Omitting Seller-Paid Points Want to know why many real estate Web sites — never good at estimating home prices — are off by at least another 3% now? Because Seller-paid points are a fixture of many house deals these days, yet the government data that many real estate sites rely on don’t report that. Instead, Hennepin County and...Read More
Realtor-Speak for “No Go, Try Again” Personally, I’ve never understood the logic of “countering full price.” That’s what most listing agents advise their clients to do when they receive an offer that’s disappointing — or worse. Supposedly, that conveys to the Buyer that the offer is too low to begin negotiating in earnest, and that they...Read More
“Long-Time Buyer Needs” A fixture of most broker weekly meetings is the 15 minutes or so allotted to “Realtor Networking.” The purpose is to give office Realtors a forum to plug their current and upcoming listings; promote listings that have just had price reductions (“price improvements”); and to broadcast what their Buyers are looking for....Read More
Playing Housing Market Arbitrage, or, The Substitution Effect to the Rescue I don’t know about anyone else, but I see an imminent collision — the good kind — between what’s happening in the rental market and the “For Sale” market. In the Twin Cities and nationally, rentals are scarce — and getting scarcer. In the...Read More
Realtor Role(s): Conduit, Funnel and Filter What does the picture above depict? If you said, “a tournament bracket,” you’d (also) be right, but what I was actually thinking of is a flowchart showing all the communication that accompanies a typical real estate deal, where both Buyer and Seller have their own Realtor. So, a key part of what...Read More
Is That Like “Underbought?” Saying the stock market is rallying today because it was “oversold” is like saying it went down yesterday because there were more “Sell” than “Buy” orders. In other words, it tells you nothing. To be sure, violent moves like those that have occurred the past two weeks often overshoot; the ensuing...Read More
