I got a call from an agent today and the conversation turned to a deal one of my team members tried to make on her listing which never went together. It wasn’t that they didn’t like our price, she explained. It was the seller concession. While the net to seller was quite acceptable, their attorney “didn’t like” the proposed concession. 

My jaw dropped as she shared with me that the same thing happened twice before on that property. The seller and their attorney rebuffed what sounded like (certainly in our case) qualified, pre approved offers with good net to her seller over a seller concession. Instead of selling months ago, the house languishes on the market, no doubt having the price lowered as time passes. 

Such lost opportunties over a prefectly fine, if misunderstood, term of sale reminded me of the old joke where the guy throws out an old baseball because it was from 1927, had people’s names all over it, and one of them, Ruth, was a girl anyway. How tragic.

There is an unflattering ethic among some older practitioners of both law and real estate in Westchester County that money not delivered in a Tiffany case is not money. Seller concessions, to some attorneys, aren’t what we do in Westchester County. No matter that they are perfectly legitimate. No matter that they turn otherwise non prospects into able buyers. No matter that it is good for the seller client to achieve their objective, which is to sell for as much as possible in a timely way. No matter that 15 minutes away in Rockland County or the Bronx that they are done with no issue, skin rash, or damage to the esophagus.

No, here in Westchester the ground water is different. We rest on a different tectonic plate. The acidity of the soil does not allow buyers to finance part of their closing costs and get homes sold in this recession. It is more than an absurdity borne of ignorance of the current market, it is a tragedy that a client is so poorly represented. These people had their house sold three times. And they have nothing to show for it. 

Seller concessions, or givebacks as they are called in some places, are just fine and not uncommon in first time home buyers. Anyone who says otherwise has not done much in this market lately, and may in fact be incredibly out of touch with events of the last 3 years. I see them all over the place, and while we’d all love for buyers to plop 50% down or pay in cash, that isn’t possible. And of the deals I have seen not close, the concession was virtually never a cause.

Allowing buyers to essentially finance a tiny (3%) portion of the sale price to cover their closing costs is absolutely OK in almost every case I have ever seen. And in a slow market where able buyers are rare, it is unconscionable to rebuff an offer, essentially subordinating the well being of the client to a tired, snooty principle.  And it is intellectually dishonest to invoke the client’s best interest over rejecting an offer so structured when killing a deal is in fact contrary to the client’s best interests. I’ve seen this cost sellers big money over time as they reduced in price. 

Time on market is not the seller’s friend. 
Rejecting an offer over a seller concession legitimately arranged by their lender is foolish.
This market is not 2005 where buyers are waiting in line, and squandering an able buyer is nuts.

Seller’s concessions, my friends, are perfectly OK despite what this attorney thinks. I have closed hundreds of them. That is why I get the results I get, while this home sadly sits unsold after 3 viable offers. 

As Yogi Berra says, you can see an awful lot by watching. And as a broker who oversees 20+ agents, 50+ listings and who still works in the field with select buyers, I do see both sides of an issue that sellers often bring up in the discussion of listing and selling their house. 

Many of the people who list their home for sale with me already experienced failure with a prior broker. They often tell me in our preliminary interview that they were frustrated with the lack of “selling” they witnessed with the agents who showed their home when they came by. Why they were even home to see this in the first place is a post for another day-suffice to say the folks aren’t free to speak with the owner 2 feet away. The question itself speaks to the need consumers have for education and understanding as to how homes are chosen and bought. 

“The agents who show the home just walk through and hardly say anything about the house. Don’t they want to make a sale? Why aren’t they pushing for a sale?”

To understand the fallacious underpinnings of the question, you first have to understand the process a 2011 buyer goes through in the selection of a home. They don’t want to be “sold.” This isn’t a home-o-matic that comes with free steak knives if you act now. This is a six figure decision in an unreliable economy that will house their family. And owners or agents who follow them around the home tour peppering them with data about the storage under the stairs, an anecdote about the wall oven, and dozens of other well meaning tidbits are viewed as a distraction and nuisance. 

