I have a deal going on one of my listings. December deals are special, and there are a lot of moving parts on my clients’ part, so I thought I’d reach out to the buyer agent to check status. She’s been good about contact, so I wondered why we hadn’t spoken in a few days. A man answered her phone. 

It was her husband. She just had a baby. They were still at the hospital. 

Since Ann and I have been down this road four times, I congratulated him heartily and asked for a call back whenever Lora was up to it. I didn’t expect anything for a few days.

I wasn’t finished with my calls, so made another call to an office. The phone rang awhile, then a woman answered. She wasn’t pleasant. “We’re closed! It’s Christmas Eve!” she said indignantly. “Merry Christmaaaasss,” she said, in a saccharin voice, then hung up. This is a respected company in an affluent area. If it were my firm, this woman would have been given her license and shown the door. 

Moments later, my phone rang. It was Lora, calling from her hospital bed. We handled what we needed to handle, I congratulated the new mommy, wished her a merry Christmas, and we agreed to speak again next week. I was blown away. 

One woman is in the comfort of an office and hangs up on me. Another calls from the hospital after giving birth. What a contrast in dedication. Hats off to Lora Giordano, who gets it. I don’t care if I am plugging a competitor, I am acknowledging the dedication of a colleague. I have seen 4 babies come into this world, and it is no picnic. I am still amazed. Way to go that extra mile, Momma bear. Way to take care of that new cub. I applaud you.

Ossining Christmas Vigil: Lighting the Way for Santa

One of the really cool local traditions in my old neighborhood on Osage Drive and Susquehanna Rd was to put rows of candles out along the street to light the way for St Nicholas. As I was driving to my office on an elf errand around 11:30pm, I drove through the street to admire the view of the Holy Child’s birthday candles. The photos do not do it justice; in person it is breathtaking.

This one is the view from Pleasantville Road as you turn in to Susquehanna Road. 

The candles light the way for St Nicholas

He won’t have any trouble finding this house. 

This was truly impressive in person. 

Prior to snapping this one a car drove by. People actually drive through the neighborhood to see the candles. 

You can see them winding down the street until they are out of sight.

In all, residents from six separate streets participate. It is no easy undertaking. Each bag has to be filled with sand, the candle has to be placed in correctly and then lit. Few go out, even in the wind. Doing 20-30 of these in the cold isn’t fun. But they do it. 

There is something quietly stunning about it; very few people do the Griswald house lights on this night, but almost everyone does the candles on this one night of the year. Call it lighting the way for Santa or birthday candles for Jesus, it is a sight to behold. It is one of the special things about the place where I grew up.

Merry Christmas, and peace and prosperity to you in 2010.

It can be confusing to understand the health of the economy from the media. As the screen shot from my news feed shows, there are seemingly completely contradictory stories on the U.S. real estate market. I’ve put red next to the “bad” news and a green mark next to the good news. One headline has things jumping up 55%; another says new home sales are down 11%. No wonder people are finding that making sense of it is not easy.

Here are a few things to consider:

• First, all real estate is local. One region can have a spike upward while overall the country can be down. New York is not Miami or Las Vegas. For that matter, the Bronx is not Bronxville. 
• There are different sectors in the market. Resales are not new homes; they are pre existing homes. In a down market, few people build new compared to the number of folks who are picking up pre-owned foreclosure properties which were built decades ago. 
• There are different metrics, such as price and volume of transactions. Prices can be down, but the volume of sales can go up. 
• Prices can go up, and the volume of sales can be depressed. 

I remember finding a letter from 1945, written by my father from the South Pacific at the end of the 2nd World War. Japan had surrendered, and he was sharing with his parents that he and his fellow soldiers were not so much jubilant as they were exhausted. He wondered aloud about the future of mankind with such powerful weapons in the hands of mere men. It was a very unique look into a time in my Dad’s life I would never otherwise see. He was 24 at the time; I was 32 when I read the letter. For the first time, I related to my father as a young man with an unknown future. 

Flashing forward to today, so many of us are creating a body of work online that will not be stored in an attic, but will last in perpetuity. Blogs, postings, Tweets, and Facebook will give our children and grandchildren enormous access into our thoughts. Some will actually know how it was for us when 9/11 occurred, Barack Obama was elected, and when they were born. Can you imagine?

Can you imagine knowing JFK’s personal thoughts during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Jackie’s feelings when she was newly widowed? What about Thomas Jefferson’s feeling on July 5, 1776? If Christopher Columbus could tweet on a blackberry, what would he have told us? Or Martin Luther? Charlemagne? Francis of Assisi? What if you could learn about your great grandfather, or your great great great grandmother? 

Knowing my mother’s thoughts when Pearl Harbor was bombed, when my father proposed, or when her dad died would be extraordinary. Understanding my father’s feelings when he was a GI in a tight spot, when he was working in the Great depression, and how he felt when I was born (he was 46) would be enormous. I have always wondered what my grandfather Salvatore experienced at Ellis Island when he arrived from Sicily.  

Future generations will know all of this. Your great great great great great grandchildren will know you. I don’t know about you, but that’s part of the reason I write. I’d like to build a company my children, if they chose, could run. If they knew that it just didn’t appear, that it wasn’t all easy, and what challenges I faced, it would make a difference in their stewardship. It might also tell them something about their father they might not otherwise know. 

