photo credit: libertygrace0

Information and misinformation has been a problem for our clients and would-be clients for years. The search box runneth over with sites offering real estate “listing” data, and it’s hard (in the words of the more famous Yogi) for the average bear to make sense of it all.

It’s long been a problem, but in the midst of the brouhaha over ARG Realty’s announcement that they were opting out of third party syndication, I suppose I have been paying a little more attention to the whole idea of data integrity lately. In the last week, we have fielded more calls about homes that were not really for sale than I can remember. Buyers are confused. Can you blame them?

A couple of Thursdays ago, I spent some time shoveling through the “active listings” on Zillow. And let me say that this isn’t just about Zillow; I could have easily picked one of hundreds of other third-party aggregation sites for the purposes of my little forensic investigation. But Zillow is becoming what you might call a household word – a household word whose fourth quarter earnings report was a smidge better than my own – so this seemed a logical place to start.

My friend Jonathan Dalton likens searching for homes on the Zillows and Trulias of the Internet to a visit to Mr. Roger’s “Neighborhood of Make Believe.” And since I have a long-standing tradition of ripping off Mr. Dalton’s better stuff, let’s see what was happening in the Neighborhood of Make Believe on February 2, 2012.

Consumer Search Primer

First, a little home search primer is probably in order. Real estate agents (and by real estate agents, I mean me) tend to forget that while we understand the life and travel tendencies of a listing, many homebuyers and sellers may not.

When a home is listed, your agent will enter the information in their local MLS. Through the MLS, all other agents in the area will have access to the vitals including text, photos, show instructions and offer of compensation.

There is also this thing called “IDX,” or Internet Data Exchange. MLS agent and broker members agree through IDX to allow their listings to be displayed along with the listings of all other cooperating agents/brokers on member websites. IDX closely mirrors the actually MLS – I say closely because a broker may always opt out, although they rarely do. So when you search for homes on any local agent or brokerage site with a search feature, including ours, you are looking at an IDX feed which is straight from the MLS to you. By the way (and many agents don’t even get this part) this includes Redfin’s site, because Redfin is a broker. In San Diego, it includes SDLookup, because that too is a broker-operated site. It also includes Realtor.com, because our data is delivered to them through an agreement with our MLS.

Then you have the third party syndication sites. These are multiplying like bunnies, so there are too many to list, but two of the more familiar and frequented sites are Trulia and Zillow. Here, the listings come to roost in many ways. They can be manually input by a listing agent, broker or homeowner. They can be delivered via a “feed” from the agent/broker website or through a listing syndication service.

The important thing to keep in mind is that garbage in equals garbage out. In the case of IDX, the same theory applies, but our MLS’s have policies and procedures in place for policing. They have the authority to insist that data is correct, current and not misused. Not so where the third-party syndication sites are concerned.

By the Numbers

So on with the show. Please keep in mind that I have a day job, as evidenced by the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to get around to writing about this. And because this day job keeps me pretty busy, I didn’t have the luxury of plowing through data for an entire region. I limited my search to one Zip code: 92131.

On a morning when the Sandicor Multiple Listing Service (MLS) showed 48 detached homes for sale in the 92131 Zip code, Zillow showed (drum roll) 224! In their defense, that’s only off by 367%. Close enough, you say, except that we are the ones fielding the calls from confused buyers returning from the Neighborhood of Make Believe. (By the way, my own IDX site was off the actual number by 3 on this day, which I can attribute to a mere time-delay in data refreshing.)

Now, it turns out that 46 of those were miscategorized; they were condos that had been included in the “detached” category. We’ll get to those in a minute, but for now, let’s exclude them, leaving us with 178 Zillow listings. Of those, 15 were new homes posted by a builder or For Sale By Owner postings, leaving us with 163 Z-homes.

If you are still awake, here is where it gets fun. 54 of the 163 homes shown were not for sale – have never been for sale. They are homes that a certain foreclosure website has determined, from the tax records, have a Notice of Default filed by the owner’s lender. In other words, they might be on the market someday – or not. These pretend listings are shown with no address, only a street name, and requests for more information are funneled to their website where a buyer might pay to subscribe to a foreclosure notification service or be put in touch with a “neighborhood specialist” who will likely say something like, “That home isn’t available, but we have others!”

If we exclude the 54 unicorns, we are left with 109 Z-listings on February 2^nd. Now we’re getting somewhere! Except:

• 24 had long ago sold, one dating back a full 13 months.
• 10 were in escrow. (Fun side note: One very large brokerage is showing all of their pending listings as “active” in Zillow, which sounds suspiciously like intentional deception in order to make that phone ring. Our own feed refreshes with the MLS; our listings go pending, and they come off of Zillow. If I can figure this out, I have to believe a national brand-name brokerage can.
• 1 was shown for sale at a bargain price of $7,000, but the remarks revealed it was actually a miscatergorized rental.
• 1 home was entered for sale twice by the same agent.
• 8 were expired, cancelled or withdrawn listings.
• 17 were “contingent,” with an accepted offer waiting on bank approval.
• 2 were mystery homes, and I finally gave up trying to figure out where these came from or if they are/ever were for sale.

The good news for Zillow is that most (not all) of the active inventory this day was there – somewhere. Just try finding it.

And the condos that were miscategorized as detached homes? Over half were not really for sale.

How does this happen?

Is bad data just another example of agents behaving badly? Sometimes yes; other times, I’m not so sure. Either way, it should be the responsibility of the platform to have effective procedures in place to ensure compliance.

My favorite example of the “agents behaving badly” scenario is the home that sold in September but shows up as an active listing.  Big deal. There were 24 examples of this. Except, in this case, the agent that represented the buyer in September is the one who subsequently reposted the listing; he is now showing up as the listing agent for a home that is not on the market. Utilizing the magic “Report problem with listing” link, we indeed reported this listing to Zillow — three weeks ago. And, just like magic, it is still on their site in all its glory this morning.

And then there are the inaccuracies that I just can’t figure out. There’s a home that sold last summer, and the history indicates that the listing agent posted it as for sale the day after it sold. Yet, there is no listing agent or listing office shown. So, who really reposted the bogus listing? In fact, there are numerous examples of active listings with no listing agent or listing office attribution. I can think of only two folks who would benefit from such a posting: The agents adverting around and beneath, and a site owner who wants both a populous site and happy advertisers. If a listing is “accidentally” left on the site, I just can’t reconcile how the listing agent/office information falls off the grid. There could be a very good explanation; I just can’t see it.

Who cares?

I do, and other agents and consumers should. It’s a sort of listing Wild West that makes a mockery of both the data, and of the system that supports cooperative sharing of the data and offers of compensation between members. Remember, it is the latter that was the whole genesis of our MLS system.

The problem is that Zillow and their counterparts are not MLS’s. They are sites born of a free market, a site where the founders saw an opportunity to repurpose and monetize the efforts of the real estate industry. That’s fine. It’s that kind of thinking that breeds innovation. It’s that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that makes America great. It’s just too bad that, given that the plankton of their business models is listing data, they can’t spend at least a fraction of the time they spend manning the phone banks to sell advertising around the data that they do on the data itself.

So keep in mind that if you show up on these sites searching for homes, you are really just, as I once put it, “Playing Zillow.” Your search results will include many homes that are for sale, but you will also be looking at many more properties that are only available in the Land of Make Believe. Have fun and, if you don’t already own a Ouija Board, delight over the Zestimates. Be dazzled by the array of side bar “neighborhood specialists” who may or may not be specialists at all but share the commonality that they had to pay to play Zillow.

Or, in San Diego County, you can just search here or here. And if you are in full search and purchase mode, maybe, just maybe, you could establish a relationship with a local agent who can help you sort through the online mess, an agent who knows the difference between real and make believe.

(Fun footnote fact, in case you dazzled by the agent review stars: This morning I checked the three "Premier Agents" who are shown sidled up to one of my listings. Now, I admit that they could each be the greatest thing since the death of Disco. But, according to the MLS, one has a total of ten career sales to his credit but twenty client reviews (OK, his "leads" are probably going to his agent team), another has zero transactions in his career, and the third is an agent who works in a different county and is not even a member of our MLS. I guess that doesn't mean their money isn't good. At least in the old days, gaming the system was free.)

I've toyed with the idea of incorporating video into our site for years, but staring into the eyes of the video monster can be a frightening thing. I always came back to the same question: Do it yourself or do it right?

Right won out. A big shout-out to the Hickman Group for helping us produce this wonderful short that perfectly captures all of the reasons we love Scripps Ranch. We'll be doing more of these. In the meantime, I am left to ponder how we might find a time and cost effective way to do something equally compelling for each of our listings. That's the tougher nut to crack.

