You Know Real Estate Has Crashed When…

• You forget how miserable 2006 was and instead think of it as the Good Old Days.
• You have a price reduction form available to clients as a “fax-on-demand.”
• The customer service number for a referral company you attempt to register with is now a chat line.
• A competitor’s website redirects to their Amway business.
• When you tell a stranger at a cocktail party you are a broker they give you a hug.
• The next day they bring a casserole to your house.
• You no longer have to explain to anyone what a short sale is.
• You no longer have to explain to anyone what a BPO is.
• You laugh at an appraiser when they use comps from 6 months ago. 
• You notice how generous commissions have gotten.
• Mainly because the sellers are banks.
• Half the expired listings you find aren’t prospects because the seller is a bank. 
• You hate banks.
• Your wife asks you why you shake your head anytime you hear the word “Countrywide.”
• You get more spam about second income opportunities.
• You read it.
• When a prospective listing says what they paid for the house you mentally start subtracting.
• When an overpriced client tells you that this will all be sorted out by the Spring you tell him to shut his pie hole.
• You get startled when your cell phone rings.
• You are disappointed when it is a social call.  
• You have more time to blog.
• You have more time, period.

and the best one…

• The only agents left are the professionals like US.

I have a great deal of contact with people outside my home state of New york and they are shocked to hear how high property taxes are. In Ossining, where I grew up, the taxes on the rather average 2000 square foot home I grew up in are over $12,000. I remember the rent for my apartment after college was $500, and the taxes on my home were twice that. Our current home’s taxes? Forget it. Of course, when someone from Texas or Nevada tells me the taxes on their newer, nicer place are $3000 annually, I want to scream.

Why are taxes so high here? My observation is that in New York we have far more layers of taxation than most states. For instance, I live in the village of Briarcliff Manor, which is in the Town of Ossining. The Village of Ossining is also in the Town of Ossining. If I drive the 1.5 miles from my home to my office, I can plausibly drive by patrol cars for FOUR different police departments: Village of Briarcliff Police, Village of Ossining, Town of Ossining, and Westchester County highway patrol. We also have state troopers in a pinch. Leaving out the state police, that is 4 police stations, 4 police chiefs, and 4 dispatching staffs for sleepy suburbia. That are many duplicated expenses, and the police are a 24-hour operation.

In the town of Ossining, there are two village governments, one town government and 3 department of public works. One notch up, we have an enormous county government with still another county highway department. Almost every county department is a duplication of town or village government. There have been calls for reduction or elimination of county government

School districts range from small village districts with 300-student high schools to larger districts with 2000 student high schools. The town of Greenburgh has 6 villages and at least 8 school districts- Tarrytown, Elmsford, Irvington, Ardsley, Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Woodlands, and Edgemont. That’s 8 superintendents, 8 high school principals, 8 football teams…are you getting the picture? Of the 8 school districts, none have a high school with more than 1000 students (9-12). Edgemont high school has about 300 students. Some district consolidation would make fiscal sense, but the ramifications are too incendiary to even discuss in a forum of licensees. Greenburgh is also home to part of the Valhalla and Pocantico Hills districts, but I excluded them because of overlap with adjoining towns.

In nearby Connecticut, 10 miles away as the crow flies, there is town and state government, period. No county government. Villages are for mail delivery purposes only. You have town and state police, that’s it. School districts are larger. And somehow, they make it work.

When a relatively modest home has taxes of $12,000 and a nicer home is pushing $20,000, something has got to give. This is the Empire State, but the only one who seems to be benefiting from that moniker is the emperor.

I got a call from a very annoyed agent at once who was attempting to show my listing. There was no key in the lockbox. Naturally, I called my seller client, who was perplexed.

“Don’t they know there is a lockbox?” she asked.

“Of course they know, but there’s no key in it.”

Silence.

“It needs a key?”

The showing was rescheduled, after I showed my client a second time how the thing worked.

I was complimented on the use of this aphorism recently but cannot take credit. Whoever did actually say it first was wise:

Some people have 30 years of experience, others have one year of experience repeated 30 times.