Buyer agents who are not talkative are not ignorant about the house. They aren’t talkative because they do know their buyer clients. Rather than seeing a home tour as a sales pitch, it is better to view it as a dressing room or a library. They are studying it. They are taking it in. They are soaking in it. They are seeing if it fits them. They are assessing how they look in it. And that’s hard to do with someone in your space the whole time.

If it feels like home, they’ll ask questions or gladly take a data sheet with a list of all those improvements and enhancements the owner wanted to ram down their throat in the first 15.8 seconds they walked in. If it doesn’t feel like home, no list will matter– it is off the list. Just imagine how little clothing a store would sell if the sales staff followed you into the dressing room and yapped about the pleats. How intrusive and unsettling would that be? 

A smart buyer agent therefore lets the buyer client go through the very personal process of understanding the house in as pressure free a manner as possible, selecting what to say carefully tailored to their clients needs as they see them apply through the home. They aren’t not trying to sell. Quite the contrary. They know that doing what a biased, emotional un-trained homeowner does will foil a sale. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Homeowners are wise to not be present for showings. And mandating that a listing agent accompany showings as their proxy is a bad idea in most cases also. Let the buyer agent do their job. If you are an owner and you have a pitch you feel works for the house, write it up and print it for the buyer to take with them so they can reference it quietly, at their own pace, and without pressure on their own terms. Homes are bought, not sold. If it doesn’t feel like home in the first place, you’ll never talk them into buying. 

Let the buyer try it on and see how it fits in peace. Let them study it without noise. Stay out of the way. My results say this is the way to go. 

Law Memorial Park in Briarcliff Manor is, to my eyes, one of the most attractive downtown parks of any municipality in Westchester County. It is literally walking distance from downtown (perhaps 2 city blocks) and has the village library, a huge swimming pool, a small wading pool, a huge clubhouse pavilion, clay tennis courts, a pond, tree lined paths, and gorgeous vegetation. Summer days see lots of people swimming and recreating here, walking the paths and relaxing, all in sight of beautiful, massive trees that, if they could talk, tell generations of history. In all it is 7 acres large and not a square foot needs help. 

The library was recently enlarged and the whole setting is peaceful, cared for, and uncommonly pretty. It is one of the things that make Briarcliff Manor a special community, and we are thankful we can live and raise our family here. But don’t take my word for it. Enjoy. And remember that what you see is 3 minutes on foot from downtown. 

To the best of my knowledge, only two things exist under stairs: little creatures who eat pens and underwear and poop lint, and storage.

I have never seen the little creatures.

Most people innately know that there is storage, or, in some cases, a full-blown closet under stairs because they have their own junk they need to hide or because they currently live somewhere with stairs. It is true. 

After getting my real estate license in 1996, I was first introduced to the phenomenon of homeowners who somehow felt that having storage under the stairs made their house the purple cow of the subdivision. I reflected on this strange manifestation of pride today when a homeowner showed a buyer client his own storage cubby beneath the stairs and then paused to behold it for a moment as if it were a sunset or piece of amazing art. It wasn’t a long pause, just long enough for me have a fleeting thought where the 19 year old in me in me wanted to burst out 

OH MY GOD YOU MEAN THERE IS TOTALLY SPACE BEHIND THAT LITTLE DOOR WHERE I COULD PUT MY STUFF? WHEN DID YOU FIND THIS OUT? I CAN PUT ANYTHING THAT WILL FIT? WHAT WILL THEY COME UP WITH NEXT? I need to sit down. 

It was just a fleeting thought, shorter than the owner’s pause, but I had to share it here. 

I have had people tell me in a walk through for a listing interview with a straight face “we love this house because there is storage under the stairs.” Then, they pause and wait for me to solemnly take the undertruss of the stairs in, and nod toward them like we just saw the house pull Excalibur from the rock. Trying to be polite, I might say how convenient it must be to put holiday decorations there instead of the attic, and they agree almost giddily, like they are the only people in the universe who have this special, amazing amenity. Call NASA. Alert the Smithsonian.

This is especially the case for owners of raised ranches, where the entry stairs curl around, giving the little cubby a second compartment, no doubt filled with the wonder of a new dimension in the space/time continuum.  These people seriously dig that little area. Do they talk about it when they are alone? Is some women knitting somewhere in the world, then looking up at her husband reading the paper and saying “thank goodness we have that storage under the stairs”? Do they hold hands and gaze at it? 