It was three years ago this month that I wrote about the importance of being present at your property inspection.

The idea is that things tend to get lost in translation. More specifically, when an inspector’s findings are translated to paper, even the must mundane observations tend to take on a DEFCON 1 level of urgency. This is because paper by its very nature is quite portable, so that it can be delivered to the judge with speed by even the frailest bailiff.

First, if you are a little rusty on property inspection protocol, here is how it typically goes. The buyer’s inspector, accompanied by the buyer’s agent, will arrive at the home at 10:00 a.m. to perform an investigation of the property that will take “oh, an hour and a half or so.”  He will finish at about noon – in November. This is because it is the inspector’s job to be thorough and to make sure the buyer get’s his money’s worth.

Usually, the buyer and the seller’s agent will arrive “oh, an hour and a half or so” after the inspection began so that they can hear the summary of findings. They will all stand around the kitchen and swap stories about their children and domestic pets until November, at which point the inspector will announce that he should be wrapping things up in “oh, an hour and a half or so.” Five hours later, he will be ready to deliver the tablets unto the anxious audience.

This is where the fun starts. First I should clarify that not all property inspectors are created equal. And I am not talking about all inspectors here, but just the ones I have encountered most recently. And it’s not their fault; we live in California, where our motto is “E Pluribus Lawsuit.” Better to err on the side of caution.

But, back to the “lost in translation” part. Sure, everything may sound just ducky when you hear the inspector say it, but twenty-four hours later when the report arrives, memories may have faded. And what you are left with is a written summary of findings that suggests moving your family into this particular home would be negligent on par with running with scissors barefoot over hot coals through the zoo’s Bengal tiger exhibit at feeding time.

To quote myself from my previous post (and to save me the trouble of having to write brand new words this morning), here is how it might go.

Inspector at the home: “You can see here that there is some ponding of water on the back patio. They probably ran their sprinklers just before we arrived.

Inspector in the report: “Evidence of improper drainage. Potential for water accumulating near the foundation and, over time, causing home to hydroplane into adjacent structures or fall down entirely. Recommend contacting Army Corps of Engineers for complete analysis of surrounding water shed (minimum 42 mile circumference) assuming 100-year-flood and an Elvis sighting.

Inspector at the home: “This outlet has reversed polarity.”

Buyer at the home: “What is reversed polarity?”

Inspector at the home: “It is (speaking loudly and slowly) when the polarity is reversed. I’ll note it in the report.”

Inspector in the report: “Electrical outlets at various locations show evidence of improper and/or faulty wiring and/or gross negligence on the part of the contractor who had no personal stake in the safety of future owners or their families. Recommend a complete toxic mold investigation and remediation by a licensed HVAC/OPEC/FDIC/Structural Engineering specialist as well as immediate relocation of any remaining, living occupants to high ground in a neighboring county.

Lately, I have seen even the most minor cosmetic issues written up in a way that might cause concern.

Inspector at the home: There is a small red stain in the hall carpet. Someone probably spilled something – like cranberry juice. Or, if it was my house, a Bloody Mary. Ha, ha, ha!

Inspector in the report: Soiled flooring present in the hallway, one meter southwest of the linen closet. Source unknown. Recommend further investigation. Suggested reference materials: In Cold Blood, 1967, Truman Capote; Hoffa, 1992, directed by Danny DeVito. (The latter is available for instant download on Netflix.) Identifying locations of ancient burial grounds is beyond the scope of this inspection.

Every time I attend an inspection these days I am reminded that we have lost touch with the reason for the property inspection – to confirm that there are no serious structural or health and safety concerns that any reasonable person would expect to be addressed prior to commencing habitation. Instead, so many now see it as an opportunity to remodel and upgrade as a condition of sale. They are looking for new construction when what they initially offered to purchase was a used product.

I am not planning on selling my home any time soon, but I may some day. With that in mind, I think it is only fair to disclose the following so that my future would-be buyers can make an informed decision.

• All of my appliances currently function, but I’m pretty sure they will all cease functioning at some point in the future. That’s what appliances do.
• The faucet in my laundry room leaks a little at the base, but this only happens when I turn it on. My advice is that you not turn it on.
• The master bedroom window screen frame is bent from that time I accidentally locked Steve out on the balcony and went to a termite inspection. It is still functional. And Steve got over it.
• In the kitchen, there is a small chip in granite counter top that bugs the heck out of me. I am not sure how it got there, but my money is on the time I bonked it with an empty wine bottle on my way to the recycling bin. (Note: At my house, using “empty” and “wine bottle” in the same sentence is beyond redundant.)
• When it rains, our patio gets wet.
• My refrigerator is 12 years old, and my washer and dryer are one year new. If you buy my house, I may give you all three so I don’t have to move them. But if you have any issues with the way they operate or look, I will not fix or replace them. Because it’s my stuff, and I think it’s kind of nice that I’m willing to give you my stuff. (Speaking of stuff, the Betta fish that my daughter brought home from college two years ago, the one intent on making a mockery of published fresh water fish actuarial tables, will convey. This is not negotiable.)
• My garage has more cobwebs than the set of The Amityville Horror. We keep meaning to clean it out, but we may not get around to it.
• I have never been in my crawl space, and I have no intention of going there. Unless you find something clearly not indigenous – like a pack of rabid wolverines or Jimmy Hoffa – know that everything you see is as was delivered by the builder. Blame them.
• While we are on the subject, “delivered by the builder” applies to pretty much everything in my house. Let me go on record as saying I did not marry Steve for his do-it-yourself skill set. Power tools were long ago banned at our home. We own a hammer and a couple of screwdrivers that we sometimes commission to change a light bulb or open a wine bottle, but that’s about it. So, if you see any code violations, you can sleep nights knowing it didn’t happen on my watch.
• The master bedroom door makes this annoying jiggling sound. For the jiggling sound to present itself, several things must occur: The door must be closed, the window must be opened, there must be wind, and you must be trying to take a nap. I suspect this is due to natural settlement, but I am no expert. What I do know is that this condition is easily remedied by wedging several sheets of Kleenex between the door and the jamb when closing. (Other brands, like Puffs, may work as well, but I haven’t tested the theory. In any event, I would avoid generics to be safe.)
• Periodically, our fire alarm goes off. This only happens at two in the morning, with the median duration of deafening blaring documented as approximately 93 minutes. Spreadsheets are available on request. I should clarify that we have never had a fire — at least, not to our knowledge. (As I mentioned, I have never actually been in my crawl space.) The important point here is that the men and women of Fire Station 37 are always responsive and courteous. You will really enjoy their company.

You’ve been warned.

I hate multiple offers.

First, I should define the term, for the laypeople out there. Multiple offers are situations where the offers to purchase number more than one, and thus the term “multiple.” I know it’s complex, but that’s the kind of stuff they teach us in real estate licensing school.

Now that you know what multiple offers are, you should also know that I hate them. Sure, I don’t hate them like, say, I hate Snooki. (To be fair, I don’t really hate Snooki – I don’t even know her. I just hate the idea that she is somehow out there being all rich and famous for, well, nothing while I am blogging in anonymity about something really important like multiple offers.) No, multiple offers are more like eggplant. I can deal with it, but I would rather not.

First know that this is a contemporary topic. Suddenly, in our market, it seems that every home that is standing sort-of upright and is priced within a furlong of market value is attracting multiple offers. I am seeing this throughout the I-15 corridor, but I am also hearing the same stories from some of our richer coastal cousins.  What gives?

Inventory. We have none. Take Scripps Ranch. Zillow shows 161 detached homes on the market this morning. If only! In the 92131 Zip code, our MLS includes (drum roll) 47 homes available for sale. That represents approximately 0.6% of the standing inventory. Need a home under $700,000 so your 20% down payment can bring you within high-end conforming loan limits? You’ve got 17 homes to choose from.

And, trust me. Buyers are out there. Steve’s Realtor-mobile is starting to look like one of those circus cars (and, no, I am not suggesting Steve is a clown). The buyers keep piling into the back seat but no one comes out. They are all waiting on new listings.

Where have all the listings gone? The recession ate them. Too many would-be sellers don’t have the equity to sell, so the discretionary move market has been severely hog-tied. Many others, who do have equity, are simply making the decision to stay put, banking on future price increases and a better payday.

The irony is that amidst all of this, while prices are creeping in some segments, they are doing so ever-so-slowly. It may turn out to be a seasonal thing – or not. Only time will tell. In the meantime, multiple offers are a reality.

Did I mention that I hate multiple offers?

