Open House Advice

Today many of you will search open house listings, visit an open house or speak with an agent about a house you saw in the paper or online. As you have those conversations with agents, please remember a few key facts about Open Houses.

1) When you call an agent about a property they have advertised that ad becomes the "procuring cause" of your contact with the property, and your rights to use a buyer's agent have been lost.

2) When you visit an open house and do not sign in as working with an agent, that open house becomes the procuring cause, and again your rights to use a buyer's agent have been lost.

3) When you search Boston Homes, the Globe or Boston.com you need to remember that you are not seeing a large portion of the homes currently on the market. Since Open Houses don't usually lead to the sale of that specific property offices are cutting back more and more on their weekend advertising. The open house is almost exclusively seen as a tool for agents to generate contacts with potential buyer clients these days. This means the office, as property sits on the market longer, has to take a good hard look at how many properties go in the weekend publications.

These three facts make it critical that you employ a buyers agent. You need to have a contract signed with this agent to make sure you get your full protection. This contract, except for the most rare situations, is free and the obligation (99.9% of the time) to pay your buyer's agent falls to the seller. I suggest you use this weekend to interview an agent or two. The top agents today will not be sitting in open houses, they will be out viewing property for clients or in the office writing offers for their clients. Remember this as you go out, and make sure you stack the cards as much as you can in your favor. Happy Sunday!

Go Sox! Go Pats!

MCAS Scores are Out

The latest MCAS Scores were released this morning. My quick read looks like the Heath School was the highest performing school in Brookline.

In the real estate world it's still Devotion, Devotion, Devotion, but we'll see how that changes over time. A lot of the difficulty with sending kids to Heath School is affording property in Chestnut Hill. It will be interesting to see where Brookline ranks across the board when the state rankings come out.

Bringing Down the House (Again)

Front page article in today's TAB about how a Newton developer wants to tear down three properties in "North Brookline." This is my neighborhood, so I take a strong interest in following these stories. The article references two key points in my mind. Also, see my earlier post.

1) This developer has a track record in Brookline when it comes to these projects.

2) My neighbors want to impose a historic district on our neighborhood so we can create our own review committee.

On the first point, I have been in the most recent Brookline work by this developer and I have to say, while the exterior seemed decent enough, I felt like he was making the same house over and over again with "nice" finishes but nothing special. Also, the layouts as I saw them were not as well thought out as they could be leaving me to prefer projects like the 99 Winchester development.

On the second, and much more important and interesting, point, I am all for it. Tell me where I can sign up! Don't get me wrong here, I am all for responsible development. Any time we can take a house that is in complete disrepair and turn it into a neighborhood gem it becomes an extreme benefit to us all. However, looking down my street (Winchester) and seeing super-modern exterior condo buildings on top of classic old Victorian houses upsets me. I know of one group of developers who are currently lying in wait to get the house next to them so they can tear down three houses in a row and build a massive development. Developers all impact most of our lives, whether we like them or not. I look at the buyer clients I see who want stainless kitchens, upgraded baths, parking garages, etc... and I know that they will most likely find them in a property that has been improved by a professional developer.

The project we represented on Atherton Road last year is proof of this. The developer took a completely run down house where the whole front portion was sinking into the ground, totally renovated it into amazingly beautiful condos and helped turn around that part of the neighborhood. As a show of thanks to his immediate neighbors, he also paved their driveways and parking areas for them.

My consistent theme when talking about these projects is to encourage the developer and his agent to get out and meet with the community to let everyone feel involved in the project. Being a successful developer is a lot like being a politician and you need to be great at public relations. It is the charismatic people who do well in this world, and I encourage the parties involved in this to start getting together and talking. Good, responsible development is needed to sustain EVERY neighborhood. Bad, irresponsible development is the easiest way to kill a neighborhood. It's a fine line, and maybe we need a committee to discuss it. Hildy Grossman, you know where to find me!

