Matt Stigliano

photo courtesy of bgilliard

I hate this sort of phone call.

I'm picking up the phone in just a moment. It's the sort of phone call I hate to have to place. I have to let a client know some news that changes everything for them today. As of this morning, they were happy people. This afternoon, they won't be. We've been looking for a property for them for two weeks now. We're looking at foreclosures mostly and we finally found one that was going to serve their needs. We wrote a very strong offer after I did my research on the property. Full price because we didn't want to lose out and we knew the seller's situation thanks to their listing agent. We wanted to go in strong to secure the home for us. We sent the offer in and received a counter.

Yes, a counter offer. On someone who was heading down the path to foreclosure. Seems the agent miscalculated the payoff amount. This seller is desperate to sell to get through this with barely a scratch and we were willing to help them (and get the house my clients wanted). The note came last night and I spoke to my clients. They weren't pleased, but they agreed to work it out. We made a verbal counter offer and I received email notification early this morning that we were good to go and I could get counter-signatures.

Then the emails came.

The first one asked me if we could make the option fee as a money order because the listing agent's client didn't have a bank account set up yet in their new hometown. Ok, fair enough. I arranged it. Signatures and money order will be in place today at 2:30. Sweet. *Beep beep* My email again, better check it. Ugh. Seems the agent not only miscalculated the pay-off value, but also didn't find out that the bank have moved to foreclosure status and assigned a lawyer to the case. Suddenly, we're now looking at a short sale. My clients aren't interested in the short sale wait. I guess we'll find out what my client's think when I pick up the phone.

Agents - stay on top of the foreclosure process.

If you're going to list and work with foreclosures, short sales, and cases where it's getting close; please keep up on the property. I know we're dealing with sometimes irrational and logic-defying banks, but this has wasted my time, the client's time, and probably frazzled them one last time. My clients did all they could to help your client. My clients were willing to go above and beyond what they wanted to initially do. They actually were trying to get a new house and to help your client (yes, they really cared). All of it? For nothing. Now we're faced with the truly irrational and logic-defying status of a short sale. We're going to see if we can push it through anyway, but had the listing agent just stayed a little more on top of the case, I might not be making this dreaded phone call.

In a city like San Antonio, we have far less foreclosure (or near) inventory than many cities. If we work hard, we can clean this inventory up. But only if we work hard, smart, and efficiently and stay on the ball with the status of our listings. So please, I beg you, check where your listings stand right now - and update, correct, or change if necessary.

There's a time when a man must decide.

I reached one of those point recently. Do I continue in my current position or do I seek out other like minded individuals who can help me move to a new level of success and determination? From the logo, I think you can guess what I chose. I spent a lot of time thinking about the different things I wanted to find in a new office and when Sheila Moran called me to sit down and talk, I took a shot and sat down with her and Pat O'Brien. What I found were two people who listened to what I had to say, gave me their take on my situation, and expressed their interest in getting me to be the best agent I can be. My head was swimming with thoughts by the time I was done, but I wanted to sit with my wife and discuss the potential move as well as call my trusted real estate friend, @LaniAR.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

It's never easy to make a change, but after my discussions with Sheila and Pat, I knew I had found my new home. A team that takes advantage of technology (I've had more texts and tweets from them in one day then you can imagine - I love it), is creative, smart, and dedicated to giving their clients the best; well it was pretty simple to choose.

While some agents will rave about RE/MAX and the benefits they will provide me, to be honest, I'd follow Sheila and her sister Kristin to just about any company. For me, the people in the office are what make the difference. I have been speaking to Kristin for a long time and always thought she seemed like a great person and a great agent (and she brought me to ActiveRain). When I finally met her sister, I knew there was something there that would help motivate and inspire me to do better. Only time will tell the true benefits of my choice, but as of today, I'm feeling great about the future.

Of course, it helps that I'm surrounded by so many great agents too. I look forward to making friends with my office mates and think this team can "rock" San Antonio.

I'll let you know how it goes.

photo courtesy of Brasserie Pavil

Twitter can be used for good or evil. Which do you choose?

