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Saturday, June 26, 2010
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28 comments:
Need a little help. Getting ready to list our townhouse ourselves. Was looking at some of the websites out there. It looks like with forsalebyowner.com, it costs ~ $800 to get the house listed on the MLS (and realtor.com). With FSBO.com, it is only $299. Does anyone know why the difference there and if forsalebyowner.com is worth the extra investment? Thanks!
Planning on offering the buyers agent 3%, but sure hoping we can sell this ourselves.
Here's a heck of a flip.
Sold to a commercial flipper in Jan for $48,500.
Offered at 349,500. But I believe that's an average price for that area.
nic
I suspect the number of fsbo sellers in this forum is limited. I don't have any experience doing this either but I did come across a detailed review of the forsalebyowner.com site on Amazon.
The print edition of the Post included a map of Arlington median sales prices, 2008 vs. 2009, detached and townhouses (not condos), in the real estate section yesterday. I couldn't find it online.
IIRC, the zips served by the orange, blue and yellow metrol lines (22201 22202 22203 22205) generally stayed about the same or went up a little. The other zips (22204 22206 22207) went down more than 2%. These also tended to represent the relative high priced and low priced zips, whereas the metro zips tend to be relatively mid-priced.
22209 and 22213 are pretty small and I don't recall what happened in those zips.
We may attend this open house in Miller Heights today. Looks like the owner is taking a 50k+ haircut off what they paid in 2005, but it isn't listed as a short sale. Should be interesting.
So we went and the story is that the home "owners" already bought their next house and are carrying two payments. I had thought banks were going to make it much harder to buy a second home since so many people were doing that before defaulting on the first, but maybe these people had the money and/or equity to do it anyway.
Jeremy-
I think you hit the nail on the head. As long as they had a good downpayment on the next house the bank will allow it. They may also may be well above water on the house you looked at. I knew plenty of people that bought a house at peak, but are above water, because either they put 40+% down, or have been making much larger payments than are necessary.
So, Jeremy, you didn't like the house itself?
No. It was actually a little embarrassing because we had been to that house before. They had an open house in April and then went under contract but it fell through. So many houses in Oakton all look the same, and I've seen them all online probably hundreds of times so I didn't remember visiting that one.
The house was nice inside and I think priced better than others in the area, but the yard isn't flat at all and it is on a pipe stem directly behind another home. They did put in granite countertops and a new microwave since our last visit - probably with the previous buyer's earnest money if the agent's story is true. She said that house was their "back up offer house" and when they didn't get their first one they decided they didn't want this one either. Do people really submit more than one offer at a time?
On another note, we decided today that if we don't find a house by the time we have to renew our lease in September that we are going to drop our current agent and get a Redfin agent. Ours just has not been very helpful or very good about replying to emails. When we ask again to get an answer he often asks questions in his reply that were already answered in the initial email. We just don't feel like we are being taken seriously.
Does anyone have any horror stories about Redfin or valid reasons why a first time buyer shouldn't use them? Apparently they have changed their business model in 2008 so you get a dedicated agent the whole time and unlimited tours now, but only get a 1.5% commission refund instead of 2%. Time to start reading up a bit on the redfin forums I guess.
Jeremy,
How long have you been looking? You are probably considered a "tire-kicker" by your agent. I'd drop you too.
VA_Investor:
We first met with our agent when we had him show us a house in February. We told him we would not waste his time getting him to show us houses unless we thought we might buy them, and we haven't had him show us a house since then. I have emailed him occasionally to ask questions about certain homes, nothing that should take much of his time since he says he focuses on the Oakton area where we are looking.
I originally wanted to go with a Redfin agent but my mother-in-law worked for Long & Foster 30+ years (accounting/administration) and highly recommended this guy. We get her referral bonus out of the deal, but it isn't anything near 1.5%. My wife wanted to do what her mother suggested so I didn't fight it. Now the wife is the one who says maybe Redfin would have been a better choice.
Jeremy-
I thought redfin agents are pretty good if you know what you want. The only problem is agents don't like redfin (redfin is taking away their business) so sometimes the sellers agent are fairly uncooperative to redfin agents.
Jeremy,
I'd rather have someone who works hard and can help me get a deal than a rebate or referral fee to my MIL.
You have to find it. It won't fall in your lap. You need someone who can get a contract together on a dime, not someone that gets back to you in a day or two. Keep your approval updated. Is your LO hooked in with your agent? You need a letter quick. This doesn't mean you can't find alternate financing (if you can still close on time).
