Pay me to put a plastic combo box on your front door.

We've all seen them, the lovely 6, 8 or 10 button combination lockboxes that many listing agents throughout the country use. Well, guess what...in Brookline they're the sign of an agent who does not work in our market. I personally don't get the lockbox thing. The premise is you hire me to sell your house (paying me 2.5%+) and I'm going to sit on my couch with my dog just allowing people to traipse through your home (and all of your possessions) unsupervised. We've studied the numbers enough to know that Open Houses are simply tools for a listing agent to meet potential future clients, so by placing a lockbox on your property I'm simply using you to market myself and when it comes time to actually sell your house, I leave it to that handy little gadget pictured above. Nothing tells you how to get to a supermarket or the best way to commute to work like those plastic little buttons. You can't beat the advice and neighborhood insight you get from an often rusted spare set of front door keys.

To you lockboxers....yes, you complain all the time about having to schedule "accompanied showings" here in Brookline. Well, guess what?!?! My job is to be there when you want to see the house. When you drive in from Wellesely, Somerville, Natick....or you work for dial-an-agent.com realty I can promise you that you have not immersed yourself in the neighborhood to know what has recently sold, what has failed to sell, and WHY your buyer should (or should not) buy in this neighborhood. We hear over and over and over again that "real estate is local." I've got pages and pages of stats on this blog that prove that. So, if it's so local and you're driving in from Metro-West, shouldn't you expect a local expert there to help give you the information needed to answer the important questions on the spot?

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Appointments by Text

Increasingly I see agents offering home appointments by text message. Mainly these offers are broker to broker, but as a home buyer would you feel comfortable texting to set up an appointment? As a seller's agent I'd want to have a phone conversation with the person coming to visit to make sure they are a "qualified" buyer first, but am I the only one?

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The Reality Disconnect

I've been fortunate enough to do some local traveling recently and it's caused me to focus in on a fundamental hurdle the Brookline market is facing.

How many Brookline buyers are current Brookline residents?

How many Brookline sellers are staying in Brookline?

Where are our buyers coming from and where are our sellers going?

In discussing these questions with people in my office it's clear that only 10%-20% of the clients we work with are "second-time" Brookline buyers. It makes sense that someone who lives in the "average" condo in Brookline - a $475,000 two bedroom - or the "average" house - a $1.1 million 3 or 4 bedroom needs somewhere to "step-up" to. These two average properties point to some of the fundamental difficulty. How many buyers can move from the average condo to the average house? Very few, if any.

So, the difficulty buyers and sellers are having right now is the realities they live in are in a disconnect. Buyers coming into Brookline are coming from a real estate environment VERY different from what we have here. They might hear the stats from qualified and experienced agents, but they still have to go home and experience the reality of their own neighborhoods. In most cases those other realities are stagnant sales and crumbling prices. Somehow, speaking as an agent, we need to rebuild the trust in buyer agency as a highly experienced and trusted resource. Buyers also need to do their homework and find someone they can trust to work with. Yes, there are so many internet resources out there to help introduce home buyers to the property in their search area, but nothing can substitute for the experience of a well versed professional.



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Beware of this new scam

All of us know that there are many scams out there on the internet. "I'll send you a check for $5000 and you refund me $4000," etc... Well, there is a new one that we've come across recently and it affects those of you who have property listed for sale on MLS.

Recently sellers and agents have been getting strange calls from people interested in renting their properties. The prospective renters state they saw the ad on Craigslist, drove buy the house and are calling because they saw the for sale sign. The confused seller or agent, with no intention of renting the property, comes to find out that someone has taken the photos and MLS descriptions of their sale listing and posted the property for rent on Craigslist. With the increase in "free" access to all MLS data anyone can get a number of interior pictures and pretty much any other data for a sale listing. When the renter goes to investigate they see a sign out front, so it makes perfect sense to them on the surface.