Ok, maybe not good and evil, but it can be used effectively or haphazardly. In light of my last post, "Re-defining ROI in the age of social media.," I've been thinking a lot about effective uses of social media and more specifically, Twitter. There's a consistent debate on how to manage it successfully for your business (no matter what business that may be) and I don't think there's anyone that can put a formula to it and give you the skeleton key to unlock Twitter's business potential.

What I do know is what I like and as a consumer what I pay attention to. In being active on Twitter within San Antonio, I have had the chance to meet some great local people who are making what I feel to be positive strides into connecting social media and business marketing - without the blatant advertising. On top of that, I am building those connections necessary for my own business. Sure, not all of them would say, "Matt is my first choice for a Realtor® in town," but one of them might. That's the theory of relationship marketing - you're never going to be everything to everyone, but if you can be everything to someone, you're a step ahead of where you were yesterday.

In order to support what I see as good business practices and a building of a strong group of local business and consumers who enjoy and use social media effectively, I decided to write a post on RErockstar.com about some of my favorite local businesses using Twitter. "Twitter For Business - Would you like fries with that?," is my way of encouraging those businesses to keep doing what they're doing and also serves a purpose for myself. Giving out good quality local information, getting to know more people, and building a local San Antonio real estate blog that consumers will come back to time and time again.

So take a moment, read the post, and feel free to tell me what you think. And if you're in San Antonio, stop by these places and tell them @rerockstar sent you!

The latest San Antonio market data available to you.

With the new RErockstar.com "Market Reports" section, you can now view real-time market data by zip code here in San Antonio.  Just choose your time frame (30 days to all available data), price ranges (by percentile), type of home (single family residential or condominium) and your market area by zip code (see example below):

please note: this is an image, so you can not click the checkboxes

Then, choose the statistics you want to view in the custom charts generated based on your selections.  Currently you can choose median listing price, price per square foot, number of listings, average days on market, sold, and the Market Action Index (a calculation based on supply/demand, sales and inventory levels).

I have other statistics available and may change what's available overtime as I start to see what interests my readers the most.  Once you select the statistics you want to view you will be able to view a chart based on the data you requested.  Below is an example of inventory levels in zip code 78258 for the last 90 days:

please note: this chart updates daily and the data will change as time progresses

Need more in-depth information?

You can sign up below for my San Antonio real estate market reports for your local zip code (if your zip code is not listed, email me and I'll try to get it in there).  These reports provide more detail and analysis and come straight to your inbox each week.  They're a great way to get a feel for your local area whether you're buying or selling and as always, I'm always available to help explain them or show you what the data means to you and your home.

Crime data is highly sought after information.

Everyone wants to know what crime is like in any given area. As a Realtor®, I'm asked about crime all the time in any given neighborhood. Since I'm not a crime expert, I refer them to the City Of San Antonio Police Department Crime Data website and from there they can sort through the various data and statistics to figure out what they like or don't like about a neighborhood.

Unfortunately, most police departments are too busy working on solving and stopping crime to be worried about clean user interfaces and aesthetics in their crime data. Enter CrimeReports.com. Using a familiar and simple interface, CrimeReports allows the user to enter the name of the city and bring up a Google Map with an overlay of crime data in that area. With easy to locate icons reporting various types of crime, users can quickly and easily see what's happening in a given area.

Putting Texas on the map.

San Antonio is (so far) not covered, but New Braunfels is (which as you can see is where I took my screen shot). I hope that San Antonio will join the ranks of other Texas cities and begin feeding their data to the site. Currently the covered cities in Texas are: Argyle, Azle, Bedford, Burleson, City Of Weatherford, Dallas, Decatur, Euless, Farmers Branch, Grapevine, Haltom City, Highland Village, Hurst, Jasper, Murphy, New Braunfels, North Richland Hills, Paris, Plano, Richland Hills, Roanoke, Rowlett, San Angelo, The Colony, University Park, Victoria, and Watagua.

The site also allows you to search through sex offender registries, combining both crime data and sex offender registration sites into one easy to access source.

Thanks to Jay Thompson for posting about this site on his blog, Phoenix Real Estate Guy. Even if you're not in Phoenix, his blog is a great source of information on real estate and I highly recommend him.