Team Reba Real Estate

Here is a link to my “August Real Estate Update“:

This Newsletter is full of interesting and useful information that I think you will enjoy whether you are a buyer, seller, homeowner, or renter.

This month’s issue includes topics such as:

“Five Keys To Successful Negotiations”;
“How to Recognize a Sellers Market”;
“Most Neighbors Still Connect The Old Fashioned Way”;
“Making Your Home Appealing On A Budget”;
“Final Walk-Through Tips”;

Plus a roundup of July real estate activity as well as much more advice and information.

I hope you enjoy this monthly newsletter. If you have any comments, please e-mail them to me. Or, if you would like to see a certain topic covered in future months, let me know that too!

Found on Yahoo Real Estate pages online is this great article by Amy Fontinelle of www.Investopedia.com.  For anyone who is considering purchasing a home for the first time, it’s worth the time to read.

I’d have to say that in addition to what she wrote here, it’s important for first time buyers to set realistic expectations for themselves. Today’s younger generations have grown up in much bigger homes than was common in generations past.  The concept of a “starter home” is a little foreign to many. 

The other big benefit of working with an agent is that it’s a great way to use their experience to get an overall view of the process and walking through it so you know what to expect in addition to a professional viewpoint of what’s going on in the market for housing and with pricing trends.  Plus, there is the added advantage of them being a personal resource for referrals to lenders, inspectors, escrow and more as you go through the purchase process.

We’ve been working on a transaction for one of our clients since late October 2009.  The client came to us the year prior thinking it would take him 2 months to get ready for on market, but then took 7 months to get there. I’d done a lot of early review of the property to try and determine our chances with FHA since only one part of the complex was initially approved when the development was completed.  For those not familiar, if your complex isn’t already approved you can do what is called a “spot approval” with FHA but only IF your building meets certain criteria.  At the beginning we were in good shape.

However, late 2009 brought lots of changes in FHA and as most of us agents know the spot approval process was in jeopardy of going away - and that’s exactly the kind of buyer we ended up in contract with so we knew it might be touch and go as we targeted a closing to meet the initial 1st time buyer tax credit deadline.  The FHA spot approval cutoff is now pushed to Feb 1st of 2010, but many of the tightening aspects of FHA have been happening along the way to that new deadline.  For one, we got hit with this transaction failing at one point because even though we’d had an FHA appraisal completed, we got turned down for spot approval because the association hadn’t yet approved their recent reserve study.  FHA was requiring that reserve studies be within the 12 months prior and the last approval of one was from 3 years ago - even though the association had a study in hand, it just hadn’t been approved by the board yet as they continued getting bids for the roofing element.

The buyer’s agent and the lender for this deal have been great about staying diligent with the file and found alternate ways to have the budget review of the association used for the spot approval - and on my end I was coordinating with other listing agents with clients in the complex to have us all pushing support of approving the reserve study. One agent had her client’s lender submitting the entire complex to FHA for approval.

With all of us working in concert with each other we got the wonderful news on Friday that our approval from FHA was accepted!  Not just for my client’s spot approval, but the entire complex will now be approved.  YEAH!  Now, we are back on track for closing - 2 months later than expected - but closing nonetheless.  All the selling clients involved are very relieved and the buyers are all starting to get excited about their purchases again.  It’s a new day and time in real estate, and those of us with the nerves of steel and willingness to work hard, and together, to overcome the obstacles that arise for our clients it is very worthwhile.

We are a growing team of real estate professionals called Team Reba, working under RE/MAX Metro Eastside in the Seattle/Bellevue metro area. At this time we are looking for a licensed assistant to work with us to maintain and improve client satisfaction, provide client updates, marketing and communication. We use a multitude of social media tools but we also utilize tried and tested marketing concepts. Client satisfaction is focus #1 for us.

There are 3 licensees in the team currently and we already work with a transaction coordinator out of our RE/MAX office on a per transaction basis so we don’t need someone to open title and escrow for us. Our business covers both residential and commercial/investment client needs in a 3-county area (King, Snohomish, Pierce). We engage in traditional residential transactions as well as working a lot of short sale and are building our REO business. Our commercial work has been heavy in MFH, mixed use, redevelopment and some leasing work.

Skills needed for the job are a positive outlook, ability to work in a fast-paced busy environment with multiple priority projects, good communication skills (verbal, written, phone), creativity, fast learner and a sense of humor.