Sure, when I am representing a seller, it is a glorious thing for my client when a whole bunch of people decide to throw their checkbooks at his head in unison. Over the weekend, I had a little listing priced slightly above recent comps that generated eight offers. Within 72 hours, we had to suspend showings so that we could catch our breath and sort things out. That’s not the part I hate.

The difficulty with multiples is that they tug at the old heartstrings. With a typical one-offer negotiation, the conversation typically goes something like this.

Buyer’s Agent: I am pleased to present this offer on behalf of my clients to purchase your listing. For $5.

Seller’s Agent: But the asking price is $800,000!

Buyer’s Agent: Yes, but we have reviewed recent sales, and this home sucks. The appliances are not Viking, the fixtures do not have the requisite gold plating, and your hair looks like it was styled by angry hedgehogs. We don’t like you. Or your client. Or this home. Accept the offer or we walk.

This confrontational approach is understandable. Despite the low inventory, this market continues to defy the laws of supply and demand. It is still a buyer’s market. Ask Case and Shiller.

But now we are seeing multiple offers, which, by the way, I hate. In multiple offer situations, the interpersonal dynamics change — like magic. The same adversaries who could only speak in complete dollar signs yesterday, the ones who would gladly have thrown the seller and his Schnauzer under a school bus for a $3,000 carpet allowance, suddenly become humanitarians of the highest order. They are deeply caring, compassionate individuals who each have a unique personal story to tell.

Enter the sappy cover letter.

There is nothing wrong with the sappy cover letter; I’ve written hundreds of them. And they all read something like this.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Seller,

Thank you for allowing my clients to tour your home. We are sorry for the inconvenience, and we will be forever in your debt. We left you a bundt cake on the counter.

Mr. and Mrs. Buyer have been looking for a home just like yours for 39 months, and now they have found it!

My clients are well qualified. Mr. Buyer runs a local non-profit food bank, and Mrs. Buyer has devoted her life’s work to searching for a cure for kidney disease, ever since she donated her own kidney to a young inner-city homeless boy. When she is not causing stem cells to differentiate, she enjoys raising her five young disabled children who spend their summers doing missionary work in orphanages in various third-world countries – like Texas.

My clients have outgrown their current studio apartment. Their lease is month-to-month. Therefore, their timing can be flexible to meet your needs. By the way, they really enjoyed meeting your puppy! Their own Schnauzer was run over by a school bus last month while trying to save a toddler who had wondered into the street, and they look forward to putting your dog run to good use as they foster rescue animals in Scooter’s memory.

Please accept our offer for $5.

And here’s the problem for the listing agent. You will have five or eight or ten of these letters, each more emotional and compelling than the next. Your client will select the “best” offer (“best” usually defined as “most money”), and you will be left to make the phone calls in which you proceed to squash the hopes and dreams of multiple families. It’s not fun.

That’s what “multiple offers” really means – “multiple families.” That’s the hard part.

Caveat emptor: One word of caution about deploying the sappy cover letter. Even the most compassionate seller and listing agent will consider other things: Namely, the reputation of the buyer’s agent. Because, you see, it is the buyer’s agent who they are going to have to work with and rely on (to meet time frames, to perform under the contract) throughout the process. It won’t matter how much of a tear-jerker your story is if your offer is filled out with a crayon or the listing agent has to rewrite the contract for you. That’s a big-old red flag, an indicator of how the next thirty days might go. And if your agent is not well-liked, lacks respect among his peers, or is not perceived as entirely competent, this will become a big factor at decision time. Just sayin’.

This is one of those posts I didn’t want to write. I almost didn’t write it. It’s too difficult, and it’s not about real estate, at least not in the strictest sense. Better to talk about termite inspections or market trends, I thought.  But as important as those things are to our clients, they seem just too trivial today.

Last Thursday, a subset of the San Diego Castles Realty team got together for a little workshop, the subject of which was how we might best dominate the real estate universe by deploying our shiny iPads.

To be honest, it was more of a “How do I turn it on?” session for some in attendance. And while we evolved to topics like electronic signing and other productivity applications, it was inevitable that we eventually found ourselves watching Randy do pirouettes in the middle of Panera’s main traffic aisle as he demonstrated his SpinCam prowess.  (Note: Panera has free WiFi, and we are a low-budget bunch.)

Jeff rolled his eyes. Randy likes to get his geek on, we agreed. And we laughed. It was the last time I saw Jeff.

Jeff Weinberger, our newest team member, best friend of and soon-to-be buyer’s agent for our own Randy Bragdon, passed away unexpectedly and suddenly this past weekend. He was 37 years old.

The last time we spoke, he talked about how excited he was that he finally received his date to take the real estate licensing exam.  After months of preparation, he knew that rotational crops do not convey, and he was able to use “chattle” in a complete sentence (we tested him). He was ready. And we were so excited for him.

Mostly, we were excited for us. Jeff was just the kind of agent we pride ourselves on associating with: Wicked smart, honest, ethical, nicer than nice, and possessing the perfect blend of snarkiness and sarcasm that I so admire. He had a fabulous career ahead of him. If only.

I have rewritten this post a half dozen times, grasping for the right words. And having left a thousand words on the cutting room floor, I have finally settled on this simple thesis. I miss Jeff, and I know that the world — certainly my world — is less complete with his passing.

I ask that all three of our readers send any unused prayers along to his family and his friends. While Jeff is at peace now, they need strength.

photo credit: rob st

Looking for a deal? Get in line.

We often tell our selling clients that there are two buyer pools out there. One wants a picture-perfect home with all of the goodies (granite, stainless, resort amenities, dancing bears and ponies) and at rollback pricing. The other wants a deal – one that “needs a little work,” the idea being when that they hang up their hammer, they will sweat equity and bragging rights to show for it.

If you are a buyer, the key is in knowing into which category you fall. You can’t have it both ways. One could argue that you have but one choice.

We recently had a client pass on a beautiful turnkey home, one that was fairly priced and within his budget. “I’m looking for something that needs a little work,” he said. It seems he likes to fix stuff. OK, fine. But either you are shopping for a home or you need a hobby.  Don’t confuse the two.

The reality is, he wants a deal – a steal, even. But the other harsh truth is that, in limiting himself to the falling-down-ugly inventory, inventory with the potential for magic equity to materialize with a couple of weekends of cabinet refacing and fixture replacement, he is going to be competing with droves of trained professionals. He is regular folk.

Jim Klinge, writing about the current flipper frenzy, said it well:

How does (the flipper frenzy) affect the regular folks?

1. If you’re an investor hoping to flip or rent-out, good luck.  The flippers have flooded the street searching for the next deal, and are working on thin margins.  They are soliciting property owners directly via mail and email, and working all the usual spots – trustee sales, defaulter lists, FSBOs, short-sales, MLS, etc.  Because sellers get bombarded, the price typically goes up – there won’t be many steals from now on.

2. Primarily, they are looking for fixers.  If you want a house to occupy and thought you’d save some money by purchasing a dog, you won’t save much.  You can avoid the rush by sticking with the turnkey properties, and hope to buy one with all the trimmings for a fair price.

3.  Appreciation – You might think that a wave of flippers selling renovated properties could lead to rising prices.  Maybe, maybe not – buyers usually can find out how much the flippers paid, and would have to be very frustrated to pay a lot more.  With the sophisticated flippers being careful to buy somewhat under market, and able to add cheap Chinese goods to improve them, they can live on thin margins and not count on appreciation. I think this will lead to a very active trading range of +/- 10% throughout the county, and for every lucky sale that pops through the range’s ceiling, there will be another flipper buying a lower sale to keep the pricing trend moderated.

I added the emphasis on Number 2, because most of the clients we represent fall under the category of “regular folk,” people who are looking for a home that they intend to live in and enjoy. Number 2 should be etched on your foreheads, because that is the reality of our current market – unless you have connections and cash.

And a message for sellers, one I have harped on before: In this market, mediocrity is not rewarded. You are either flipper worthy or you are turnkey awesome. The tougher sell is the home that falls somewhere in the middle.

But, then again, all objections are overcome with price.

Isn't this just ducky? Just in time for tax filing (not).

In an interpretive about-face, it would appear that people blessed with a Mello Roos assessment may now continue to claim those payments as deductions on their taxes, according to the California State Franchise Tax Board. And by "people," I mean me.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

On the eve of tax-filing deadline, the Franchise Tax Board abandoned its campaign to get California property owners not to deduct a portion of their real estate taxes.

From the Golden State's website:

At this time, we do not plan to add additional reporting requirements related to the real estate tax deduction beginning with the 2012 tax return.

That's good news, of course, but there are a whole bunch of us who would have appreciated getting the memo before the eve of the deadline — before we filed our returns on time like good little citizens.

As always, consult your tax advisor, because I am not one of those guys.