Does your agent have "docu-sign" so you don't have to exchange faxes or scans, etc.?
You've been looking since Feb., you should know the right deal when you see it. I find it curious/disturbing/bewildering that you forgot that you already saw that house. If I were your agent, I'd either be tearing my hair out or ignoring you.
Jeremy, we've had a somewhat similar experience with one agent (saw two houses). I guess some agents really do not understand that model of operating. They only get the "old" models of dragging them all over to see a few or many houses over several months or fewer. Today savvy buyers who aren't forced by circumstance into moving in 30 days use the web to do what years ago they made agents do for them. Your agent is too dumb to realize how little work s/he will have to do to collect a commission from you.
VA_Investor -
We go to open houses probably every other weekend, and visit all in our price range and neighborhoods even if we don't like the exterior. If you haven't shopped in Oakton you wouldn't realize that 80% of the homes are colonials and all look the same. This particular house was showing a DOM of 8 on Frankly so I didn't think about it before we left. It's not like I had an agent show us that house specifically, and our particular agent doesn't even know we went.
The more I look into Redfin the more it makes sense to me as a buyer. Sellers may have an argument for a full service realtor, especially in this market, but buyers who know enough to use Redfin, FranklyMLS, and blogs like this one I think would come out ahead with a discount broker.
Dumb Question:
What is a pipe stem? I am suddently seeing this term show up a lot. I have googled the definition:
A lot connected to a public street by a narrow strip of land. Usually several adjacent pipestems are combined to form one driveway with each owner having a mutual-reciprocal easement to use and maintain the driveway to the street.
It's that I just can't visualize it.
c, check out this listing. Scroll down to the aerial map.
A surprisingly high number of otherwise competent professionals struggle with email, either they can't be bothered to respond at all or when they do respond they send something that shows they never took the time to read the email they are responding to and understand it.
Of course, considering the egregious spelling, punctuation errors and obvious lies in MLS listings I would be surprised if a greater than normal percentage of realtors struggle with email.
As far as I can tell many are at best semi-literate. (There is no other explanation for their inability to write a 3-4 sentence description of a house without mangling every single sentence and misspelling multiple elementary-school level words.)
So tomorrow is the CS number. Personally I don't think it will be very interesting. We have had several months where it dropped ~1 point/month. I am fairly confident we will see the same thing again, with the number in the 174.2 range.
It will be more interesting to see what happens to housing prices once the tax credit has no impact. Unfortunately we are about 5 months away from this. The April monthly data is coming out now and seeing that the data has a three month look back we are still looking at February-April Data. So it will be almost the end of the year before we get clean data with no housing credit impact. Although there will be other indications of what happened to prices before then.
Nic,
Listing on the MLS is the important thing.
Have you looked at Housepad? A full MLS listing is about $300.
Here's the price list.
Jeremy A Redfin agent sold my sister-in-law's house in Orange Hunt. Our listing agent has been with us a long time through many transactions and she said he was good to work with and always did what he said he would do. The deal closed with no problems. The only thing the Redfin agent did not do was come to the settlement. The buyers were a little stumped, but the lawyer got them through everything. I did not know they were getting a rebate from him until I saw it on the settlement sheet but it was only 1%.
c,
why d/n the sale to the commercial flipper show up as the most recent sale?
buck
Buck
Dunno why that sale does not show up on the Frankly listing but it does show up in the Fairfax County tax records. Click on the tax record button, click on sales and you will see that it was sold 1/21/2010 to BEEREN AND BARRY INVESTMENTS LLC for 48,500. I assume that they are a commercial flipper as I see their name on a lot of properties bought very cheaply, remodeled and listed near the high end of market price.
I was somwhat familiar with that property as I looked it over from the outside when looking at other sales in that area. Someone in that neighborhood told me that it was an unlisted foreclosure. The Jan price certainly seems to reflect that but it was never listed for sale (I was watching for it due to mild interest).
I admit that I don't know how unlisted foreclosures get sold off, I guess it was sold on the courthouse steps.
Buck & C-
Frankly only shows data on MLS listed houses. Foreclosures are not listed, since they are sold at the court steps. So that is why it is listed on the tax site, but not Frankly.
housebuyer (and C)
thank you. Housebuyer. Are deals like that typical at the court steps? The foreclosed owners must have had a lot of equity for the place to sell for $48.5K...suprising that they could not of found another solution (unless there is something very wrong with the prop)
Buck
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