5 Things You Should Expect in a Mortgage?

My TiVo Home Screen today had the Bank of America paid advertisement for "5 things you should expect in a mortgage." I would not be doing my job if I didn't check it out, so here goes:

You can go online and apply for this mortgage with no application fee. From there you can get pre-qualified in minutes. After that, you pay no PMI (private mortgage insurance), you pay no closing fees and then they have a "best value guarantee." Finally they offer a "close on time" guarantee.

Let's break this down:

1) No application fee, but is there a processing fee, a credit report fee, an appraisal fee, a title fee?

2) Pre-qualified in minutes through their website, but is your application going to someone who understands that yes, a condo might actually be worth $2,000,000 where you live?

3) No PMI. Sounds nice, but let's just look at the news recently. It seems to me that the stock market just dropped everyone carrying "risky" loans on their heads. PMI is insurance the lender takes out when less than the traditional 20% of the purchase price is being but down up front. How does the lack of PMI affect the rate?

4) You pay no closing fees. Sounds great, but what about closing costs? There is an underwriting fee, a document recording fee, there are title fees, and then each bank has a closing attorney they have to employ. These are just a very few of the things that you need to close EVERY loan, at least here in Massachusetts. So who pays them? I promise you Bank of America is not paying those costs themselves. Take a look at your APR or your rate as well as your "Good Faith Estimate of Closing Costs" that each and every lender must provide by law to every borrower prior to closing.

5) You will get the best "value." Now, that's a little subjective, isn't it? What determines value? Who dictates which part of it causes the best "value" return. Nowhere do they say you get the best rate or the lowest closing costs. Simply put, there are a TON of holes in this.

6) Close on time guarantee. Well, that means that within their window to turn things around, they will close on time. An airline can schedule 3 1/2 hours for a 2 3/4 hour flight. If they land at 3:05 they got you there "early" right? Can they close the loan from application to payment in less than 30 days? Can they adjust on the fly if something comes up in your purchase and sale and has to be dealt with?

My experience with large, non-community banks, is you're in a lot of trouble when it comes time to getting a loan approved for "high-value" real estate markets. The loan processor in Indiana does not know what they're looking at when the appraisal is submitted and thinks that our real estate values are completely out of whack. Also, is your loan origination team going to be able to sit down with you (or your agent) in person to talk through the speed-bumps that come up in the process? Are they going to have an attorney who you have access to available to help settle any issues? Finally, with no PMI, are they going to be able to guarantee a competitive rate?

My advice: find a local lender. They can work for a major national company (Countrywide, Wells Fargo, etc...) but make sure the team you are dealing with knows your town well and can go to bat for you when the going gets tough. Also, make sure you find someone who will give you an honest answer when things start to go wrong. I've seen good lenders swoop in and save a deal with 24 hours notice, and I saw one truly impressive one close a loan that another bank had messed up with literally hours to spare before Christmas Eve.

Bank of America is fine for your checking account or your debit card, but let's leave lending to the few people out there who are still going strong and know how to do it.

While I was away

Last week I took some time to pursue my life passion of competitive sailing in Marblehead, but while I was away Jessica Scarpati of the Brookline TAB wrote a great article about the Permit Parking situation in Brookline. The article was a result of my comment on the TAB Blogs. Many people don't know that the town has started offering $25 annual on-street daytime permits. I went to a few of the Transportation Board meetings to help shape this policy, but a lot of the shaping was done by the Coolidge Corner Merchants Association.

Here are the important details:

On Monday (10/1) they will start enforcing the two-hour limit for non-permitted cars.

The permit allows you to park for more than 2 hours at a time on your street ONLY.

The permit still does not allow "overnight (2 AM - 6 AM)" parking on the streets. ("Never in our lifetime" - Michael Sandman - Transportation Board Chairman)

You have to go to the Transportation Department on Hammond St. to get your permit. Make sure they do not write your full home address on the sticker.