H/t to Agent Genius for introducing me to Piktochart, a cool little site for creating infographics on the fly without breaking a sweat. Well, it's not really that easy. First you have to have something you want to communicate.

On another morning when I did't have a home inspection looming, I am pretty certain I could get my creative juices flowing and unleash all the glory that is the infographic (All the cool kids are doing it!) to share some complex real estate-related concept. Like why you need a downpayment to buy a house. Or how when banks use the word "streamlined" when refering to their short sale processes, they mean "before you die of natural causes — maybe."

In the meantime, the San Diego Home Show is on my mind.

My spousal unit and I got all bold yesterday. We decided to take a rare trip to normalcy and spend our Sunday recreating. Because our twelve-year-old kitchen cabinets are of the "classic" oak variety (classic being a word that builders and real estate agents use to describe something that no one wants), and because we suspect, given the quality, that they were manufactured by the Middle School Woodshop class (no offense to Middle Schoolers intended), we decided to hit the Fairgrounds and get some remodeling ideas. Steve's alternative was to hike up Iron Mountain, so the Home Show was starting to sound like a rip-roaring way to spend my one day off this year.

And it was! Such a carnival atmosphere! We got some great ideas about remodeling (like, maybe it would be cheaper to just move). And we were also reminded why buyers have perfected the eye-contact-avoidance technique for visiting open houses — and why we burned the proverbial guest register years ago. Hard sell approaches are annoying, insulting and just plain ineffective.

So, without further ado, I give you my masterpiece.

“It’s stupid to give away your content for free,” my daughter scolded.

Daughter Number 1 is home on a brief layover between journalism stints at New York Magazine and The New York Times Washington D.C. Bureau. We were discussing the parallels between the changes in her profession and mine brought about by the Internet. And when she uttered those words, she pretty much summed up what I see as the central issue to the third-parting syndication debate.

It’s stupid to give away content for free. But so many agents and brokers continue not only to do just that, but to do it proudly, defending their position by suggesting that both consumers are entitled to our content and sellers are harmed if we don’t freely cough it up to anyone who asks.

Neither is true. But both are concepts that are being aggressively promoted by the owners of the third-party “search” sites, like Zillow and Trulia in a rather shameless game of shaming the broker community into giving them what they want – namely, our valuable listing data. They do this by enlisting the public-at-large, both home-shopping consumers and our selling clients, to fight their battle for them. It’s become an all-out media blitz of late. “Hey, it’s not us! You owe it to the people!”

Do we?

“I, for one, applaud ARG’s move. It was bold and, in my opinion, it was right.”

I wrote those words back in January when local brokerage Abbott Realty Group (ARG) took their stand against syndicating listings to third-party sites (like Zillow and Trulia).  That’s my story, and I am sticking to it.

ARG’s fearless leader, Jim Abbott, took a stand, and (at the risk of understating) his position sparked a lot of debate among agents and brokers. Now Jim has published a video follow-up, “Life After Listing Syndication” in which he delivers what I believe to be the most thoughtful, well-crafted argument against third-party site listing syndication I have seen to date. And I have seen a bunch.

Mr. Abbott touched on many points where listing syndication is concerned. Today I focus, primarily, on just one – content – because that is the elephant in the room.

The parallels between journalism and real estate that my daughter and I were discussing are worth considering. Take the similarities between listing syndication to third-party sites and the rise of the Huffington Post.

At the recent White House Correspondents Dinner while addressing Arianna Huffington, President Obama quipped, “There’s no one else out there linking to the kinds of hard-hitting journalism that HuffPo is linking to every single day. Give them a round of applause… And… you don’t pay them! It’s a great business model.” Laughter ensued.

That’s pretty funny, all right. It’s almost as funny as the business models of the listing aggregators like Zillow and Trulia, only the joke’s on us.

The public doesn’t deserve to be given a newspaper or a magazine for free any more than journalists have a moral obligation to give away their content to anyone who will publish it, digitally or otherwise. For real estate agents and brokers, we similarly owe no such duty to populate and monetize other’s business opportunities.

Journalists create content; so do we. The only arguable difference is that our content is, in theory, created with the sole intent of promoting a product for sale – our client’s home.  As a consumer, however, you are probably also aware of the fact that the content is created and shared for the purpose of advertising the creator – the real estate agent and broker. So as you consider the rhetoric coming from the third-party site camps, and from the agents and brokers who defend their pro-syndication stance, consider who the true intended beneficiary of this advertising might really be. Hint: It’s not the home seller.

So if we agree that it is not the consumer’s divine right, nor Zillow’s or Trulia’s, to have our content regurgitated freely, in knee-jerk fashion, to any and every conceivable publisher, then we are left with the argument about whether or not our selling clients are owed product placement on third-party sites – and with the argument about whom the content, in fact, belongs to.

I’ll tackle the latter first. The content about my listing – the photos, the virtual tours, the interactive floor plans, the property description – belongs to me. The home belongs to my client and they are (ultimately) paying me to market that home, but all of that other stuff is stuff I procured, created and paid for. I don’t have an obligation to hand over the results of my labor to sites that endeavor to repurpose and monetize my content any more than I have an obligation to advertise a home on every bus bench in town, in every print publication in existence, or on an aerial banner flown across Pacific Beach on a 70-degree Sunday afternoon. What I do have the obligation to do is market the home logically and effectively in ways that will in fact benefit my client.

What we owe to our clients is exposure for their listings. It’s but one of our job descriptions, but it is the more visible – the role of advertiser and marketer. But to suggest that I am bound by some moral, ethical or social contract to regurgitate my content to every site that might want it, or even to just the ones with the most “hits,” is ludicrous.

And, yet, the spin machine is working overtime to convince us otherwise.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/real-estate-agents-bristle-online-listings

In a report by Marketplace’s Bob Moon, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff was quoted as saying, “What seller on earth, especially in a down real estate market, would choose to list their home with an agent who was not going to put their home on the biggest websites in their city?”

That is the quote that appears in the text. If you listen to the audio, what he really said is, “A seller has got to be completely nuts to list their home with a listing agent who wasn’t going to put their home on the biggest websites in their city.” In hindsight, calling consumers “nuts” was probably considered unfortunate phrasing, especially since it is the non-participating agents who were the target of Mr. Rascoff’s verbal bullet.

So, according to the Zillow CEO and depending on which version you favor, either the seller is nuts or I am nuts. Tomato, tomahto. But the fact remains, despite my position that giving away content for free is, in fact, nuts, I would be the biggest champion of the make-Zillow-rich-at-the-expense-of-the-broker cause if it benefited my selling clients. It does not.

For the record, we ceased wholesale syndication of our listings to third-party aggregators over a month ago. We didn’t do it with a fancy, all-guns-blazing media spash, but we did it for our clients and ourselves because it was the right thing to do. Our policy is that, after discussing the pros and cons with our clients, if they still perceive benefit, we will gladly bundle their listings up and ship them off. To date, no one has opted in. It’s nuts, I tell you!

We have established that the data on these sites is grossly inaccurate and unreliable.

And we have acknowledged that Zestimates are generally Ztupid. Every single one of the listings we have taken since we stopped syndication has sold in excess of their Zestimate. One in particular sold in three days with eight offers and at $110,000 over the Zestimate. Dang! If only the sellers had had the requisite exposure on one of “the biggest websites in their city!”

We are receiving buyer calls – many, many more than we received when we were regurgitating our content for fun and philanthropy. How did they even know the home was fore sale? I can only speculate that maybe, just maybe, it’s because all of our listings appear on every IDX site – hundreds of them – in our market. The calls come via our site, our MLS’s own site, and every agent/broker site in our market with a home search feature.

Oh, and maybe it’s because people don’t search one site and call it a day.  If I am looking for a purple purse with green embroidery (I am not), I don’t just hit Bloomingdale’s site and give up. I search the Internet for “purses,” and then “purple handbags” and, most often, by designer name. Most often, serious homebuyers search by neighborhood and even address – a Zillow employee admitted as much to me. The one-stop shopper is the casual shopper and is “just looking.”

The terms of use on these sites are frightening. They should be both concerning to the content creator and to the homeowner.  From Zillow’s own Terms of Service:

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Zillow or in connection with the Services (your "Submission"), you grant Zillow an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, and translate your Submission, in connection with the Services or in any other media, and (b) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

This explains why the property page for one of our current listings shows the photos and the flowery, long-form description from the last time it was offered for sale – in 2007. The former listing agent gave up his rights to his work, yet his legacy (and the legacy of the previous owner) will live on – with no attribution and in any form and anywhere that Zillow sees fit.