A few people have chased down these fake landlords and engaged them in a dialog about renting. The story usually goes something like "We're taking a short term job and need to quickly move out of the country, and want to keep our house for when we return." In some cases the rent is so amazingly cheap that I'm sure a ton of emails or calls come in. In one example I know of a $1,000,000+ single-family home in a Boston neighborhood that was being "rented" for $1,600. In many instances, unless a prospective renter can make contact with the actual owner or agent, it's impossible to know when this scam occurs.

So, while the rental process is hard enough, and navigating the options on Craigslist is already way too difficult, everyone must be very aware of what they are coming across. In this time of trying to do all business on your own and by email without ever using an agent or meeting anyone in person, it is critical that everyone pays attention to who they are dealing with and where their information is being distributed.

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Finding an Apartment to Rent is Hard...

I've been trying to help a family member find a rental apartment in Boston, Brookline and Allston/Brighton for the past week or so. We've only got Saturday and Sunday to go look and we've been trying to email and call craigslist advertisers to see the apartments they've got posted. Nobody will call us back. Then, I called a company that has a couple of hundred buildings and whose name is plastered all over The Fenway and nobody there will call us back. The vast majority of rental listing agents in Boston (not Brookline) just throw listings against the proverbial Craigslist wall and then just sit and wait. They don't put any pictures up, many of the descriptions aren't descriptive. You can never find an address, and there's no easy way to contact anyone. I even tried to contact that big company with all of the listings to see if I could represent my family member as an agent and they would not let me. Either way I'm going to negotiate against them as hard as possible and the rental commission would be peanuts to begin with, but why can't a consumer be represented in the rental process?

Back when my wife and I were looking at apartments we were moving up from the Baltimore region and we placed calls two weeks in advance to set up appointments. We booked flights and made hotel reservations, showed up in Boston and thankfully I called ahead the morning of to reconfirm our appointments because not a single one of the agents we set meetings with remembered us calling. This led to scrambling to show us whatever building they hoped they could get access to, etc... The most amusing was an agent whose name I remember to this day because of her absolute ineptitude. She forgot our appointment, then had this "amazing and wonderful" building to take us to that was perfect for our needs. We took the T out to Coolidge Corner (from Newbury St.) and she didn't have a T token for herself. We got off the T and she had no idea where the building was. Not having a phone with her she needed to borrow my wife's phone TWICE to get directions to this place that she was so excited to show us. When we finally got there it was nowhere close to what we were looking for and it was a fully staffed high-rise building that had its own rental department. Needless to say, I never spoke to that agent again and we didn't even return to Boston with her. I don't quite know how she paid for the T on the way back in, or if she even was able to find it.

If anyone has a good, reliable rental agent for the Back Bay/Fenway area, please let me know! There are some wonderful rental agents in Brookline, and they are restoring my faith, but who knows if we'll ever get to see anything in Boston.

Would you watch?

So, I've been thinking about the reach the Globe has on real estate news topics. What is the easiest way to take the news and shape it into useful information for our "local" market? What is our "local" market? My brokerage has done a great job of contracting someone to compile "Local Housing Data" graphs and charts (link on the right). I try to talk about Brookline-only topics on these pages. Although, when I look back to my own home search two years ago my wife and I looked in the South End, Back Bay, Cambridge and the Symphony neighborhood. So, is that our "local" market? I'll discuss this later....

Back to my point, if there was a tv show about "local" real estate topics, would you tune in? What would you want on it? Where would you like the focus to be? I've thought for a few months now about having round-table discussions. I do not want to have "seminars" because I think they never really hit the right market. You are speaking over the heads of some of the guests or way below the level of others and at the end of the day many people don't feel like coming back. What if there was a forum with a banker, a broker and an active buyer/seller? Maybe bring in some guest speakers to talk about short-sales, etc...? Would you come? Would having it on TV work better? Please, let me know what you think by clicking here.

A day in the life of...