Of course, I don’t need to tell you that buyers have their own agenda, and while I have gotten plenty of requests to find something with a garage, fireplace or finished basement, I have never been asked to make sure that we only see houses with storage under the stairs. And no buyer has ever said to me “let’s make the offer on the house with the storage under the stairs.”  The fools. They must not get it.

If there is ever a call to give a Nobel Prize to the inventor of the storage under the stairs idea, I promise you that the guy pushing it just put his house on the market, and he’s got a plastic Christmas tree in a box in his cubby. And he keeps losing his pens. 

Right now, you could buy a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home in Ossining for less than $160,000. No, it isn’t a bombed out foreclosure behind a gas station, it is a co-op. Co -ops are one of the most affordable options for housing in all of Westchester county, and Ossining has almost 50 available priced under $200,000. Going further south in areas like White Plains, Scarsdale and Yonkers, hundreds more are available, often at very low price points. 

A co -op is one of the most misunderstood forms of home ownership. Simply put, co -op ownership differs from a condominium in that the owner is actually a shareholder in the corporation that runs the complex and get a proprietary lease to a unit instead of a deed. Because of this hybrid of real estate and stock ownership there is some extra paperwork for the lawyers in the purchase, and prospective buyers have to pass a board review before they can close. Reviews in this day and age are perfunctory, however, and mainly assess the strength of the buyer’s ability to pay their bills, not unlike their own mortgage bank. 

Co-op ownership has some advantages. There are no house or yard headaches such as cleaning gutters or mowing a lawn, and complexes typically have attractive amenities like gyms, pools and community rooms. But to me, by far the best advantage to co ops is that they are among the most affordable homes in Westchester. Indeed, they have been deemed the “starter home of Westchester County” for years now. In an area that seems to export people in droves to outlying areas like Dutchess and Orange Counties and out of state, they can mean the difference between staying and leaving home. 

If a housing budget is low, the option between renting and owning might mean living 2 hours or more north of Manhattan. Co-op ownership allows a person to live here in Westchester- affordably, without having to add 2 hours a day to their commute living in the “exurbs” of Orange or Dutchess counties. In real estate, it is all about location. To my way of thinking, it is better to live locally in something affordable, than to be add travel and commute time just to live under a roof that won’t break the bank. If you agree, you’ll have plenty of choices in co-ops right here in Westchester County. Perhaps if more people realized this we might not see so many younger adults migrating from Westchester to points far beyond. 

You can search co-ops all over Westchester with a free Listingbook account. 

Growth and the addition of a new team member is always a happy event for us, and I am pleased to introduce Linda Polay as the newest licensee on the J. Philip team. Linda has quite a stellar background, and I look forward to supporting her in serving her lucky clients. 

Linda comes to us with 6 years of real estate sales under her belt, most recently with Coldwell Banker, and almost 20 years of retail management and sales in the Garment District of New York City- no easy place to cut one’s teeth. She was also a buyer for Sterns, which is no job for the meek. She has sold multiple millions of residential real estate since getting her license, and a review of her transactions show some tremendous advocacy- one recent transaction where she represented a buyer closed at 9% below asking price, quite a steep discount, and one of her listings sold for $65,000 over asking– and the list price was below $200,000! When you get your sellers far more than asking and your buyers far less than asking you are good. 

The thing that sticks out for me early on in getting to know Linda was the thought and consideration she put into choosing her next company. We first interviewed over a month ago, and her line of questioning was not fluffy- it wasn’t about her, it was about how we could support her in serving her clients. Successful agents come from there. Linda’s clients will get excellent service and results because she not only truly cares, she is savvy and capable. 

A Jersey girl who is now a Westchester resident for 15 years, she resides in Cortlandt Manor with her husband and two sons. Linda serves all of Westchester and Putnam for residential buyers and sellers,and even has some experience with land. You can reach her at (914) 384-5596 or lindapolay@jphilip.com. Reach out to Linda and good things will happen. 

