The following is a comment I wrote this morning on this article on real estate brokers in the New York Times. The piece was on smaller brokers contrasted with larger ones, and as is common in Times articles on brokerage, the haters were out there in the comments telling us how bad brokers are. 

I begged to differ, especially in light of the week I just had. I don’t know who these people are or how they came to their opinions, but in my experience the people who hate brokers, or feel we don’t fulfill a purpose, often did a poor job choosing their agent in the past. 

I felt my reply deserved to be said here in a blog post. 

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I have to laugh at the trolls who badmouth brokers in these comments. I own my own firm. In the past week, I have spent 4 hours in a cold wet basement de-winterizing a short sale (which I paid for), saved a deal from going south after the buyer found the house still listed on a “by owner” site, closed another short sale that took FOUR YEARS to conclude, and basically worked from dawn until past midnight every day on behalf of my clients.

The notion that agents only smile and unlock doors is laughable. And if you think that the work ends once you “find” the house you clearly understand nothing about the process. Banks aren’t loaning money. Homes aren’t appraising. Many “buyers” are phony. Just as you pay for every mile traveled by a loaf of bread in the supermarket, you pay for the risks brokers take, the unrealistic sellers who demand that we buy expensive paper ads for their overpriced home, the buyers who call us Sunday night at 7pm demanding to see a house (then often don’t show up) and the buyers who work us like rented mules and then buy with another broker. Every low cost brokerage found out the hard way that discounting is unsustainable.

If you had a bad experience with an agent, look in the mirror. Did you check them out? Were they a relative or buddy from your kid’s cub scout pack? What did you do to verify the claims of the agent? 99% of the haters spent more time choosing their cell phone than their broker. If you think we suck profit, try getting your lawyer to do what we do. Most of the work they’d never stoop to, and the billable hours for the rest would dwarf the flat fee most lawyers charge for a regular closing.

Want to suffer? Make the hugest transaction of your life a do it yourself project.

How to get that Westchester County Home Staged to Sell!

First, make sure the landscaping is appealing with decorative additions. A mere lawn won’t do. 

Next, consider the Feng Shui of the “regular guy.”

If you think your home might appeal to a certain niche, leverage that fact. This home, for example, would be great for a cat lover. 

Panelling is out. Consider covering yours if you can’t paint over or remove. Anything is better than panelling, even letters pertaining to your legal matters. 

Yes, these were all taken at the same house. I left out the ninja knives!

I was invited by the Larchmont Rotary Club to speak on real estate this past Friday. It was a cool experience. I was unaware of the Rotary and the good work they do, but that, along with lunch, was a cool fringe benefit. And they gave me a pen. 

Not long ago I blogged about speaking at another brokerage’s “lunch and learn,” which is something I have now done twice. It might seem counter intuitive to train the competition, but it has other good outcomes: good relations with cooperating firms and raising the bar in the industry, to name two. In May I am going to speak before the Monmouth County Women’s Council of Realtors, so I guess my speaking schedule is growing. 

For the rotary, I wasn’t in front of licensees, I was actually addressing consumers. My material dealt with selling your home in the current slump. One gratifying thing: among my small audience were two former clients. One had a successful closing. The other, a builder, never sold. I acknowledged this, and he graciously said I did a good job anyway. I loved that. 

Anyway, I’ll continue speaking, and if you want to hear me yap to your group, my contact information is all over my sidebar. And you don’t need to feed me or shower me with gifts! 

We had some massive flooding yesterday all over the county, closing most of the main highways, such as the Saw Mill Parkways and 9A. It was probably a mix of the thaw upstate along with torrential rtains the past few days. I snapped an amazing video of a parking lot in Hawthorne that looked more like a fast moving river, and some other spectacles. Getting anywhere south of I-287 was nearly impossible. 

These are some photos of VE Macy Park in Ardsley, NY which is alongside the Saw Mill River. The park is a big grass field with a soccer playing field on one end. Yesterday it was a pond. 

The picnic tables these guys are standing on were actually floating. 

9A was closed as well. I got a ticket for taking this photo! Can you guess why? 

Here is the video of the Garden Center’s parking lot in Hawthorne being overrun by the flood waters:

Don’t mess with Mother Nature. 

$295,000 will get you a solid 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath colonial in the village.

The one we just closed on yesterday was built in the 1980s at the end of a dead end street in the Sparta neighborhood, walking distance from the Arcadian Shoping Center and the Jug Tavern. It boasted a finished walkout basement with sliding doors to a patio, a 2-car garage, gorgeous landscaping, a formal dining room, hardwood floors, central vaccum, and plenty of closet space. 

We wish the new homeowners luck in their new home, and we wish our seller client Evelyn much happiness in her new life now that the home is sold and closed. We’ll remain in touch. 