Everybody knows that if somebody got to live a day in their job they would suddenly have significantly more respect for that job and the people who do it. I happen to work in a field that fills its own section of the newspaper, gets the "most emailed" status on Boston.com on a regular basis and generates millions upon millions of dollars in advertising revenue for all sorts of people and businesses. I spent a whole sick-day (we don't actually get those) on my couch watching real estate tv shows on about seven different networks. Obviously people are interested, and many think they know what goes into the process. What gets overlooked often is that the majority of the country hasn't actually worked with a REALTOR in the last 5+ years. For some, jobs don't change much in 5 years. I can tell you right now that the way I have to do my job has changed a lot in the last 5 months. So, I'll risk boring the 30-50 people who will see this today by describing a day in the life of a REALTOR.

6:15 AM - Up with the dog and a check of the Broker Open House schedule for mid-day.

8:00 AM - Tessie goes to Doggy Day Care every Wednesday to free me up for Broker Tour and our in-office afternoon round-table training session.

8:15 AM - I can't speak for America, but I run on Dunkin'

8:45 AM - Arrive at the office for "floor time." To ensure informed people are available to answer the phone in our office we each have 1-2 three hour time slots a week in which we sit at the front desk and take "floor calls."

9:15 AM - Confirm final list for Broker Tour and make sure my listing is positioned well on the list.

9:30 AM - Prepare Sunday Globe Ad. We try to advertise 3 out of every 4 weekends in print and then distribute to all of the various sites. Our Globe ads usually generate 1 out of 8 open house guests each weekend. This is a major expense and a big answer to "where does the 5% go" question. Unfortunately Globe ads are seen more by sellers checking up on their agents and less by the buyers who might be interested in taking a look.

9:45-10:45 - Scan the major listing search sites like Craigslist, Trulia, Zillow, etc... and make sure that the listing information is accurate and up to date. While I do this I cross reference the MLS listing and the LINK (Downtown Boston MLS) listing. If I get the listing into LINK by Wednesday the open house will be featured in the weekend version of Boston Homes.

10:45-12:00 - Review of new, price changed, expired, withdrawn and under agreement property on MLS. While Thursday is a good day to add most property, the savvy agents will post on Wednesday to get a pre-Open House buzz going during broker tours. Also, since most Globe ads are due by the end of the day a lot of the price changes will go into the computer system today. I use the new information to touch base with my selling clients to use for pricing comparison. For my buyer clients I try to put in initial phone calls on listings that look like they might be potential matches. Without the benefit of going to weekend Open Houses to view available property it is critical that I know as much as possible at all times what has changed about the marketplace. The two listing presentations I've done this week would not have been possible without knowing this information off the top of my head.

12:30-2:00 - Broker Open House at my listing. This once or twice monthly opening is essential to allow brokers to not only preview the listing and hopefully mention it to their buyers, but more importantly to gain their feedback on pricing and condition. I build a list of comments that I try to convey to the seller. These comments help us make any changes in advance of the open house leaving my sellers in a good position to compete with the other listings in their range.

2:15-3:15 - Weekly office round-table discussion about market strategies and difficulties. This week we discussed methods for developing an appropriate amount of urgency on the part of buyers or sellers who might be on the fence.

3:30 - 4:30 - Returning phone calls on showing requests and feedback from my buyers' viewings of other listings over the weekend. Friday - Sunday get very busy so Wednesday and Thursday are the only prep days we get for the weekend. Tomorrow morning I'll have to produce all of my print marketing for the Open House and showings. I'll also be in a meeting of the Greater Boston Association of REALTORS Tech Committee, so this phone time is a critical element to ensuring my schedule is freed for my clients.

5:00 - 7:30 - This is the time left open most days for after-work showings. Most buyers in the initial phases of their search don't take time off from work to view property the first time. Any time they become interested in a specific property a daytime second showing will usually occur.


While every day is different in real estate, and most days are a reflection of the needs of the specific clients I am working with at the time I try to stick to this template as much as possible. In the past the prevalent attitude was less focused on the constant evaluation of active listings because listings didn't remain active that long. Today the average days on market is close to 100 and there is a constant effort needed by all parties to make sure that time frame stays as small as possible.