Finally, there is the agent advertising – beside, around and below – each listing gifted to Zillow. This is not entirely about me, although I do appreciate being given credit for my work. And this is not about dual agency – not one bit. Agents and brokers who take their fiduciary roles seriously know that nothing could be further from the truth. This is about advertising practices that are deceiving and really bad for the seller.

You see, if your home is not on Zillow or Trulia, the serious buyers – the real buyers – will find you. We have proven that; we know that to be true. If your listing is present on those sites, however, a real buyer may just wander through. And the advertisings host or hostess will be someone who has no fiduciary responsibility to you; they have no incentive or motivation to sell your home. They are there because they paid to play, and their goal is simply to sell any home. They refer to the buyers as “leads,” and by this they mean they consider the buyers to be their “leads,” not yours.

If you don’t believe this, then think about it another way. Would you be OK with having your agent put another brokerage’s sign in your front yard? Why not? Because the buyers would be redirected and misdirected to someone who has no stake in your sale and, most likely, little or no knowledge of your home. It is the same reason we wouldn’t have an agent from another brokerage holding one of our listings open. Our goal is to sell our client’s home; theirs is to just sell a home. At least in the case of an open house, the agent from the outside brokerage might be able to field basic questions like, “Does it have a double oven?” because they are standing in the room at the time. Not so with most paying advertisers on the third-party sites.

Surprisingly, I talk to a lot of agents who loathe the practice of third-party syndication for all of these reasons yet continue to syndicate. They do so because they feel cornered – because they believe their clients demand it. And this is exactly what the syndication sites want you to believe.

But I know our clients are smarter than that. We simply need to be bold enough to, dare I say, do our jobs. Beyond marketing is a very long list of job duties all related to advising our clients. Where our marketing decisions are concerned, we owe them the same duty to present the options and implications of each. You might be surprised that, given the facts, they are less enamored of the syndication concept than you think.

So, to agents and brokers: Syndicate or don't syndicate. The decision is yours — and your client's. But make that decision thoughtfully, based on what is really best for each of you. And remember that your content is yours; if you choose to give it freely, do so because you honestly believe the trade-off is fair — that you will realize fair "compensation" in the form of measurably better results for your clients — not because you felt cornered, coerced and the victim of some self-serving, manufactured public outcry. 

Good:

photo credit: bunnygoth

Bad:

photo credit: mikebaird

At least if you live in a Scripps Ranch subdivision.

But first, a lot of things happened on May 7, 2011 – newsworthy things, I dare say. I really don’t remember what those things were, though, mostly because so much has happened since. One thing I do recall is  that on that monumental day of yore, I wrote a blog post.

Yep. It’s been over three weeks. I was reminded of this yesterday when a gentleman called me wanting our help with a home purchase in San Diego. “I enjoy your blog,” he said.

“Blog?” I thought. “Oh, yeah. I have one of those.”

Having taken a nearly one-month sabbatical (a record even for Miss Lazy Britches) and now finding myself dangerously close to being mocked on social media sites everywhere for my blogging loser-dom, I have a lot catching up to do.  Rather than milk three weeks’ worth of material for the next 21 days, I’ll opt for the lighting round approach.

1. Getting Back to My Roots

Sure, I finally had that overdue cut-and-color in May, but that’s not what I mean. The roots I am talking about here aren’t really “my” roots, but more roots that are owned in common with an undivided interest.

My home, like the homes of two of our three readers, I suspect, is governed by an active Homeowners’ Association (HOA). And by “active,” I mean they actively bill me every month. They also actively send nasty-grams to people in the neighborhood who erect scale replicas of the zoo's flamingo exhibit on their front lawns, who paint their homes lime green, or who can’t provide documented evidence that they own the requisite golden retriever and mini-van. But that’s not the point.

The HOA also actively maintains the common areas – the parkway strips and open space pockets. And by “actively maintain,” I mean they pay both the water bill and the men who actively park their trucks on the sidewalks every couple of weeks and actively pull weeds when I am trying to somewhat-actively jog.

Earlier this week, we came to learn that the lovely parkway strip abutting my little corner lot is harboring evil invaders intent on destroying western civilization as we know it.

Numerous pine trees and one rogue pepper tree who shall remain nameless (Bob) have apparently decided that they can dispatch their malicious little tentacles wherever they feel like it. And where they feel like it is apparently in my backyard. Our first clue that something was amiss was when we began needing a boost to traverse the expansion joint in our side yard concrete walkway. An afternoon of destructive testing by our landscape crew confirmed that roots will go wherever they want; these roots, it seems, wanted to go to my back door en route to the refrigerator for a cold one.

In our active HOA’s defense, they dispatched an active arborist (he was walking briskly) who, after two trips to the “job site” and because he is a trained professional, determined the following: There are some really big tree roots in my back yard, the one that used to have grass and bushes and stuff.

The good news is that there is a solution, a solution involving a trench and a root barrier, we are told, but only after about 16 HOA meetings have convened, times and dates to be determined. The bad news is that because of the destructive testing I alluded to in paragraph nine, my planter beds now look like I am dabbling in commercial agriculture – only, without the actual agriculture.

There’s more good news; every problem is an opportunity, and this was an opportunity to spend two days and a large chunk of my retirement account at the local garden center. Alas, there is also more bad news. It now looks like Walter Anderson Nursery threw up a large chunk of their random annuals inventory in my back yard after pulling an all-nighter. (Note: Strictly speaking, salvias are perennial in Zone 10). But, I can’t penetrate my dirt (something about roots), so my new backyard consists of exploding color all residing in their native plastic containers with price tags still afixed ($24.95. Everything at the nursery, I learned, is $24.95).

All this stuff will eventually get planted. That's assuming I can locate my active landscapers, the ones who didn't show up this past Saturday like they have every other Saturday for the past 20 years, and who I must, therefore, assume were actively enjoying the three-day weekend with their families instead of mowing my brand new lawn. Either that, or they don't want to be anywhere near my roots or my little side job. Probably the latter.

Real estate message: Trees are evil. If you happen to live in a residential dwelling like I do, do not, for the sake of fluffy kittens and your foundation, surround it with trees known for invasive root systems. Such trees might include pine trees (which are pretty stupid to plant in Zone 10), those big deciduous trees with the prickly balls, and Bob.  Now, I know there are some palm tree haters among you, but there is a reason we all plant them in San Diego. They have compact root balls and shallow root systems. (I read that somewhere; I am not, technically speaking, an active arborist despite my growing knowledge of horticulture and how to properly recoil the garden hose after watering my container collection.)

2. All the Other Stuff I was Going to Write About but Now I've Forgotten

So much for the lightening round concept. Those same snooty blogging purists who insist that you are supposed to post more often than once each senatorial term also insist that posts should be short and snappy, not of the “wall of words” variety. And since I think this safely qualifies as a wall of words, my other twenty days of material will have to wait. But be sure to check back every few weeks, as I will be covering more pressing topics such as our low housing inventory,  our current difficulties with appraisals, the latest from Case-Shiller (San Diego is up zero-point-four percent month over month; take that!), and how my daughter just had her wisdom teeth taken out (all four of them, which cost me only slightly less than a trip to the nursery). 

photo credit: jontintinjordan

In a post long ago (Stardate September 23, 2006), I shared a few of the low-lights from my week that was.  This recent post by “Jim the Realtor” Klinge sent me on a trip down memory lane.

Anecdote Number 1 is a reminder of the potential implications of opening your home to total strangers and the need to take proper security precautions. Anecdote Number 2 is a bonus account of how one real estate agent (me) might have been somebody’s girlfriend or worse – a statistic – had she not been really cautious and even more lucky.

(Note: This blast from the past has been slightly edited to reflect modern-day grammar usage and to make sure that all the words are spelled right and stuff. My finely-honed attention to detail didn’t fully develop until sometime in 2009.)

Bottoms up! During a broker open house, listing agent meets a nice man who is thinking of moving into the area. They are having a nice chat in the living room when a group of agents wanders in, at which point he immediately breaks away and makes a beeline upstairs. Listing agent, being of the crime-fighting ilk, removes her stylish pumps, tip-toes to the master bathroom in stealth-sneak-up-on-you mode, and finds the nice man drinking the codeine cough syrup from the seller’s medicine cabinet. Nice man, now very startled, runs down the stairs while chased by a quite shoeless listing agent. Unable to get a license number, listing agent calls the police. The police refuse to take a report, because an open house is considered an “invitation” to visitors.

Lesson learned: Sellers, when your home is on the market, always remove your valuables and your prescription medications (the latter being considered quite valuable by drug addicts). And, kids (and listing agents), don’t try this on your own. Steve will yell at you.