If you are afraid of writing, don’t like calling people unless you have 100% of all the details, or are more worried about how you look than getting the job done… do me and you a favor and don’t contact us.

If, however, you want a challenging and rewarding environment where your work will make the difference in your income potential, please send me your resume.

Position is based in a home office environment with pets. If you have allergies to cats or dogs, then this job won’t work for you. If you love animals, we can make it work. Heck, if you have a dog you want to bring to work with you, we’re cool with that too. Office hours for the position typically are starting at 9 or 10am, ending around 5pm - if you’re right for the job, we can discuss it.

Below I am going to paste in a long response I put in to an Active Rain article today.  The original topic will be referred to by this link.  Basically, the remarks by the original writer are a series of complaints against other agents regarding response time to emails.

Here is my reply to that post:

Clearly there are some disconnects in the industry and not all of them are with respect to professionalism. I came from 15 years in the tech industry before getting into real estate 6 years ago. I literally had many agents yell at me when emailing them about their listings. Their comments were as such, “don’t email me, I only check that once a week!”  My, how times have changed. Now everyone wants to scream about not getting their email replied to.

There are many things at work here, some of them economic, some of them how our industry operates, and more. First of all, I’ll throw out the economic factor.  Not all agents have the money to upgrade their equipment each year. We’re all business owners and we have to make decisions on where our money is spent. For those that run out to buy the latest iPhone, well, good for you, but not everyone is going to do that.  I should have prefaced that with the fact that I do have a Sprint HTC phone and have capabilities to email, text, call and open keyboxes from my phone. So, I’m all set. But, I know other agents who aren’t.

With regard to sending offers in the evening and expecting a reply.  If you knew you were going to be writing an offer that night, and we’re discussing degrees of professionalism here, it would have been reasonable to consider that YOU, the buyer’s agent, might have called the listing agent during business hours to confirm their schedule. Plus, there is also an option in many email programs to require a notice of receipt for your email - use it, you might have your stress levels go down.  Oh, you don’t have the email program that offers this tool?  It’s too expensive to get or maintain? Ah, then perhaps you might understand why someone else doesn’t have a different tool that you have. We all, as business owners, have to budget our funds to all the tools we use and because of this our industry is not standardized - heck, it’s one of the reasons why this field is so damned competitive. The sad part is when the public doesn’t require their agents to have some of these tools. But, I can tell you, not all clients care.  Many of my older clients would prefer the older methods of in-person contact, less email, and more high touch.  It all depends on the client.  My technology based and younger clientele require the constant in touch mode of work and we strive to do that as well, while also letting them know that we respect their time and we expect the same of them.

It’s easy to rant on this initial post about unavailability, but then I also see agents getting worn out from working non-stop.  Lord knows we’ve been working mostly 7 days a week since last fall but with mostly listings and short sales to show for it… all of which take time and money. It’s important for all of us to continue having a personal life because most of our referral base comes from this group, so it’s important to feed all sides of your business and to prevent burn out.

One gal (comment 101) wants to say that if you only want to work 9 to 5 you should get out of the business.  I disagree. I’d like all the part time people to remove themselves from the business, because it is most likely that these are the folks that are being complained about in this post. When the NAR puts out statistics that show a strong number of our members are part time agents, you can imagine that this might cause difficulty in reaching some agents. I recall a transaction I had about 2 years ago where an agent asked me not to call him during the day as he was at his main job - he only did real estate part time and couldn’t take his real estate “work” calls during the day. The first time he told me this I was flabbergasted… then later I was just annoyed because it meant he was requiring me, the person who already works in real estate 50-60 hours a week, to spend even more time in my so-called off hours working.

There can be a shared middle ground on some of these things and rather than just complaining and hoping people “get it”, we should continue to push for high standards, lessening the number of non-serious agents in the field (read part-time), and using those tools that are at our disposal to verify transmission of documents.  Remember the fax?  If I think contact is going to be questionable upon the evening delivery of a contract, I email AND fax it.  That way I can get verification of delivery at a minimum on one of those methods.

And speaking of that… many MLS areas don’t allow email transmission of documents unless the contract has it in writing that both parties agree to it, so you should make sure you’re following your own local rules in that regard. I’m not defending the inaction or non-responsiveness of others, but for goodness sake, there are some things you can do about it.