What do you Expect from a Real Estate Website?

Today I was asked to attend a vendor presentation about real estate websites in my role as Vice-Chairman of the Greater Boston Association of REALTORS Technology Committee. It got me thinking about what agents and brokerages use for websites to speak to consumers. There is a "Web 2.0" initiative going on throughout the National Association of REALTORS. The industry as a whole needs to keep up with the technology in order to stay relevant in the mind of the new generation of consumers.

So, what is it that the "new generation" wants? In the interest of full disclosure, I'm 27 years old. I believe I might fit in the "next" new generation because many people my age aren't yet buying homes. When it came time for me to have a website I invested significant capital in "branding" myself. My first website in the business was nothing special at all. It had a search tool and a mechanism for daily email updates of MLS changes. It had some stock photography and little sections for me to tell about myself. There were no blogs, widgets, ect... In fact, the mapping tool was still Yahoo! Maps which I think stopped being relevant in 1999. Now most sites have similar next-generation map search tools, don't require log-ins, and give you minute by minute updates. So, for my website I decided to tell a story about me. I no longer view myself as the gatekeeper to the property information. You will not come to me simply for property or open house information. You will hopefully come to me because I am a specialist in a very specific segment of the market. My goal is to provide you a window into who I am so you will in turn be able to feel comfortable contacting me.

My pet peeves in agent sites are things like:

Servicing: Arlington, Belmont, Boston, Boston-Allston, Boston-Back Bay, Boston-Beacon Hill, Boston-Brighton, Boston-Charlestown, Boston-Dorchester, Boston-East Boston, Boston-Hyde Park, Boston-Jamaica Plain, Boston-Mattapan, Boston-Midtown, Boston-Mission Hill, Boston-North End, Boston-Roslindale, Boston-Roxbury, Boston-South Boston, Boston-South End, Boston-The Fenway, Boston-Waterfront, Boston-West Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge, Everett, Malden, Medford, Natick, Needham, Newton, Newton-Auburndale, Newton-Chestnut Hill, Newton-Newton Center, Newton-Newton Highlands, Newton-Newton Upper Falls, Newton-Newtonville, Newton-Nonantum, Newton-Waban, Newton-West Newton, Quincy, Quincy-North Quincy, Somerville, Waltham, Watertown

Seriously?!?! Are you "servicing" anything? The site I pulled this from has no picture on it other than a mug shot (a.k.a. an agent Headshot) and has no differentiating content. Yes, this agent is "well known and trusted" just go ahead and take their word for it. They'll tell you exactly why you should live in Allston or Everett or West Newton because that's what their little auto-generated service area message tells you.

So, consumers: What are you looking for in a real estate website? For the many agents who read me: Why have you decided to go with one type of site over another?

Where are all the houses?

As we approach Super Bowl Sunday we should be seeing the start of the busiest portion of the annual real estate calendar. Wednesday "Broker Tour" open houses should number in the 30-40 range each week and we should see new inventory popping on the market left and right. Instead, what we're seeing is an average of 5-10 new listings each week. More distressing though is the lack of Broker Tour property. Two weeks ago there were a whopping 6 showings available to the brokerage community and last week there were 8. To put this in perspective, in October of 2005 there were 65 properties open on a single Wednesday.

I cannot understand why any listing agent, trying to make a positive impression on the market, wouldn't open up for an hour on Wednesday. Also, why aren't sellers pushing for more and more exposure? Normally we've seen listing agents introduce their properties to MLS on Thursday night or Friday to give them the highest likelihood of attracting "direct" buyers to their open houses two days later. This week I am going to be trying a different approach. I will be bringing a listing on the market on Monday, trying to attract the buyers' agents to bring their clients in. The buyers are out there, let's make sure they can see the properties!

What Commission Do You Charge?