Blind Date. Agent takes a call from a man very interested in seeing a listing. “No problem,” she chirps. “It is vacant and easy to show!” Very interested man already knew this, of course, because he had seen the pictures. Agent meets very interested man at the property, and man remarks that her picture in the ad is “really cute.” As they make their way into the home, very interested man becomes a whole lot less interested when he sees that the vacant home is not so vacant today; the carpet cleaners are in full swing. Man breaks the land speed record as he flies out the door and into his car. Guess he didn’t like the sense of entry.

Steve yells at me again.

Lesson learned:  Sellers, when your home is on the market, NEVER allow people unaccompanied by card-carrying agents into your home.  Even if these people are with someone who looks a lot like an agent, even someone you might recognize from the bus bench or the back of the shopping cart, make the agent open the lockbox so that your own agent has a record of the showing.

And to agents, always assume a defensive position when showing homes alone. Always be the one closest to the door, always have your cell phone poised in readiness, and always make sure that you have told someone where your are going and when you expect to return. While you really want to sell that house, you really don’t want to be dead – or worse. You definitely don’t want Steve yelling at you.

(Before we commence with our regularly scheduled programming, a big link-back token of my appreciation to Kyle Lammers at Lender 411 for his uber-nice write up of our little blog. As my daughter, the sixth year Spanish student, might say, Mucho Thank You!)

If you don’t have a blog, then you probably think that all of this magic just happens by, well, magic! It’s easy, you think, to spin a brand new entertaining yarn every lunar cycle or so about Giant Tree Roots of Death, Milton’s Deli or, on that rare occasion, even real estate.

Blasphemy! Au contraire, even. I am here to tell you that this blogging stuff is hard work. I’ve been dangling my participles here since April 1996. And during that time, I have learned that one must constantly strive to improve ones craft if one is to have a fighting chance of holding the attention of at least one of their three readers.

Enter Copyblogger.

Yesterday I was reading an article from Copyblogger titled “11 Ways to Bore the Boots Off Your Readers.” And, no, they didn’t mention me by name but if you play it backwards, I’m pretty sure you can make it out.

The truth is that I have been violating the laws of copywriting for far too long. My posts are criminally long; my rambling diatribes are both feloniously off-topic and far too infrequent. 

I may be older than color TV, but it’s not too late for me. So allow me to take my new skills out for a whirl. Number One on Copyblogger’s how-to hit list is that “each article should have one big idea.” Here goes.

1. BIG IDEA: PROCESSING A SHORT SALE IS AS MUCH FUN AS REMOVING YOUR OWN APPENDIX WITH A BUTTER KNIFE WHILE BEING FORCED TO WATCH THE ENTIRE THIRD SEASON OF “JERSEY SHORES” AS YOU DINE ON YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW’S TURKEY MEATLOAF.

But there’s more.

2. Keep sentences short and lively. Use periods. Often.

Incorrect: It defies logic that a certain lender, one we shall just call WtF, sent my client (and I am not making this up) TWENTY-ONE identical Notices of Default on a single day, ELEVEN of which were delivered by regular mail and the remainder by certified mail, the latter requiring my client to make a trip to the post office, yet WtF can’t seem to find time to process our five-month-old short sale request.

Correct: Lenders. Are. Stupid.

3. Don’t bore your readers with difficult words.

Incorrect: While customers are anathema to bank short sale departments who have a plethora of noxious files with which they must dispense, said customers and files perceived as impediments to the plethora of more essential duties (such as licking Notice of Default envelopes), it would really be nice if they considered reprioritizing their competing professional responsibilities in order to facilitate the customer’s transaction. The fact that you get eighteen weeks of vacation a year as evidenced by your email auto-responder does not ameliorate my clients present hardship.

Oh, and antidisestablishmentarianism.

Correct: Hey, bank! Over here! I’ve got a homeowner who could use a little help before we all die of natural causes!

4. Don’t be so snooty and formal.

According to the experts, to engage with your reader you need to be charming. “Show your readers the ways in which you’re like them… Use metaphors… Occasional profanity is fine.”

Incorrect: When an occasion arises whereby a lender approves a short sale, one is inclined to assume that the transaction shall progress in a meaningful and efficient manner. It is reasonable to assume that approval will not be followed by rejection, then approval, and then another rejection without some semblance of constructive notice and a subsequent opportunity for dialogue that might lead to discovery of actual relevant, compelling facts and a mutually beneficial resolution.

Correct: I like it when people return my phone calls. I bet you do too! We sure can go faster and farther when we are all rowing our boats in the same direction, dang it! And, by the way, as my grand-pappy used to say, the online “Equator” processing system bites the big one.

More Correct: If I ran my business like the banks run their short sale departments, I would be living out of a refrigerator carton in the brush under the southbound connector ramp to I-15. And banks are full of horse doodie.

5. Use a readable font and don’t let your readers drown in dreary blocks of text. Be generous with white space. And always use compelling images.

Incorrect:  It can be exceedingly frustrating when you are asked to perform the same task multiple times, as this repetition is both unnecessary and counter productive. Such repetition causes pointless delay that, in turn, reduces the bottom line to the very lender who is trying to recover as much of the unpaid mortgage debt as possible.

Correct: Are you kidding me?

You just asked me to resubmit my client’s tax returns (and I am not making this up, either) for the fifth time?

I have faxed them to you, emailed them to you, and uploaded them in your Equator system.

At one point, they were delivered directly to your office by sled dog while we all yelled “mush” in unison. 

6. Be unpredictable. “Shakespeare misused words. He used nouns as verbs: he godded me. And adjectives as verbs:thick my blood. This technique surprises and “wakes up” the brain.” (Note: Shakespeare wasn’t under pressure to post to his bloggeth on a regular basis, but I digress.)

Incorrect: Despite numerous and repeated attempts by the government and, presumably, the lenders to streamline, automate, systemize, accelerate and generally facilitate the short sale process, the process remains laughably inefficient and fraught with bureaucratic procedures and check-list requirements that ultimately harm the borrower, the lien holder and market recovery in general.

Correct: The short sale process annoy my head and, yea, the lenders doth, more oft than nay, sucketh.

Today, I only worked on 5 of the 11 big bloggy no-no’s. But, as Shakespeare well knoweth, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Plus, I have just been informed that my client’s short sale – the one that was approved last week – is on hold again. They need to order a new appraisal. And they want to see the tax returns – this time fully illustrated and presented as a pop-up book. 

Steve penned this little gem about five years ago, shortly after Jim Cramer called the bottom of the housing market. 2007, 2012. Tomato, tomahto. Close enough, if you ask me.

The point is that, lately, we have been feeling like American Home Buying Day is finally here. Now all we need are some homes to show the buyers.

The Declaration of Independence 

If we had a dollar for every time… How many times have we said that? At the risk of compromising our street cred, this latest one is for real. Well, actually, it's not the latest, as we have been hearing it for about twelve months running. We hear it when we are holding an open house, at the grocery store, at a school function and even at the gas station. We hear it from the prospective buyers. After asking us, "How long has it been on the market?", "Why are they moving?", and "Is there going to be a price reduction soon?", we inevitably hear the next declaration.

"I think I'll just wait SIX MONTHS."

A thoughtful explanation invariably ensues. "My (dentist, Uncle Phil, barber, therapist, insurance guy, mailman) says that in SIX MONTHS it will be the right time to buy." Of course, these experts have it all over Jim Cramer from CNBC who, as our alert reader "Rido" pointed out, identified next March as the bottom of the market and, therefore, "the time" to buy homes again. The Federal Reserve Board, most economists, and even the National Association of Realtors have yet different opinions, but what do they know? Naturally, the smart money is on Uncle Phil.

Six months, six months, six months… There are so many people waiting to make a home purchase, and all of these people seem to be zeroing in on a single day 182 1/2 days from now. You heard it here first: All hell is going to break loose.

The one thing we most need in this current market is certainty. Thankfully, we seem to have a quorum and a consensus. All seem to agree that the optimum buying time-frame is six months. The only remaining question is, "Six months from when?"  

We the People

Somebody has to take a leadership role. So, we are here to bring sanity to the table. A moving target causes angst, it causes frustration and it results in undue stress and premature graying. Wishy-washy targets benefit no one. We need to establish the exact day on when it will be okay for the ever-growing gridlock of buyers to safely venture from the sidelines.

Therefore, let it be known that, in order to create a more perfect union, the time begins now. Six months from today is May 15, 2008. If the barber, the dentist, Uncle Phil, and other studied pundits in our collective spheres of influence are all correct, do you have any idea what will happen on this date? It will be chaos.

