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.