While I cannot be in attendance at Inman Connect San Francisco, I am following the Twitter stream on the event. I wish I could go, but I have to make hay while the sun shines. One tweet that caught my attention referenced a speaker by the name of Laura Roeder advising attendees to NOT blog daily, but to get out there and do business. Now, in fairness to Laura, there is no context to the sentiment, so I don’t have the full picture. I’ll offer my opinion with that caveat. 

In an of itself, I think that blogging is a smart thing to do daily so long as it is part of a plan that includes a full dose of other work. I do post 30-40 times a month on various sites, primarily right here, and were I to cut back, it would not help me do more business, it would set me back. Now I’ll be the first to say that if you are a new agent and all you do for business is blog, you have a problem. The same goes for agents who blog or hang out on Facebook to avoid other less comfortable work. That isn’t smart. But all things being equal, I believe that blogging daily, if you have the inclination, is better than not blogging daily. So long as you are taking care of everything you should and have a workable plan, I am all for it.  

I have never heard of Ms Roeder, but she has close to 15,000 followers in Twitter  and she has the feathers in her cap to be a speaker for Inman, so she must be quite credible. Her website says that she is a social media expert, and while her profile kind of makes me feel old, I respect her views. Her “about” page states that she has been quoted in the LA Times, CNet and been a contributor to a number of industry blogs.

Well, I outsell all but a few out of 7500 agents in my market, been in the NY Times, ABC World News, AP, AOL, and several other outlets, and I am on the board of a very forward thinking and large MLS. My blogging has played a large role in that stuff, and I say posting daily is good so long as it doesn’t undermine other work. As I said to a colleague on Twitter, that’s what the other 23 hours a day are for. So if you want to do it daily, just put out quality content, unless you live in New York. 🙂

I am going to follow Laura going forward because her blog and other writing strike me as quite on point, and disagreeing with her on this matter may be a non sequitor, as I was 2000 miles away when she made her presentation. I hope to catch her next time. In the meantime, I’ll go back to selling real estate and blog about things other than blogging. 

Today I came home to the usual flurry email requests for feedback for a full afternoon of showings homes to a great buyer client. I’m not the biggest fan of feedback for reasons posted before, but this afternoon I was more forthcoming. The following are my responses to feedback requests that I really did send. See if you can guess which house is the front runner, or if any of the feedback told the agent something they didn’t already know. 

1. Showed well, but there was some concern about the shower in the former bedroom closet, the illegal bathroom, and the price. 
2. There was doubt that the client would be able to fit her car in the altered garage without surgical precision and petroleum jelly. The vast brick facade (a school gym is directly across the street) dominating the front view was a deal killer. 
3. Client felt that house was considerably overpriced for the condition.
4. Thanks for the showing. 
5. Would have been far more comfortable if owner’s wife was out of the shower when he showed us the bathroom and asked her to keep curtain closed. 
6. Nice home, but the automat-styled kitchen was a bit too much to take on.
7. Not bad, just wondering if there was a way to gain access to rear yard? We couldn’t do much better than see from upstairs. Does the owner collect/make crucifixes? Client was wondering. 

There you have it folks. Most of this stuff was obvious, and much of the “revelations” were just poor client education. We don’t want to see the woner’s wife in the shower. It would be actually nice to walk in the back yard. I am sure tha agent knows that the school towers over the listing and that the “garage” was best used for a mini. 

Now I’ll count the hours from the calls from the listing agents to tell me why 20+ religious artifacts is a room in great staging, how 3/4 of a garage is good for hand/eye coordination drills, and an expensive kitchen renovation in 50’s diner style is really neat-o, which will move my client not a millimeter. The time to scramble is not after we see the home, it is before the showing. 

I could start a whole separate blog for the things I consciously decide not to write about, because it’s just too easy to express bemusement or incredulity at the stuff a small number of agents do with a straight face. For example, a few minutes ago an agent just asked me “what kind of person” my client was when I called about their listing. I responded that she has mastered walking on her hind legs. But that’s not the purpose of this article. 

Earlier today, after all week of no response, I finally got a return call from the buyer agent whose client was ostensibly about to sign the contract on my listing. The last we heard they were supposed to meet with their attorney Monday, and then nothing. 

“I’m on vacation,” my -ahem-colleague said, “but I’m calling you back as a courtesy.” 