Society Without Government

The latent demand is just too enormous, and anarchy can get ugly. Remember the debut season of Tickle Me Elmo? Imagine, then, a day when throngs of home-seeking buyers take to the streets finally ready to call dibs on their favorite home (you know the one – "model-perfect", "priced to sell" , "bring all offers", "koi pond conveys"). And, then, they will proceed to beat the crap out of each other with their respective Zestimates. In order to avoid this impending doomsday scenario, we need to bring not just certaintly but order to the process.

Hail to the Chief

That's why we propose May 15 as our newest National Holiday, "American Home Buying Day". This way, we can all count on it and plan accordingly. Government agencies can coordinate traffic control and emergency personnel. Costs to the taxpayers can be offset by selling strategic advertising, such as "593 Shady Sunset Happy Place Lane brought to you by Jim's Discount Tire and Mortgage." Real estate agents will have lotteries to determine in which order their clients will get to see each home. "Number three-zero-six: Please report to "Lovingly Maintained 4BR Plus Bonus Room, Owner May Carry." Thinking about it, this is so much better than the arbitrary way we do business now, just showing multiple and random homes, willy-nilly, over the course of months and months. Now, the conversation will be much different. Buyer: "Can we see the home this weekend?" Agent: "No, you'll have to wait until American Home Buying Day. Take a number."

America was made great by increasing efficiency which led to enhanced productivity. Eliminating all but one day a year to buy a home will do the same thing. It's the six-month solution. We will fly our flag proudly, in the colors of Sienna Sand and Arizona White.

What a great country!

I remember an old joke from years ago, although I have probably butchered it over time as the old brain cells have moved well beyond their half-lives. It's a joke about picking your argument.

A man faces his accuser in court, the victim of an attack by a big, black dog. “It couldn’t have been my dog, because I don’t have a dog. Besides, my dog doesn’t bite. And he’s white.”

Just give us the damn listings, already, and no one gets hurt.

As reported by Inman News, that’s the appeal that Zillow sent this week to Multiple Listing Services (MLS’s) across the country.

Back in May, I wrote about the real elephant in the listing syndication room – content. So this appeal by Zillow for free content comes as no surprise. Except for the part about having the huevos to lay their cards out in such a matter-of-fact, cut-to-the-chase manner.

Just give us the listings, already.

Maybe the whole coercion angle wasn’t working quite as well or as swiftly as they had hoped. Just last month, the former friends-of-the-agent I applauded in those more innocent, salad days, were insisting they didn’t have a dog in this fight. “The home buying and selling public demands that your listings be gift wrapped and shipped directly to Zillow. You owe it to your clients. Do it for the People!”

Except it’s not about the People at all. It is about the “agent wallet,” that big pot of gold that catapulted the company into IPO stardom. It’s about shareholders, profitability, and future earnings.

All the fancy algorithms and questionable Zestimates and whimsical blogs about celebrity houses in the world will not keep the agent wallet in the house without the listings. Because, it is the listings that buyers and sellers want to see. And it is the buyers and sellers looking for those listings that the agents are after.

Apparently, the argument du jour is that by simply going to the source — the MLS’s — Zillow’s pesky problems with data integrity can be readily solved. And so they could. My own future earnings could also be greatly enhanced if Nordstrom simply shipped me their entire fall line so that I might set up my own little marketplace on eBay. But, I am smart enough to know that they wouldn’t just send me their stuff for free. Nordstrom would probably want something in return.  It’s crazy, I know.

It’s the content, stupid. And Zillow has a bit of a mess on its hands right now. Some feeds come from brokers; others come from individual agents. Much of the listing data they do have is out of date, incorrect, misattributed or otherwise misrepresented. And, with more agents and brokers opting out of the whole thing, the data set is incomplete.

The real estate agent community is a tough one to corral. There are too many of them and, as any broker will tell you, it’s a revolving door. There is the constant need to recruit, train, rinse and repeat. Where populating a site is concerned, better to just cut out the middle man, that little guy, the agent community that you once ferociously courted in order to gain the necessary traction to publish that prospectus.

In May, I quoted my daughter, the journalist. “It’s stupid to give away your content for free.”

Indeed.

The MLS’s are the department stores of real estate. They run the showrooms that display the wares of all of the individual designers – the agents. It is stupid to give away your content for free; it is even dumber to give it away only to have to repurchase the rights to what was yours to begin with.

And I am certain that, if not the agents, the MLS’s across the country get this.

They do, right?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the “housing bust is over.” Phew! That’s a relief.

This article ran last week so, technically, the housing bust was over on July 11. I suppose I was just too busy writing multiple counter offers to notice.

Those of us in the trenches have been seeing all of the signs of a recovery. Or maybe what we have been seeing is summer. It could go either way. But the funny thing about tops and bottoms, peaks and valleys, is that you can’t really know you are there when you are there.

Take those brave pioneers who, for whatever reason, decided it was a good idea to head across the California Mojave desert on foot. They, too, probably thought they had hit bottom when they got to Death Valley. And then they stumbled upon Barstow.

Death Valley, Barstow. Whatever. It’s close enough. I actually tend to agree that, while we may be trudging through the tumbleweed for a while yet, we’re pretty much there.

Our most recent listings have all gone with multiple offers. Last week, I entered a listing in our MLS at 6:00 am. At 5:00 that evening, I got a call from an agent. “How may offers do you have?” she asked. My answer: Five.

Which brings us to this installment of Stats Man.

Today Stats Man looks at market times and, since we long ago established that Stats Man is lazy, it will come as no surprise that this information is for the Scripps Ranch, 92131 Zip code. (Disclaimer: Information is from the Sandicor Multiple Listing Service. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Dry clean only, do not use this data while operating heavy machinery, for external use only, void where prohibited.)

I took a quick look back at detached homes sold in Scripps Ranch over the past thirty days. Note that I eliminated the short sales, because their market time continues to rack up while they are relegated to the purgatory of “contingent” status waiting for lender approval. I also eliminate the couple of homes that were new construction, builder offerings. That being said, here is what the market times looked like:

Average Days on Market: 32

Average Price per Square Foot: $268

That was fun. But what is more fun is to look at what happens when you eliminate the homes that were overpriced. How do I know which homes were overpriced? Those would be the ones that had to go through one or more price reductions before they found a taker. Duh.

Average Days on Market: 13

Average Price per Square Foot: $287

Now, as a preemptive strike for all of you naysayers, the price spectrum in each sample was roughly the same. In other words, you can’t say that more expensive homes generally have longer market times. They don’t. At least, they didn’t over the past 30 days.

In summary, what we have here is two messages. First, I will beat my favorite drum. It you price it tight to true market value — if you price it right — you will sell faster and for more. Period.  

OK. So we knew that. The other message is a reminder that there are buyers out there – a whole bunch of them. And the activity we began to see in early spring is continuing, even escalating, as we head into the dog days of summer.

Are we in Death Valley or Barstow? Beats me, but we’re close enough.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this post about Barstow do not necessarily reflect the opinons of San Diego Castles Realty. It is a fine town. Really, it is. (Not to mention, it is halfway to Vegas.) They have a Bob's Big Boy. I highly recommend the Brawny Beef combo.

Photo credit: By chokola

The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) released their home sales statistics for July. This data is for all property types and reflects homes sales nationally. And According to NAR, the national median existing home price was up 9.4% July over July, while the number of existing home sales was up 2.3%.

As my local news ticker (I call him “Steve”) was reporting NAR’s numbers, real time, as they were reported to him by a perky morning news anchor, I was reminded that national statistics are just that – national. They are relatively meaningless to the couple three blocks away that is trying to sell their house, and they are meaningless to the buyer in my backseat trying to pin a value on the home they just visited.

So, just for giggles, I ran the July numbers for a few San Diego I-15 Corridor Zip codes to see how we stacked up. (Information is from the Sandicor Multiple Listing Service, all property types, July 2012 versus July 2011. Data is deemed reliable but not guaranteed, blah, blah, blah.)

You can see that the overarching, “Everything is just ducky, thanks,” message from NAR generally holds true in these San Diego communities, with Scripps Ranch most closely tracking NAR’s national numbers. But, the numbers do vary widely.

The increases in numbers of homes sold are no surprise to those of us in the trenches. We’ve had quite the summer rally. What surprised me was the magnitude of the price changes in Rancho Bernardo and 4S Ranch. But this is where you have to consider the dangers of lumping property types.

The one thing that stands out is that we are comparing apples and bananas in 92128 and 92127. A higher mix of single-family sales in these areas, of course, resulted in a higher median sale price. In Scripps Ranch, where the percentage of detached versus attached sales remained relatively unchanged, so also did the median sale price. And in Mira Mesa where attached homes represented a bigger piece of the pie in 2012, the median price dropped.

