Listings are Almost Worthless to a Realtor

[powayseller]

WickedHeart, Are these his total sales for his career? Or are they all from this year and how do they compare to last year?

How did you get sdr’s identity and sales info? Are you his friend? Or a fellow realtor who figured out who he was and looked up his sales on the MLS?

P.S. What do you mean with baiting? Victim?? Complaining?? I’m just taking your punches…And being a super duper good sport, too!

[Jim Brubaker]

Looks like Rich has a new Monikier if I’m not mistaken

[4plexowner]

If Rich isn’t paying powayseller (or using powayseller as an alias), he should be.

From my perspective over the last few months, powayseller has been the main contributor to this blog (which makes me think she has too much time on her hands or is being paid).

For the most part I enjoy powayseller’s posts.

I find some of them amusing too.

Like suggesting that the NAR start a campaign to educate sellers that they should get realistic and lower their prices.

Are you serious about that? On what planet do you think that might happen?

[sdrealtor]

SORRY….wrong guy. Those are Jim The Realtor’s sales.

[sdrealtor]

Once again I am not here to be baited into identifying myself. It’s really quite simple, a pilot can get a raise by increasing in seniority or being promoted when the company is struggling. Similarly, an agent gets more seniority (previous buyer clients sell and move up or out of area) and be promoted (a past client refers a new client). There first few years in the business this doesn’t happen. After a few years in the business it is happening to me.

BTW, Ipayone is getting slaughtered. All the real estate industry people that were founders left because the business model doesnt work. They have a revolving door of agents that quickly realize the comp plan is a joke. The CEO was a charlatan of the type I used to run into in the tech industry. His one goal is to build something with enough revenune that he can find a sucker to sell it to. It’s a bait and switch system and should disappear in a year or two.

Lastly, 842 properties have gone into escrow the last 7 days and countless others are likely in the midst of negotiating. Last year the numbers were about 20% higher but we are hardly at a standstill. Plenty of homes are still selling everyday.

[powayseller]

Too much time on my hands. I’ve never met Rich.

The NAR campaign would be a Realistic Pricing campaign. The only way for realtors to keep their transaction volume, is for sellers to get real. Seller stubbornness is the reason for lower transactions. So we have inventory up from 9,000 last year to 20,000, sales down 35% from 6,000 to 4,000, and only 4 out of every 20 properties is selling. [The numbers from last year are estimates]. With sales down from 6,000 last year to 4,000 this year, that’s a much smaller pie to be split between all those realtors out there. If the NAR is really representing the realtors, they need to change the Realtor Ethics campaign to a Seller-Get-Real campaign.

[bailedintime]

This thread is so telling of the real estate market in general. Talk about a staring contest between buyers and sellers!

It seems as if PS posted this topic directly to SDR and jabbed away at his credibility until he responded. I believe this is telling as to the motives of PS. Here is someone who moved her family from their home to reap the rewards of an overheated market. She made a tidy profit of which she did not earn (none of us who sold in the last three years did) and has expressed guilt in previous posts about it. This is nothing short of a windfall and now she is trying to make sound financial decisons with it. Her blogging is fed by fear she will not make the best of these profits. Look at the information she seeks (mostly financial advise).

At the same time, she seeks out information that she made the right decision for her family. Again, fear based. Did she uproot them for no reason? Did she sell too soon?

I think Jim B. posted a few days ago about how it is human nature to seek out information that supports our world view and edit the information that doesn’t. This is universal, just because you believe in the bubble doesn’t mean you are immune. Thus, PS spends her days surfing between housing blogs to seek information she made the right choice. I admire her caution, just not the way she responds to dissenting opinions. People are irrational when they are scared.

[Bugs]

I like to have an idea of where a person is coming from so I can assess their opinions within that context. A vague idea is sufficient for that. Beyond that, I don’t think it’s productive to play point-counterpoint with each other on a personal level. These exchanges can never result in any meaningful information or analyses because what any individual does is meaningless in the wider context.

Whether PS deserved her profits (I think she did) has no bearing on whether her buyers were underinformed or were gambling when they made their purchase. Whether SDR is having a great year or a poor one doesn’t address and is irrelevant to the question of whether the volumes are dropping enough to affect pricing. Arguing about Rima’s writing style doesn’t address the message that writing is attempting to convey.

If you don’t mind my saying so, arguing about the colors of the leaves on your trees won’t help you to see the forest any better. There must be 100 better ways to spend your time other than to attempt to justify your lives to complete strangers.

As a community we need to observe and maintain a certain amount of self-restraint in our comments to the other members of our community. I strongly doubt that some of the comments and exhanges that have been made here would have been made if this were a doctor’s waiting room or a coffee shop. Surely we can coexist more civilly than this.

