Gordon Corsie

Well I have have had several agents who after faxing me an offer fall off the face of the planet, don't return calls emails etc. Last week for the first time I wrote an offer on a listing, faxed it to the number listed on the MLS and had zero response for 7 days! I left messages at both numbers for the listing agent and decided to hand carry a copy of the offer to his office where at least I could get a receipt initialed by the receptionist.

His 'office", was an unmanned desk inside a local mortgage brokers which was under a different name. The lady who answered the phones told me that he was a one man office who rented his desk from the mortgage broker and that she had seen him yesterday! Frustrated I called the California Association Attorney. I was sure I had read that I had the right to go directly to the seller if I did not get any response from the listing agent within a certain limit. The attorney said no. Despite the listing agents inaction and failure to respond this was not cause for me to contact the sellers direct. It is unethical and perhaps a violation of MLS rules to not communicate with a selling agent but no more than that.

Eventually I hear from him, and he provided a plethora of excuses, about why he did not call back yeah right. The deal did not go together, no surprises there.

So my question to you, has anyone else experienced this? How do you handle this in other states? Should MLS rules include a set time for which a listing agent should at least acknowledge that an offer has been received?

Is anyone else suffering from the Zillow Effect?

Tell you what, I am getting a big dose of it at the moment. Every time I sit down with a seller at a listing presentation and after researching, reviewing and discussion of the most recent comps in the neighborhood, the seller will say something like,'Zillow says my house is worth $(fill in a number here) more!"

This is an interesting phenomenon don't you think? Despite having a professional meet and present the facts, many sellers will much rather believe a website which uses some uknown formula, using unknown comparable sales to determine some general value price which usually I have found is always higher than a property is worth, usually @ 5% higher. Is it because Zillow is a non-interested party giving a neutral opinion that some home sellers attribute Zillow a higher authority, or could it be something else?

Could it be, that Zillow always errs on the high side of the value range deliberately? I think they do. I think the reason is that they know that homeowners being only human after all, will always want to hear what it is that they want to hear, in this case they want to believe their property is worth more than it actually is. Why? The answer may be so that property owners are attracted back to the site time and time again. Think back a couple of years, it was fun to check the stock market every day and see how much it had increased. I bet that today all of us with stock portfolios are feeling the same pain when you check your balance now and I also think that you may feel less inclined to check more than every few weeks. Armed with a high web visitation count Zillow are in a position to sell more advertising to....us...hey wait a minute!

Perhaps if we are smart enough we can use the Zillow effect to our advantage. Cyberhomes allows a handy framed download which is free to load onto your website or blog and can effectively provide a similar service.

Anyway I would be interested to hear your approaches you are taking to counter the "Zillow Effect", objection.

Agents try a new tactic!

Recently a new phenomenon has appeared in the local real estate market in the tri-valley.

Many homes in Livermore and homes for sale in Pleasanton are affected.

Several homes have come onto the market at very deep discounts. These are bank owned properties or “REO”s. The asking price is so low that it does not really reflect the true value of the home. For example, a property in Livermore bank owned and 2100 square feet was listed at an asking price of $330,000. The last home similar to it sold and closed for $550,000 one month ago. There currently exists two others similar on the market for the low $500,000s. By listing the property at an artificially low price, the bank and listing Agent aims to get a lot of excitement and activity immediately and therefore generate multiple offers. The house I give as an example genrated over 20 offers in only 4 days on the market! The idea here is to have buyers ‘bid up’ the price by competing with one another!

There is nothing wrong with this of course nor is it unethical, but I do believe that innocent buyers who believe that they are seeing a great deal need to be counseled that their chance of being successful on purchasing one of these homes at these discounted prices even if they offer full or over asking price is unlikely, moreover they are sometimes being led into the competitive bidding war.

Take care before you make an offer to purchase. Make sure you see the last 2 months sales in the neighborhood of similar homes. We are still in a declining market but if something seems too good to be true, probably it is....