Thanks to Matt Goyer for starting this group. Here are links to my two Redfin Posts:

Why Redfin Won’t be Redflop

Redfin Redux

There have been a number of posts on Redfin, and they even have a channel on Active rain now. I hope this group will foster civil discussion on the company and how it does business. I am a Redfin Partner Agent in New York and I have had a very positive experience with the company since March 2009. 

I had two accepted offers today, one on a listing I am selling and another for a buyer I am representing. Here’s a coincidence: They are on the same street in New Rochelle, less than a mile apart. They are completely unrelated deals. 

Another offer was presented on behalf of my buyer but we havn’t had a response yet. Two accepted offers and the possibility of a 3rd in one day doesn’t make me a great agent. But it does speak to the fact that people are no longer sitting on their hands. 

Word is out that now is the time to buy. Rates are fantastic, sellers are motivated, and prices are way down. The holidays are apparently not a deterrent to the pool of active buyers out there. Of course, Sundays get more husbands out with their wives when the Giants and Jets stink. 

I completed the old 2 weekend Forum in Philadelphia in December of 1989. I then did the 6 Day in the summer of 1990. I don’t know how many seminars. 20? I suppose in a community that is pushing 170,000 with such diverse groups as Autistic Spectrum Disorders ,  Dog Lovers Group and my personal favorite, 40 Somethings , that I’d come across a few Landmark Alums.

I still draw on the insights and distinctions I got from the training in my daily life. In this business, you draw on every resource. 

I just have one thing left to say:

Werner Erhard. Werner Erhard. Werner Erhard.

I’m with Susan Mangigian: Carpe Diem! Or, as they used to remind us, this isn’t your practice life. 

Now that Greg Nino and Bob Haywood have blogged recently about Redfin I thought I’d add my own 2 cents. Why not? I’m a Redfin Partner Agent. I blogged a earlier this year about the firm when I wrote Why Redfin Won’t be Redflop. 

I was contacted by Redfin’s area manager, Michael Daly, earlier this year around March. He found me through my Active Rain profile. It has translated into about 10 closed sales for the company thus far in 2009. I paid a 30% referral fee, which included a small commission rebate to the client in each transaction. We have another 4 deals under contract and about half a dozen serious buyers we are working with. 

Now, before I go on, let me ask you: would it kill you to have 10 sales referred to you in the next 6-8 months? No advertising, no bird-dogging, just an email telling you to contact Joe Buyer. Yeah, that would really suck. Another Active Rain horror story. 

I have met Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, twice. He’s a nice enough guy, certainly committed to the oft-heard “Transparency” mantra, which I believe they are serious about. Glenn is also clearly regretful of Redfin’s initial splash, which was arrogant and adversarial toward the industry model. This haunts the company more than anything else. It is their Original Sin. And you never screwed up in your first year of real estate. Right. But some of the things they are criticized for aren’t what they appear to be. Their anti-short sale stance is ill advised and bad publicity, but they didn’t complain when I sold one. They want to stick with prices above a certain number, but if you go below it they either waive or reduce their referral fee. Those BASTARDS! 

I dislike firms which are called alternative models in polite company, not because of their methodologies, but because their agents suck. Crummy agents crew up deals. Bad agents tend to gravitate toward alternative models because of guaranteed pay, their gimmicks, or both. What is different about Redfin is that their agents don’t suck. As a matter of fact, the people whom I have dealt with are pretty good. 

This isn’t to say that as a partner agent I drink Redfin Kool Aid in the morning. I don’t think everything they do is wonderful, and if I have an issue, I contact Michael Daly and we speak. Glenn Kelman’s door is opened if the need arose. One thing I’d like him to do is make the site a little warmer and fuzzier. He can be such a CEO sometimes. I’m in sales. You can’t deny the emotional part of the biz. 

But some things they do will improve the industry better if we stop half a second and learn. 

• It takes guts to survey every client and publish the results. 
• They do IDX and home searches better than anyone I have ever seen.
• They track every single referral. No one gets lost, misplaced or forgotten. 
• Bad agents get sacked. 

While going through some old archives to rebut some gnu who feels agents are overpaid, I found the following passage, which I authored on May 1, 2006, on another blog. This was over a year prior to the sub prime collapse of 2007 and the Fannie/Freddie crisis of 2008. 

The sales statistics for homes sold in my area for the first quarter of 2006 are out, and sales are down from the first quarter of 2005 by 14%. This, coupled with higher interest rates means that the pool of buyers is shrinking, which suppresses appreciation. Add to this the growing inventory from the lower sales rate, and, all together now, the boom is over. Oh, one more thing: in the next 18 months, millions of variable rate mortgages which started out as fixed for 2, 3 or 5 years will hit their adjustment period. This will flood the market with even more inventory as people try to jettison mortgages which they can no longer afford. Foreclosures will spike, putting more properties up for sale, and the bank-owned REOs will elbow out a significant number of regular folks who wish to sell and who may find themselves unable to get the price they need.  Guess when this really hits the fan? 2008, which, by the way, is a presidential election year.

If you don’t want Hillary to be president, you better pray hard that they catch bin Laden, because that’s the only thing that will turn things around for this administration.  

Of course, Barack Obama was on no one’s presidential radar in May of 2006. Moreover, nobody could have predicted the house of cards that Freddie and Fannie were. As significant and unpredictable as those things were, the writing was on the wall anyway. There would be no soft landing. 

I’ll finish my answer to the person who feels that licensees are overpaid and post it soon.