If you’d like to find yourself a nice home like this one in Ossining or the surrounding area, get yourself a free Listingbook account and search the MLS database almost exaclty like an agent. 

Last year I blogged about the 1,096 day short sale I had in Putnam County getting a “final approval.” The thought entered my mind that blogging about such a snake-bitten file prior to closing might jinx it, but with a final approval and a solid buyer I thought “what could go wrong?”

Plenty. 

I won’t bore you with the details, but when we failed to close by the deadline the lender rather callously re-set the timer and made us start from scratch. They ordered a new Broker Price Opinion (BPO) and that came in $100,000 higher. The buyer’s mortgage commitment expired. We were back at square one. It was heartbreaking yet almost humorous if you could somehow divorce yourself from the fact that my clients financial life, let alone my living, hung in the balance. 

10 months later, we finally closed. The buyer came up in price $50,000 to make the deal work, and coordinating approvals from the second lender and first, coupled with the buyer’s new mortgage, took us from this past December to today. My youngest son, who was born a week after the place was originally listed in 2007, turns 4 tomorrow. It will be the first day of his life when I am not working on getting this home sold. 

My typical short sale is incredibly faster than this- as a matter of fact, my friend and CDPE (certified distressed property expert) instructor, Mark Boyland, joked with me last week that he’d like to help me get approvals in under 1000 days. Well, we can smile about it now. 

There isn’t much more to say, except that we’re relieved and glad it is over with a happy outcome. The buyer hung in for 18 months. The sellers had their hearts broken so many times we lost count. And yet there we all were at the closing table together, as if we were graduating from a 4-year education together.

4 years and 4 days. The only thing missing was pomp and circumstance.

It is a rare thing for me to have to reconnect and heat up a winterized home, especially as a listing agent, but I did just that today for a short sale scheduled to close Monday. The interior temperature when we started at around 1pm was 39 degrees, and it was cold and rainy today. Shivering in the basement as I watched my plumber work, I really looked forward to that furnace firing up and getting some warmth.

It was a slow process due to the age of the home and the type of system. De-winterizing a home can only take a half hour in most cases, but today it actually took four. At one point we thought we were complete but hit a snag and I ended up calling the HC/AC firm on the maintenance tag, who came within 15 minutes and had us going. 

I tend to get a little funny when I am cold and irritable, and I said to the second contractor “you mean, just standing here and cursing at the boiler won’t work?”

Total damage on the day was $475 between the two contractors. I’ll never get reimbursed; the short sale bank won’t throw in a dime and I have to view it as the cost of doing business. 

It felt really nice to return home and sit in front of a roaring foreplace after shivering in that basement for 4 hours. Yesterday I had a great appraisal with a big huggable dog. Today I froze my buns off. No day is the same in this business. But my clients are great people and I am happy to get this done for them. That’s what I think about when I feel cold. 

I’m not the biggest fan of attending appraisals, but sometimes I have to make the best of it when so conscripted. Today was one of those days, and prior to meeting the appraisor I ducked into the office of the listing brokerage to say hello to the broker and recharge my lockbox smart card. After hugs and card updating, I pulled up to the house 15 minutes early to see the appraiser there, also early. 

I like that. 

We recognized each other from a prior inspection, and he and I proceeded to enter the house and get started. 

Upon opening the door, I was surprised to hear someone home- it was the owner, who was expecting us. Had I known she’d be home I would have knocked, but she was fine- no worries there. Right next to her, and probably no small reason for her being at such ease, was a chestnut colored mountain with floppy ears: a gigantic mastiff. He had to be 120 pounds. I immediately forgot I was at an appraisal and started making friends with the big pooch. You don’t see a Mastiff every day. And this one was a big mush. 

I’m a dog guy, and I love big dogs like this one. He was a gentle giant, and it was a welcome departure from business as usual. Every so often you get a nice change of pace, and this was the only appraisal I have ever been on since 1996 that I can honestly say was too short. 

Quick one here.

I am getting offers from agents who don’t have a pre approval for their buyers. This means that they are committing the real estate version of picking up hitchhikers- putting people in their car who have not been checked out, vetted, or qualified to buy a home, let alone be alone with them in a vacant house. 

Often, when I ask these agents about it, I get some hokey reply like “they are in the process,” which speaks to complete ignorance about that very process.

Folks, in 2011 it takes a 15 minute call to a loan officer to get run through Desktop Underwriter and you can have an answer by that afternoon, often within an hour in real time. It might take some time to collect documents, but at the very least, having your credit run and stating your assets & income subject to confirmation is not rocket science or over laborious. 

What if they are credit worthy, but they love a house that is beyond their affordability bracket? 

What if they aren’t credit worthy?

It is heartbreaking to find these things out once you find a house you love. 

The facts are that I have listings with 15, 25 and sometimes 40 showings and I know that there aren’t half that many sales in the local markets for that property type. These agents are just chauffeuring people around looking at houses.