Crazy Job! With People or Alone?

This job of real estate that I have been working at for the past 31 years is a crazy job! From the outside looking in, it seems as though I would be with people all day, driving buyers around to houses, showing them through the houses, writing up offers, negotiating on the offers, spending time at home inspections, sitting through the mortgage appointments, and on and on!

However, the truth of the matter is I spend most of my time alone!

Does that surprise you?

More of my day is spent researching and searching for homes for my different buyers, phone calls following up on showings of my listings for feedback, calling contractors for quotes on repair items, phone calls to the mortgage companies to find out what documents they still need for the mortgage application, phone calls to the buyers and sellers, driving to listings to show buyers and their agents through my listing, and on and on!

The fun part of this job is when you are with people. However, you can’t have one without the other. The time I spend working alone is what pulls it all together.

So if you are thinking of looking into real estate as a career, a question I would ask you is, “How do you do working on your own?” Have you done anything like that before? If you aren’t good at working alone or have never done it before, this job may be very difficult for you. I love this job because I love being with people and have the ability to work well on my own.

Sell Before Buying??

I was reading the Saturday morning real estate section from our local paper and the lead article was about move-up or scale-down buyers. The two agents interviewed both felt that they should sell first before they made an offer on another house. The problem I had with this article was not the position the agents had but the reasons they gave for doing so.

There are many areas in our marketplace where the purchase offer with a contingency of selling a house will not make any difference and will not affect the selling price that is negotiated. This is because the sellers are so glad to see an offer that they will readily accept one even with a contingency.

Unless a neighborhood has a shortage of inventory and is in high demand, most sellers, if properly advised by their agents, will accept a contingent offer. In our area, the listing does not have to be changed to reflect a contingent offer and no one knows it has an offer on it except the seller, that buyer and the agents.

This way, the odds are in the seller’s favor, because now there are two houses on the market and if either one of them gets an offer, the seller is good.

So why wouldn’t a buyer make a contingent offer? Yes, there is the possibility that another offer could come into the picture and they would have to do a bridge loan to keep their offer or they would lose it. But generally, if they price their house properly, de-clutter it, and then stage it, the house will sell fairly quickly. To wait until you have sold your home, to then start looking, you may not find something suitable and you will have to move twice, first into temporary rental housing and then into your next house. This would far out weigh the cost of carrying two mortgages for a few months.

The Upside & Downside of Home Inspections

I was sitting in a Board of Directors meeting this past week reviewing a new addendum form to approve for our Association to use for the inspection contingency in a purchase and sale offer. There was considerable discussion as to whether the buyer should have to indicate who they were selecting to do the inspection, whether it was Uncle Harry, a licensed home inspector, an engineer, a builder, etc. After all the discussion, the final decision by the Directors was the buyer did not have to disclose who they were choosing to do the home inspection for them on the addendum form.

The reason there was so much discussion around this rather simple item, was because of the experience all of us have had the past several years with home inspections. There are the home inspections that the buyer has their Uncle Harry do for them and he either talks about the selling price and everything else except the house or he finds fault with everything in the house.

Then we have the inspections done by a builder that compares everything to a new home and nothing is to code in the older home.

It seems that features that are characteristic of an older home are overlooked during the initial visit or even second visit, but with the home inspector, suddenly they aren’t acceptable. And even though the buyer may have negotiated off the sales price to address them after he buys the house, they ping the seller again with the list of repairs and ask for a credit at closing from the home inspection.

Inspections can and are an escape route for a buyer, plain and simple. If they want out of the deal after signing, the home inspection provides the door to escape. That’s the way it is and there is no changing it!

Home inspections are part of the process now and they are here to stay with the upside and downside they bring to the home buying process!