession, it's repeat sales that keep you in business. And anyone who acts as you insinuate wouldn't be in business for long.
Frankly, you sound like the kind of brat who because he can't afford what he feels himself entitled to is going to shift the blame to someone else. If you can't afford what the market is asking look to yourself to fix it. Don't expect others to fix it for you. It's called being self-responsible.
Lance,
I'm sure there are good realtors out there, but I think the Realtor (tm) business model creates a situation where there is almost always a conflict of interest. A realtor serves the deal, not the client. People say lawyers are bad, but generally speaking I have found realtors to be much worse. With the ease of entry into the profession and the fairly easy money in the boom, the percentage of horrible realtors has grown -- both those who purposely try and work against their client(s) just to get the deal done and those who don't know enough to be effective. I'm sure your father was great, but the realtor of today is not the realtor of yesterday (and hopefully not the realtor of tomorrow).
Lance: Just because I'm a happy homeowner does not mean I can't see how we've all been harmed by the behavior of nearly everyone involved in the mortgage industry.
You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. I, however, have been reading your postings on line for years. Heck, at some point some blog i was reading actually posted the address of your home just so everybody could quantify the level of BS you'd been slinging. So I know that *you* are the guy who's been insisting that there's no bubble, that everybody who's complaining is a whiny crybaby who doesn't have the beans to ante up, and you've done all this in a transparent attempt to bolster your own holdings.
It's hard for narcessists to understand other people, so I'm not going to waste my time trying to get you to comprehend why I'm so upset that the economy is going to be in toilet for years, with millions of hard working Americans impoverished, but your feeble attempts to attribute motivation to my litany of facts in the face of years of your online personaes being publicly slapped down is frankly pathetic.
gruntled,
I understand your frustration with Realtors (TM), but I don't lay this mess at their feet since their livelihood depends upon generating transactions. The current mess in the credit markets is primarily the fault of the Fed and a banking regulatory system that has abandoned their mission of promoting a sound currency, low inflation, and a sound banking system with reasonable lending standards. To paraphrase a former Fed Chairman, it's the Fed's job to remove the punchbowl when the party gets out of hand.
I'd also lay some blame upon a political system that promotes the phony "American Dream" concept that home ownership is virtuous per se and worthy of special treatment; this has prevented politicians from addressing the housing bubble until the time for prevention has passed. The President, for example, was until recently touting high home ownership rates as part of the "ownership society." Never mind that the high ownership rates were attributable to an incredibly wasteful misallocation of our resources to loans people can't afford to repay.
"You know this is going to be worth $350K in a year or two"
Gruntled said:
I'm sorry, I'm sure there are some realtors who never did anything like that, but I've never met one. The whole thing just makes me so angry...
Unfortunately, I've had to chastise Realtors I like for comments like that.
It is frustrating what will happen to the economy for the next four to seven years. I'm very pro-growth when it comes to the economy. Ok, I would like sane growth (say, with Saltzberg like urban planning), but growth.
Ignore Lance. He insults anyone who doesn't advocate buying now. In the past he's been the first to call someone an idiot and the first to whine that its unfair people said stuff. He's... projecting. Those who advocated the runup, mortgage fraud, and other aspects of this bubble are squarely to blame.
When you have an investment mania there is always a following investment depression. (I'm using the old terms as they were used prior to the 1930's.)
We've finally entered desperation. Be careful. We could have a "bear trap bounce." Then... we have the big fall in prices.
Terminator-X,
Well said. But I will side with gruntled on this. A used car salesman who knowingly puts a family in a lemon is less at fault than the REIC and what occurred over the last five years. Yes, the fed and I-banks were at fault too. But the salespeople knew they were setting up foreclosures for personal gain.
Harriet,
I eagerly await you dispersing the February sales figures. FYI, Interesting stuff happening right now in the Asian stock markets.
Got Popcorn?
Neil
If anyone says anything that is counter-wisdom, you can count on the truth police here to express faux outrage. But seriously, do you think anyone at an auction will be steered by off-handed comments? This isn't the subprime crowd in need of no closing cost, 110% financing.
As a technical point, a question for the legal experts ... is a Realtor a Realtor all the time? Assuming these folks are licensed Realtors, were they acting in that capacity in an auction? As a baseline, is there any requirement that someone selling real estate at an auction must be licensed?
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