In general, if you are passive aggressive, refuse to submit an offer in writing, claim to have a cash but won’t submit proof of funds, and feel the need to repeat that you have been in the business 30 years multiple times, you fall into the latter group.

In a recent posting, I made a reference to the “bedroom counties” of New York City, meaning the suburban counties surrounding the Big Apple. The term was based on “bedroom community,” which is defined in the dictionary as a suburb. You can get more specific, as some suburban locales are more destinations in themselves, but the context was more geographical than socioeconomic.

I actually googled the term and found only one use prior to mine by Kansas State University economist David Darling:

A bedroom county is where more people live in the county than work in the county – the daily net flow of people coming into work is smaller than the net flow out.

Darling’s use never took, perhaps because, as he acknowledges in his work, some bedroom counties are also job centers. My own home county of Westchester, for example, has long been filled with bedroom communities popular with Manhattan commuters, but many municipalities here, such as Yonkers, New Rochelle and White Plains are small cities popular as employment locations. This makes Darling’s rigid numerical definition awkward for use in real estate. Bedroom communities were defined over the years more by their location more than numerical statistics. First and foremost, they are good places for commuters to live.

Bedroom counties in my view therefore are suburban counties that are commuting distance from a major city. I would characterize the bedroom counties of New York City as Westchester, Rockland and Putnam to the north; Fairfield in Connecticut; Nassau and Suffolk to the east; and in New Jersey, Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Union, Passaic and Morris counties. You can differ if you wish.  I never won an argument with anyone from Somerset County, NJ anyway. All metropolitan counties of New York are also job centers, but they are also all suburban and that locational component trumps who works where in this day and age.

If, at some point the commuter population of Westchester were to overtake the population of those who sleep here I would still consider it a bedroom county. It is one of only two counties to physically border New York City. We are in real estate. It is a location thing.

Dear Bank:

I am in receipt of your extortion short sale approval contingent upon the reduction of my commission.

I decline your offer. I do not play chicken with my business, and no, something is not better than nothing. I did great work to produce a buyer for this property in spite of rather shabby and unprofessional conduct by your negotiator, who, by the way, I would not hire to walk my dog.

I earned every penny of that commission and more. If you do not close on the deal as proposed, then you will lose, by my conservative calculations, another $75,000 in legal fees for foreclosure, more back taxes, accrued interest and arrearage, and a reduced sales price after the home is vacated and, um, “staged” by Slob Contracting, LTD.

If you choose to foreclose, you are overtly stating that my earning less is more important to you than maximizing the revenue for your company. That would be breathtakingly stupid, which would not be a first for you.

I encourage you to reconsider our offer as proposed by employing the use of something known as “Math.”

Very Truly Yours,

J. Philip Faranda

I just got an email from The National Association of REO & Short Sale Professionals offering to make me a certified short sale expert.

Frankly, I have no badge or initials after my name, but a filing cabinet filled with closed short sales and about 12 in the pipeline so I kinda thought I was an expert. I am all for professional affiliations and that sort of thing, but does anyone know about this organization? There seem to be lots of foreclosure-related designations cropping up and I am trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, or at the least the worthwhile ones from the ones who want $100 for a web-course and logo on my website.

Any input would be appreciated.

I just got an email from The National Association of REO & Short Sale Professionals offering to make me a certified short sale expert.

Frankly, I have no badge or initials after my name, but a filing cabinet filled with closed short sales and about 12 in the pipeline so I kinda thought I was an expert. I am all for professional affiliations and that sort of thing, but does anyone know about this organization? There seem to be lots of foreclosure-related designations cropping up and I am trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, or at the least the worthwhile ones from the ones who want $100 for a web-course and logo on my website.

Any input would be appreciated.

I just got an email from The National Association of REO & Short Sale Professionals offering to make me a certified short sale expert.

Frankly, I have no badge or initials after my name, but a filing cabinet filled with closed short sales and about 12 in the pipeline so I kinda thought I was an expert. I am all for professional affiliations and that sort of thing, but does anyone know about this organization? There seem to be lots of foreclosure-related designations cropping up and I am trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, or at the least the worthwhile ones from the ones who want $100 for a web-course and logo on my website.

Any input would be appreciated.