Well gee. What a mensch. Calling me back from the beach or hotel. How nice of. Are vacations some new real estate agent union benefit we got from management? I never got the memo. I always thought that when you went on vacation, you, um, TOLD people, and you had a co worker COVER for you so your files didn’t crap out. 

But that’s just me. 

Anyway, my compadre had no update other than that the people “were supposed to sign sometime this week.”

WOW. It must be nice to just leave town, disappear for the week, and expect deals to close themselves. 

How would the buyer clients feel if we got a competing offer and I couldn’t reach the agent about it? 

What if my seller interpreted the disappearing act as disinterest and elected to engage someone else? 

Real estate is not a wage-earning job where the dishrag is waiting in the same place you left it when the shift ended. It requires care and maintenance of the shifting sands of a transaction, and if you can’t have your hands on the rudder, you absolutely have to make sure someone can cover for you. The cavalier attitude of this agent about basically deserting the file for the week makes me wonder what else was missed on the buyer’s behalf. 

Choose your agent wisely, folks. Real estate mistakes are expensive. 

I see an interesting trend on the blog dashboard this morning from colleagues across the US- poor conduct by agents, and understandable incredulity by the authors about it. I agree. If an agent won’t present an offer, return a call, or just behave, it is a problem with an unattracive domino effect. I myself have had many a problem, for example, with agents who won’t allow me to show their listings, typically by indifference, and it has strained my standing with my own buyer client. And when someone puts an unethical impediment between you and dinner, that is bad. 

There is no one size fits all solution, but one rather under-discussed move is to simply call the agent’s broker or manager. As a broker-owner myself, anything that is a red flag for liability is a huge concern and top priority. In many cases, a call or email to the branch manager or supervising broker will get that call returned or offer answered, and often quickly. While the response may be slower by a few hours, putting it in writing in for form of an email is pretty effective. 

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the manager may not be useful. I have had my share of shoulder shrugging, milquetoast losers without the backbone to handle the very people they were hired to handle. That is for another article. But if the manager has a half a clue, they’ll get a result. You may not like the result, as even managers will spin and talk fast to preserve an in house sale for example, but it also puts them on notice that you are no doormat, and that you won’t tolerate unprofessional conduct. 

It is a shame that we have to engage these sorts of discussions in our industry, but it is a fact of life until stndards are raised meaningfully. I can tell you this much: anyone that calls me on an issue with one of my team members can rest at night that I won’t stop drilling for answers on the matter until I hit water. Problems are training opportunities anyway, and brokers should be the go to people when their agents cause them. 

Item: The Senate passed a measure late yesterday evening to ensure that buyers of homes have their rights to “Housing with Dignity.” The act’s precepts include the right to an home in “compliance” and other minimal, basic housing rights, or to have a renumeration for the purchase of homes not in conformity to the proposed bill, which goes to the House on Friday. 

Entitled “Deserving Everything Updated For A Song” (DUEFAS), the intention of the bill is to reverse owner bias against buyers seeking affordable housing. A groundbreaking piece of legislation, the bill, if signed into law, will mandate that all homes sold the contiguous 48 states, Hawaii and Alaska have granite and stainless steel kitchens, bathrooms of marble, basements that are hermetically sealed from moisture of any kind, floor carpeting devoid of any odor a bloodhound could detect, household appliances that run in molecular silence from a minimum distance of 5 feet, at least two walk in closets, and “gleaming” hardwood floors. An earlier measure mandating crown molding and chair rail failed after the wainscoting coalition of the Midwest threatened to filibuster. The bill’s preamble statement condemning Formica as a plot to kill middle class America was also removed. 

Considered an important measure for buyer protection by Senate Democrats, the bill mandates up to a a 33 1/3% discount for all buyers buying a home not in compliance with the new requirements, as well as a price control disallowing any list price more than 1% above the median for that census tract, or an amount equal to what a buyer’s relative would recommend so long as they have bought a home once in the past 26.5 years, or have a comb over, hairnet, or exposed buttock in normal bending over, whichever is lower. 

