One of the most overlooked items on the purchase contract is the earnest money or good faith deposit. Sellers and agents are so anxious to see what the offer price is, they miss a key component of the offer. What is a earnest money deposit? There is a good definition & article on the same subject here by Elizabeth Weintraub. My definition would be anything of value, mainly money, put forward by the buyer to show good faith to the seller that they are genuinely interested in buying the property. The deposit, … [Read more...]
Big Bear January 07′ sales numbers not so hot
March 2, 2007 by Leave a Comment
The numbers for the Big Bear real estate market for January 2007 look pretty bad....for sellers, that is. According to the local First American Title Co., there was a total of 77 units that sold during this time frame (Download first_american_jan. 07.xls {Excel doc. 1.61 MB}). That number is down 45% from the January 2006 numbers of 139 total units closed. This makes January 2007 the slowest month in the last 10 years for sales numbers. To really understand the numbers though, this stat refers to the number of … [Read more...]
CRS Listing Course #201
March 1, 2007 by Leave a Comment
I just finished a two-day CRS class in Victorville, CA. CRS stands for Council of Residential Specialists, which is a special designation that Realtors can achieve by taking extra education courses as well as completing a certain amount of transaction. There are approximately 50,000 CRS members in the world, with the vast majority of them located in the U.S. This was my first class and my intention is to take a few more this year in order to achieve the CRS designation. The particular class I took was the … [Read more...]
Note to real estate sellers: rejection should not be in your current vocabulary
February 11, 2007 by 2 Comments
One of the items that was recently added to the California Association of Realtors purchase contract was a "rejection of offer" box at the end of the contract. The box states that, "no counter offer is being made to the buyer but it was reviewed and rejected by the seller." My guess is the intention behind this was to give assurance to the buyer that their "low" offer was at least presented. One of my fellow associates just received the aforementioned "rejection of offer" checked on one of his offers yesterday. … [Read more...]
Real Estate Blogging…..no excuses
February 10, 2007 by 2 Comments
I can think of a few excuses why I stopped writing posts over the last couple months (too busy, holidays, & not enough topics) but the real reason is lack of commitment to blogging. I don't think I am the only one who has done this. I have noticed a few other people, including some real estate agents, who have started a blog only to stop writing posts a few weeks into it. From what I can tell, blogging, like exercising & dieting, requires dedication and discipline to be successful at … [Read more...]
Zillow gets hit with FTC complaint
October 29, 2006 by 1 Comment
Sounds a lot like my post on September 23rd of this year. The real scoop is getting out on Zillow.NCRC charges Zillow with falsely representing to the public that its on-line valuations are within ten percent of the home selling price when the company really has "less than a 30 percent accuracy rate when offering the valuations for public consumption." Click here to see the article. … [Read more...]
Baby Boomers & Big Bear Real Estate
October 23, 2006 by Leave a Comment
I just reviewed an article by the National Association of Realtors that summarizes a recent survey that looked at the Baby Boomer generation and their housing needs. Given that Big Bear Lake is a four season resort town located in the San Bernardino National Forest, just 2 hours from Los Angeles, our real estate market is directly effected by the purchasing trends of this generation. Click here to review the article. The article points out that the Boomers are typically working longer and waiting longer to … [Read more...]
2007 California Real Estate Forecast
October 22, 2006 by Leave a Comment
Forecasting is difficult to get right. Whether you are talking about forecasting the weather report or the real estate market, it is never 100% accurate. It does, however, give one a good idea based on the reasonable probabilities. I just got back from the October meetings for the California Association of Realtors which was located at the Long Beach Convention Center this year. We have meetings three times a year but it is always at this time of year that we get the economic update and forecast … [Read more...]
No urgency in today’s real estate market.
October 3, 2006 by Leave a Comment
In today's real estate market, there is no urgency to move quickly. During the last 5 years, buyers had a sense of urgency to buy the property they were interested in. If they did not move quickly, they risked the chance of someone else coming and buying the property or getting into a bidding war. If they missed out, then they would have to wait and hope that a similar property came on the market for sale that was not drastically higher in price. Now that the active inventory levels have risen … [Read more...]
Zillow Is Not Always Accurate When Evaluating Big Bear Properties
September 23, 2006 by 1 Comment
Zillow.com has received a lot of attention lately in the real estate industry. In essence, this site allows users to pull up the value on any property in the U.S., ideally their own. The site uses public data to get among other things the property square footage, age, year built, and most important, sales data. It then crunches all this information and comes up with its current valuation, which typically is a wide range. It allows the user to add information to their property that may change the value or that … [Read more...]
