Steve Mallett

The Real Estate boom of the past few years saw an explosion of licensed agents signing up to sell properties. At one point one out of every 250 people in this country was a licensed Realtor. Buyers were hiring brand new agents to handle the transaction of one of the most valuable assets they had - their home.

Those days have gone. Now only the best agents with the most advanced training and support are doing well and getting the job done.

The current market has once again focused agents on the fundamentals of real estate. Agents now need to be responsive to calls and inquiries with helpful and accurate information. They need to spend hours looking at market information to determine how to price properties to sell. Agents must now be knowledgeable about all of the available real estate tools found on the internet and how to best use them to sell their listings. Now properties are sold on Twitter and Facebook sometimes before a buyer even steps foot on the property. Agents now spend hours training themselves to be better negotiators and to understand the needs of different personality types. The demands of the market have changed and the best agents anticipated those changes and altered their business so that they can continue to provide the best real estate services to their customers and clients.

Coaching has taken off in Real Estate where agents seek advice and direction from proven top producers. You can bet that the agents who are left, that are thriving, have been through some type of coaching.

My coach recently said that she runs into many people who think all agents are the same. When she does she always asks, "Can you run from here across the street and back?' The answer is always "Of course!". Her response is, "well, an Olympic athlete can run across the street and back too. Does that make you the same as them?" I think it's a great example of the difference between a person that has a real estate license and a real estate professional. Anyone can have a license but only a few have the business sense, drive and direction to thrive no matter the circumstance. Look to hire the Olympic athletes of the real estate business. You deserve to have the best agent available.

Ask anyone in the real estate industry in Dripping Springs what's happening locally and they'll tell you that our real estate market has changed significantly in the past 2 years. Once, you could pad your list price by 10% and still sell your home. Once, you could do a marginal job preparing the home to be listed for sale and still get multiple offers in a week or two. Those days are gone.

Now sellers are competing for buyers by being aggressive on price and by staging the home and property to sell. Buyers are in short supply and showings have reduced significantly. The only way to compete in this type of a market is to do your homework before listing so that your property is at the top of everyone's list.

Most sellers overestimate the value of their home. You cannot afford to be off by even 5% in this type of market. A good agent will get your pricing right by taking many factors into consideration. Those factors can include acreage, condition of home and property, availability of similarly priced homes on the market, amenities, upgrades and property improvements. In Dripping Springs getting the price right is much harder than an Austin subdivision with many similar homes. Dripping Springs agents must be able to determine the value of property features like barns, pools, gates, fencing, trees and landscaping, location of the home and more.

A good agent will also tell you how to stage the home to sell. It may hurt to hear that the lime green paint you love in the living area has to go, but if the agent thinks it needs repainting, it probably does.

Another thing sellers can do is basic landscaping to the property to freshen it and give it more curb appeal. Some landscape companies have even started to offer "Landscape Staging". A crew will come over and mulch, trim trees, plant some plants, and just generally spruce up the property. Its money well spent and can raise your sales price by thousands of dollars.

Choose an agent that is selling properties, not just listing them. Once you hire that agent follow his or her advice. They know what you need to do to compete for the few buyers that are out there.

In Dripping Springs, the town where I live, in 1999 the average sold price per acre for land sales, in tracts larger than 10 acres, was $4050 per acre. In 2008 the average sold price per acre was over $15,000. That annual rate of return over the 10 years was in excess of 11% for land purchased in 1999.

At the end of 1999 the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at 11,450. The Dow has recently been trading at 8800. GM traded at $72 per share on December 31^st, 1999; now that stock is worth nothing. It's not hard to figure out what has turned out to be the better investment over the last 10 years.

Granted some real estate investment has not been profitable. People that bought properties near the end of the last real estate boom with the intention of quickly reselling the properties (flipping) were burned as property values in certain parts of the country plummeted in just a few months. But generally over the long haul real estate has consistently been a good investment.

Even when land could be purchased for $15 per acre in Dripping Springs buyers worried that they were paying too much. No matter how good of a deal, it is normal to have a nagging feeling that you might pay too much. Consider how well you would have done if you had purchased land along Onion Creek for $50 per acre 50 years ago. At the time it was a significant amount of money per acre but now that same land is worth hundreds of times the purchase price. The only way to realize those real estate gains is to be invested in property. Waiting for a deal that seems too good to be true may be safe but being a property owner is the only way to realize the value gains in land.

Real Estate is like any other investment in that it tends to be cyclical and rise and fall with the larger economy, but overall, land has consistently been a smart buy. Like stocks, the land investors that buy and hold are the ones that make money. People buying now, and holding for the future, may very well be the ones that come out of the soft economy looking like real estate geniuses when really all they were was smart enough to buy something.