It is amazing how many conversations about real estate start with that question. It baffles me to this day that this is the one field in which people think they can make a decision simply by how much money the professional practitioner will "charge" them. It gets asked other ways, like "what's your fee" and "how much will it cost me" but at the end of the day, it speaks to a backward mentality.

Let's run through an exercise here: You get a big bonus at work this holiday season and you decide you want to buy a fancy new car. Let's say you spend $80,000 on that car. When it comes time for that first service are you going to go from random mechanic to mechanic and ask them what their rate is? You'll most likely take it to someone who you have heard has specific expertise with that model car, and you'll most likely pay a lot more than the random mechanic who would have done who-knows-what to your car.

An even better example is picking a place to eat dinner. Do you open the yellow pages, start at the A's and call asking "what's the price of food?" First, there are steaks and lobster which will be a whole lot more expensive than burgers and fish sticks. There will also be places which will give you $7 steak and I seriously doubt you would feel comfortable eating it. The simple "what's the price of food" question just makes NO sense. If you feel like a steak, you're going to the Capital Grille or Abe & Louie's.

So, what commission do I charge? It's impossible to know. I need to see what type of house or condo you have, and then we need to have a serious discussion about your pricing before we can determine how in-depth we need to get with your marketing campaign. From there, we build out a marketing calendar and we decide which types of floor plans and virtual tours you will need.

The one important thing to look at is the agent representing your sale does not get 5-6% of the sale of your house. All agents should be cooperating with buyer's agents. This usually takes half of the commission amount. Next, most agents split their commissions with their offices who pay for Globe and Boston Homes ads, certain Open House materials and other incidental costs. I will say, on average, I am looking at maybe 1.5% of the overall sale price of your house before I even start doing my own personal marketing efforts for your house (floor plans, fliers, post cards, catered broker tours, etc...). Remember, all of these things are paid up front whether your home sells or not. So yes, maybe there is someone out there willing to give you a "rebate" or "charge" you a lower commission, but I assure you the Globe isn't charging them less than me for advertising and the floor plans I pay for aren't offered to them for less money either. By hiring that agent for less money, I will ask you.....how much will that cost you?

The dangers of The Globe Real Estate section

Every week I see it. The top searches box in the upper right corner of The Globe's homepage. "Open Houses" is always at or very near the top. It's great in theory that you can just go to your local paper, enter your search criteria and not have to worry about being contacted by an agent. I mean, it makes perfect sense. I want to by a home, I go to an advertising section in a paper. I want to buy food, I can find that in the Globe too, same with clothes, or stocks, or furniture. OF COURSE NOT!

Yes, there are a lot of real estate agents out there, and sometimes contacting them will cause one of them to call you back. It's amazing that consumers like to complain about how little agents do for their money, but these same consumers go to great lengths to avoid all of the efforts those very same agents are doing.

Here's the scenario: I am a listing agent for "Property A." Before signing the listing contract I went out and did a thorough market analysis sifting through over 1200 homes which have recently sold. I've compared square footages, amenities, finishes, styles and proximity to the things we all want to be close to. I've now presented my case to the sellers. At that moment, I am the most knowledgeable person about that property and its place in the market. What gets overlooked is I can also tell you about the 5-10 closest "competitors" to this listing as I've already analyzed their square footages, amenities, etc...

Now, Mr. & Mrs. Buyer, you give me a phone call, and I determine with you that you're qualified to buy "Property A" and it seems like it might be a good fit. We arrange a meeting to go see Property A but we also take a look at the three most similar alternatives currently available. There are over 400 homes on the market, how much time did you, the buyers, have to spend researching and sifting through to come up with those alternatives? None. It's my job.

Here's the other danger with searching the Globe. It's an advertising section, and therefore only has the listings which each company has chosen to put in on that specific week. There are many properties which never have open houses (they don't really lead to property sales) and the Globe doesn't let you see that inventory.

Call an agent. They are working hard every day to preview the market, determine what the best values are, and weed out the ones that don't fit.