Battiata & Associates

[mattbattiata]

Hello there – working away in the office and happened to come across this thread, so I thought I would respond briefly.

The Battiata Real Estate Group actually has a 96% success rate year to date (2011) for our short sales. YTD we have closed 112 short sales as the listing agent.

Most of these are in SD County – some are in other counties. Obviously this does not include non short sales or buyer transactions. Also, some short sales close quickly (3-4 months) and some take a long time ( 8-12 months or even longer banks are backed up and unresponsive or when buyers back out).

With that said, apparently there is some confusion re canceled and expired listings, so allow me to clarify:

Expired listings and canceled listings do not mean the property went to foreclosure. Listings expire and are canceled for a variety of reasons i.e. the listing term expired and the property was re listed, the seller decided not to sell or postponed selling for whatever reason, the seller decided to try a loan modification, seller decided to declare bankruptcy etc. etc. etc.

I also see posts here from buyers who are upset bc they wanted to buy one of our short sales and did not get it. Let me clarify this: our sellers see every offer and pick the one they want to submit to the bank. 99% of the time, they pick the highest offer, but sometimes they may pick a different, lower offer because of the financing terms , because it is cash, because they want to sell to a particular buyer who looked at their home or because the buyer has extra money to contribute to settle a 2nd lien.

Bottom line, when there are 10 offers on a property, one buyer is going to get the property and nine are going to be disappointed. There is nothing I can do about that.

I know short sales are frustrating – they are frustrating for
everyone involved: potential buyers, their agents, the seller as well as for me and my staff.

But at the end of the day, our job, as the listing agent representing the seller, is to get the deal through and protect our client from foreclosure.

Finally, we close 100’s of deals every year. The overwhelming majority of our clients are happy. The overwhelming majority of the professional agents we work with are happy.

I see negative comments posted about me and my staff online, and while some of them are actual clients who are upset because their home went to foreclosure, or because they did not get one of our properties etc, many of them are of a specious nature – in other words, they are not clients of ours which leads me to believe they have some interest in posting negative comments about me and my staff (in other words, they are competitors), which is unfortunate.

With that said, happy holidays & here’s to a safe and happy 2012.

Cheers.

Matt Battiata

[sdrealtor]

FWIW you claim to close 100’s of deals every years. To me that means at least 200 and probably alot more. Per the MLS there are 136 closed listing side transactions and 16 closed buyer side transactions. Thats 152 with less than a month to go. Thats a lot of volume but it isnt 100’s of deals. Thats the kind of puffery most agents engage in that puts off clients.

[Still Surfing]

Why would SD Realtor aka JTR want to beat up Battiata ?

[profhoff]

What? Adam Rappoport is sd realtor

[CA renter]

SDR (with capital letters)

🙂

[SD Realtor]

I would agree with sdr, when I look at the total listings you have had and then look at the number of SOLDs it comes nowhere close to the numbers you are claiming.

That darn math…

[ucodegen]

@Matt Battiata
A bit of a recommendation here. I have mentioned something like this in the past to at least one other poster. Be careful about posting here if you don’t want every detail dissected, including histories of past transactions etc. With every ‘discussion board’ there will always be people making questionable claims. Best thing to do at times is just ‘ignore’ them. In many cases, the rest of the discussion board members do the same. The members of this board include other Realtors/Brokers, investors(stock, bonds & property), people with a lot of banking experience, people who work in the Defense Industry, engineering types, phone app writers and people who have the ability to dig up all sorts of info and correlate it. Most of the people here don’t sit at home watching TV and then just decide to randomly ‘pop-off’ on Piggington.

Looking at what sdrealtor dug up.. I find something interesting. The transactions are very heavily biased to the sell/list side as opposed to buyer side transactions (136 to 16). If I am not mistaken, and other Realtors can/will chime in here, the buyer side of the transaction is much harder than the list side. Yes, the seller has to get the owner to prep, help with staging and has to run the open house and list on the MLS. The buyer side has to do a lot of travel with the potential buyer to several properties.. on the chance that maybe the buyer will purchase. Sometimes the buyer is a ‘dry hole’.. does not purchase. Looking at the history and assuming $500k average per property, standard commission (3%/3%) means grosses of $2,040,000 on the sell side and $240,000 on the buy side of the transaction. Not bad, but looking at it from the ‘balance’ of sell to buy transactions, it would seem that it is ‘cherry picking’ the side of the transaction that is easier complete, leaving other Realtors with the more time consuming, less profitable per hour part of the task.

Now as to the quality of the listings/properties as well as to whether there is a pattern of under-listing and selling under comps, effectively short changing the seller.. I am not going to address it. I would not be surprised if one of the Realtors might be so inclined as to check completed sales against price vs comps.

I would wonder why you, Matt Battiata, would want to resurrect this thread that does not necessarily put you in a flattering light. To repeat an old adage: “Best let sleeping dogs lie”.

[sdrealtor]

FWIW better more experienced agents prefer to be on the listing side. That way you are almost certain to get paid. Its easy to find people to drive around and show homes to. Closing rates on buyers are well under 50%. Getting someone to trust you to sell their home requires much more confidence.

Also to put some real numbers out there avg sales price across those 136 listings is 333K and average commission is probably around 2.5%. That translates to $1.13M. Look at his website and look how many people there are on his team. Drive up the freeway and look at his office space in Del Mar/Solana Beach. Throw in TV commercials, web advertising, marketing of properties, flyers, signs, office equipment, self employment taxes etc and that big top line number gets alot smaller very quickly. He does a real nice business but dont kid yourself that he’s netting anything close to what you suggested.

[ucodegen]

[quote sdrealtor]He does a real nice business but dont kid yourself that he’s netting anything close to what you suggested.[/quote]I said gross.. not net. I know he has quite an overhead. TV commercials can get REAL expensive REAL fast. I was trying to get a rough order of magnitude, and was more interested in the diff between sell and buy transaction representation. Someone had to be the counterparty to his sales..
[quote sdrealtor]Also to put some real numbers out there avg sales price across those 136 listings is 333K and average commission is probably around 2.5%. That translates to $1.13M.[/quote] True.. I was using 3% instead of 2.5%, but then there are people who have made statements that he expects a ‘Transaction Compliance Fee’, which would change the effective ‘percentage’ while not showing up on records. I can not attest to the existence of such a fee.. but it showed up on more than one poster.

[sdrealtor]

Lots of agents (myself included) hire a transaction coordinator to manage the actual file when the property is in escrow. Its usually 300 to 500 for a transaction coordinator. Some agents make the client pay it. Most (myself included) pay it out of their commission or do it themselves. So to answer your question, it wouldnt add to his commission income.

[ucodegen]

[quote=sdrealtor]Lots of agents (myself included) hire a transaction coordinator to manage the actual file when the property is in escrow. Its usually 300 to 500 for a transaction coordinator. Some agents make the client pay it. Most (myself included) pay it out of their commission or do it themselves. So to answer your question, it wouldnt add to his commission income.[/quote]
I’m sorry, but that does not exactly compute.. I also said effective commission. The math doesn’t seem to work. Somehow, giving same commission rate on same property, paying the $300 to $500 out of commission seems to come up with less than directly charging the client. On the other hand, you might charge a 2.7% instead of 2.5% commission and pay the $300 to $500 yourself out of commission and get the same net as if you had directly charged the $300 to $500 and had a 2.5% commission.

–thereby, charging the $300 to $500 as a separate charge effectively increases the commission (without looking like it) because it removes a charge that might normally be covered under the commission, to a separate line item.

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