In related news, the Republican controlled House of Representatives passed the Feaux Equity Aid Statute (FEqAS), geared toward the protection of seller’s interest in their primary life investment. Deemed the Republicans’ answer to the Democrat “attack on ownership,” the bill proposes certain inalienable protections for owners, including these highlights:

• The Sentimental Conscienciousness Clause (Senta-clause) attaching premium intrinsic value to parts of the home based on “relevant life experiences,” exempting those parts of the home from needing a physical update. 
• Establishing the efficacy of Duct Tape as a universally acceptable remedy for any household repair.
• The “Foreword Progress” rule, enabling homeowners to price protection based on the highest price sold in a thousand foot radius in the prior 48 months.
• A one-time right to a dispensation from market activity pricing with the solemn utterance before two witnesses of the words “I know what my house is worth (,dammit (optional*))”. 
• The Code Schmode addendum, allowing for up to 400 square feet of indoor or outdoor improvements such as decks, bathrooms and basements to be allowed to pass title in lieu of permits so long as the contractor was a relative or “sharp guy.”

If you are paying Cash for real estate, especially here in in a high cost area like Westchester, I have some advice as a broker who has worked with many cash buyers. First, congratulations on havng the recources to pay cash. You are blessed.

Here are a few steps that will help you in your efforts.

1. Get a statement for the account with the funds. It can be printed up from your online account, gotten from your bank branch or financial institution, or one of the statements they mail out periodically. 
2. Get a sharpie or magic marker. 
3. Take the sharpie or magic marker and black out your account number. Photocopy the document. 
4. Give the copied document to your agent so they submit it with your offer. 
5. If steps 1-4 won’t suffice for some unfathomable reason, a letter from your personal banker, CPA or attorney stating that you have the funds in liquid form will do. This is frankly, more work, but it will suffice. 

If you haven’t met Paco, you’ll be hearing about him on the news. Paco is the little rescued Chihuahua who chased armed robbers out of his master’s store. He didn’t care that they had a shotgun or dwarfed him, he still barked his head off and chased them out of the store like they were dinner if he caught up. 

Paco didn’t rest on his laurels or tell the robbers what he did in 2006. Paco didn’t tell his master to let the lawyers work it out. Paco was indifferent to the odds. He took matters into his own paws charge. 

My old head rowing coach in college, Tully Vaughan, always said this: “Crew doesn’t build character. It reveals character.”  Character is just something you have. You don’t learn to pull Excalibur out of the stone, you can or you can’t. You don’t work up to holding the hammer of Thor at the gym. You either belong in Asgaard or you don’t. Here’s what you don’t know about someone until you do know- whether they have the heart of a wolf or a chihuahua. Paco has the heart of a wolf. 

If I seem overdramatic about some dog barking at strangers and probably not knowing what a gun even is, perhaps I am. But I have a soft spot in my heart for the diminutive and the underdog. Being a shorter dude myself and often underestimated, I eat this stuff up. I have been a giant killer since the days I opened my firm for business. 

Dogs don’t understand fanfare. They understand belly rubs. If Paco could speak, he’d just say he was doing his job. 

To me, the take away is to do your job with Paco’s faith and you’ll kill giants. To consumers, there is also a lesson- biggest isn’t best. The agent who’ll do the best job for you may not work for the swanky label, they work for the result. My boss is a collective of 4 with a combined age of 26. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for them. 

Go out today and make magic. 

Some bonus inspiration:

Raw surveilance footage of the event on the owner’s Youtube account. 
Heather Dorniden’s amazing comeback. (hat tip to BLiz Spear)
People are awesome.

I don’t often blog about listings because I focus more on commentary here, but I think the walking tours we now do for our listings are very appealing. I do them Bob Vila style, with a candid, conversational walk through as if we were chatting together touring the house. I don’t use a script, so where language limps I add an annotation for clarity or to flat out correct myself. 

We just listed this home, and I think you’ll find that the tour will pique your curiosity to see the place, not just for what the walkthrough shows, but also for what it does not show, such as the pond on the other side of the grounds. 

Price taxes, and other specifics are on the walk through, and if you dig the place or have questions, give me a call or send an email. 

This is a beautiful home in Philipstown with a small pond, lovely grounds and considerate owners, and I believe that it is priced right as well. Enjoy my nasal voice.