[zk]

Amen, Bugs.

[hs]

Bugs, with respect,as always!

[Jim Brubaker]

I think that you will find that neither Powayseller or Sdreatlor meant to slug it out.

People just do not realize that what they say with an intoned emotion, is not the same thing they said with a typewriter (I date myself). What you type is subject to miss-interpretation.

Its very hard to convey an argument without emotion. The problem is, the reader implies the emotion from his perspective.

Its my hope that Powayseller keeps up her posting.

In the same vein, I hope that Sdrealtor does the same.

To clarify a comment I made about “Rich having a new Moniker” Rich is the only one who knows who Sdrealtor is. I assumed that if the listing and sales info was valid, it only had one source–wrong again!

[Bugs]

I would wager there are several people here who have access to the MLS and other sources of data. For example, I spend almost $800/month on various sources of real estate data for my business.

—————
As for some of the exchanges we’ve been seeing I think it has indeed become quite personal. We’re now rebuking each other over grammar, spelling and punctuation. What is productive about that?

I think it’s ironic that the parties generally don’t seem to hold viewpoints that are entirely opposing. There is much common ground between them and instead of using their macro agreement they are feuding over the micro details. I think some of us have lost sight of the fact that virtually no group of people other than a cult will ever be in 95% agreement on any subject. Elections are won and we are governed by the opinions of a simple majority. Anything above 55% is considered a landslide. We should be very content with attaining 70% concurrence here because that supermajority will dominate the discourse.

These online forums highlight an interesting evolution in our communication. Back when written correspondence was the only way to conduct a non-verbal discussion people were very careful to adopt and maintain a high degree of formality. That formality and “distance” served as a buffer between people and helped them avoid some misunderstandings that can occur as a result of reading between the lines.

That formality has long been dropped from common usage in our society, partly as a result of the technology that has allowed us to conduct live conversations. To be sure, it’s a lot more intimate to be able to use a casual mode of conversation. Now that these online systems allow us to expand our conversations to include more people and to encompass an indefinite time frame we have strangley reverted back to the written modes of communication. Most of us are not good at this because, unlike our grandparents’ generations, we never had to be.

Having come full circle, we are only now seeing the need for a little more formality, reserve and restraint in our conversations and exchanges. The problem is that in the written word it is difficult for most people to accurately convey their tone. The anonymity of the Internet allows us to avoid the decorum we normally maintain when talking with strangers.

It’s like comparing how people drive in the big cities vs. how they drive in a small town. The more anonymity there is the more people assume they won’t have to answer for their uncivil conduct out in public. Conversely, we’re a little more reluctant to tailgate or cut someone off when we know there’s a real good chance we’re going to run into them at the hardware store later today and run into their cousin over at the diner on Saturday.

The bottom line here is that this is a community. How productive our community is going to be will be a function of how well we observe and maintain a minimum standard of conduct. The credibility of the arguments that emanate from this forum will be a function of how level and fair everyone perceives the environment to be. We don’t want our discourses to devolve to the point where Rich has to post rules of conduct or start banning people for acting outside of those rules. Better for us to develop our own internal restraints than to have to rely on external controls. Then when someone crosses the line it is the group, not some moderator, who applies the pressure to conform.

I don’t consider the need for decorum to be some sort of hand holding or I’m-okay-you’re-okay doubletalk. This is all about finding a practical way to attract and analyze the maximum amount of information that pertains to our common interests – which are to observe and forecast (to the extent possible) the direction and depth of the next leg of this economic cycle.

[Operation]

Sadly, we’re going to be seeing fighting like this and a lot worse as we travese the slipery back-side of an RE bust.

[powayseller]

I need to focus on the bigger picture. From now on, I won’t call anyone’s bluff. There’s a great saying, “Live and let live.”

[sdrealtor]

In case any of you have been wondering where I’ve been the answer is very very busy. Three of my worthless listings received strong offers from well qualified buyers in the last 3 days. Sellers are painfully realizing they sell now at the market price or maybe not sell at all. I also wrote a couple offers this weekend and am negotiating (fiercely I might add) on a couple homes that should go together in the next 2 to 3 days. BTW, one of these buyers contacted me as a result of seeing one of my worthless listings on Realtor.com and another I met at an open house for one of my worthless listings.

Bottomline, listings are still the key to this business and lots of properties are changing hands everyday albeit at lower prices. Everytime I start wondering whether one of my lisitngs will sell, in walks a buyer. I will say, the offers coming in tend to be low ball in nature but the buyers are also well qualified. Sellers are thinking long and hard before writing a counter offer that might send that buyer packing to another property. Comps are coming down and the good agents are getting their sellers to come to terms with the best price they may see in the next 5 years or so.

[Author]

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