The point then, assuming you are still awake, is that broad-brush statistics are fun and great, and can give us a feel for what’s going on. But, statistics alone lack soul. In order to know how your market is doing, you can’t rely on NAR, on Case Shiller, or even on my little MLS exercise without human intervention. Housing numbers require interpretation, and only a real human being entrenched in your local real estate market can provide the context.

Which brings me to the Zestimate, Zillow’s now-infamous “estimated market value.”

Last week, Steve and I represented three clients in closed transactions. Next week, we have four more closing. And while a discussion of Zestimates slapped onto the end of a discussion of NAR’s housing data may seem only loosely tangential, this was a good time for me to compare Zestimate accuracies – before they pick up the tax recordings and the Zestimates reset to sale price. And the comparison is relevant because it underscores the dangers in relying on data without soul, without human intervention to provide context. (Yes, real estate agents are, generally speaking, human.)

For our three closings last week, Zillow hasn’t picked up the recordations yet. I should also note that two of these were our listings, and we no longer gift our listings to Zillow. Similarly, in the case of the one buyer side, that listing agent does not syndicate to them. In other words, Zillow does not reflect these homes as for sale or having been listed, but they do provide a Zestimate for each.

You can see that the reality of our market was just a little off the opinion of the Zestimate algorithim.

As for the homes closing next week, all our listings, here is what the differences will look like.

With the exception of one little condo, the Zestimates were all significantly lower than the buyers’ opinions of value, and it is only the latter that counts. You may think that 9% sounds close enough, but $25,000 – or $65,000 – sounds like a lot of money to me. And it is a lot of money to our clients.

Finally, and as a preemptive strike to those who might claim that our selling clients are being somehow being wronged by not having their listing data outsourced to third party syndicators like Zillow, I threw in the bonus market times. And in the case of all seven homes, I should point out that there were multiple offers – on every single one.

NAR is right, at least where our San Diego market is concerned. We do seem to be turning a corner. Our shortage of inventory coupled with continuing favorable interest rates is not an insignificant factor. We’ll have to wait and see how rising interest rates, a Presidential election, a fiscal cliff, or other external factors might affect us moving forward. But if you want the real skinny as it relates to you – your neighborhood and your home – look not to national stats or a mysterious home valuation program. Talk to somebody in your hood. Your mileage may vary.

Standard & Poors/Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices for June came out yesterday. But you didn’t have to wait until yesterday. Zillow saved you the trouble and predicted last week what Case-Shiller would report yesterday happened in June.

“But we know what happened in June!” you might refute. And I suppose that is true. Heck, I – and the National Association of Realtors® — even know what happened in July. We’re that good!

Reporting on the past is something real estate agents like to do. And in that spirit, I bring you our latest installment of Boring Stuff About Contracts. Here, I am going to make the following brave prediction:

The Sunrise Powerlink transmission line project linking San Diego and Imperial County will be completed and put into service in mid-June, 2012.

Yes, I know this is a bold statement. I might as well predict a housing bubble in 2005! Come to think of it, we should have a disclosure for that.

But here is the problem with real estate disclosures. We seem to constantly add new ones to our arsenal, yet we never can quite relinquish the old ones that are no longer needed.

Three times in the last week I have received the following “disclosure” from a cooperating agent in a transaction. Each time, they requested my client’s signature because the form is “required for their files.”

Now, I understand the spirit of this disclosure. If an agent is aware of anything that might change the decision to buy or not buy, they are obligated to disclose. Ok, fine. And since a portion of the Sunrise Powerlink will run through Scripps Ranch when it is completed (last June), a future Scripps Ranch homeowner might be interested in the specifics (specifically, will the power lines be running through my guest room when they are constructed  – last June?).

But, somebody has to go out on a limb here, so it might as well be me. THE PROJECT HAS BEEN COMPLETED! You do not need to use this form anymore. It is finished, kaput, over and done with. There was a ribbon cutting ceremony, even. If a homebuyer is to be affected by the project, they will be able to come to such a conclusion all by themselves, by looking around for the telltale signs – like transmission towers, high-voltage wires, neighbors glowing in the dark and stuff.

Oh, and while we are on the subject of disclosures that you can safely retire now (there are too many to address here), let me share with you my favorite. Please, for the love of all that is good and decent, stop sending me a separate Megan’s Law disclosure!

Megan’s law is addressed:

In the Purchase Agreement -

In the Statewide Buyer and Seller Advisory -

In the Natural Hazard Disclosure report -

We don’t need a separate disclosure. I think it is safe to say that we pretty much have this one covered.

If someone is going to sue you over Megan’s law, having disclosed it four times versus three is not going to make a difference.

Phew. I feel better.

Question: What’s your excuse this time for not blogging for nearly a month, blogging being a medium whose success depends almost entirely on delivering consistent daily, if not weekly, fresh and compelling content?

Answer: Look! A butterfly!

OK, we’ll just call it distraction. Mixed with a little apathy borne out of sameness.

We are in the throes of a novel real estate market that lacks any of the necessary elements of a “good read” – excitement, intrigue, plot twists, a butler. What we have is a market bouncing around the bottom. It is showing signs of improvement, sure, but with no inventory to speak of, there just hasn’t been much to see here.

(For those who like stats, chew on this. We have a whopping 42 detached and 14 attached active listings in Scripps Ranch this morning – those out of approximately 8,000 and 4,000 homes standing respectively.)

Enter the distraction. My two daughters, the ones I relied on for years for my best material, have long flown the coop. And now that they are no longer resident at Chez Berg (except for the occasion trip home to visit my charge card), I have to work a little harder to keep up with their exciting lives. Stalking and creeping my way through their Facebook and Twitter and Instagram accounts takes a lot of time, let me tell you. It’s plain exhausting!

And it is easy to get distracted. While Daughter #1, the Capitol Hill Reporter, posts pictures of the Speaker of the House, Hillary Clinton, the cast of the Daily Show at the Reblican National Convention CNN Grill, and this guy….

my own photo journal looks something like this….

Meanwhile, for reasons I only later discovered, Daughter #2 who spent the summer working in custom content marketing on the NBC Studios backlot, is posting pictures like this one.

Apparently he’s is a famous monkey.

And as I spend time trolling the social media sites trying to find my offspring, I can’t help but notice the trending topics. I am reminded that (1) the Packers should have won Monday against Seattle and (2) we are in a political election cycle.

Which brings me to today’s topic: Affordable health care. Specifically, today’s topic is about the part of the Affordable Health Care Act involving a Medicare Tax on certain real estate transactions.

Much has admittedly been written about this. Yet Steve and I still are getting questions from neighbors, clients and at least one family member who, thanks to blast emails of misinformation warning us all to head for the nearest underground bunker, find themselves fuzzy on the specifics.

(First, the disclaimer. I am not an attorney, nor am I a CPA. Consult your tax advisor and so on and so forth because, if you find yourself being audited, “’cause Kris said so” will likely not be considered a valid defense.)

Keep in mind that I am only going to be talking about primary residences. For investment properties, it’s a bit more complicated. Having said that, here are the basic facts.

1. Effective January 1, 2013, there will be a new 3.8% tax assessed when a property is sold.
2. The 3.8% tax will only apply to “high income” taxpayers, defined as single filers with an Adjusted Gross Income of more than $200,000 or married couples filing jointly with an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of more than $250,000.
3. The existing primary home exclusions will remain ($250,000/$500,000 for single and married filing jointly respectively). The new 3.8% tax will apply only to gains that exceed these numbers.
4. For the squeakers, those close to the AGI limits, there is this. The tax is NOT imposed on the total AGI, nor is it imposed solely on the investment income. The tax will be determined based on the LESSER of (1) net gain (over the current exclusions) OR (2) the excess of AGI over the $200,000/$250,000 AGI thresholds.

Clear as mud? Let’s try some examples. For ease, let’s assume the taxpayer in our examples is married and filing jointly.

• Your AGI is $5. The gain on the sale of your home is $500,000.  No 3.8% tax.
• Your AGI is $5,000,000,000. The gain on the sale of your home is $500,000. No 3.8% tax for you.
• Your AGI is $251,000. The gain on the sale of your home is $600,000, which is $100,000 above the $500,000 exclusion. (Note that I took lots of math in college.) You will be taxed 3.8% of $100,000 (the net gain over the $500,000 exclusion), or $3,800.
• Your AGI is $Mitt Romney. The gain on the sale of your home is $600,000, which is $100,000 above the $500,000 exclusion. You will be taxed 3.8% of $100,000 (the net gain over the $500,000 exclusion), or $3,800. (And, may I suggest, this is the kind of problem you like to have.)

Now, here is where it gets tricky, and this applies to the folks hovering near the AGI limits.

• Your AGI is $5. The gain on the sale of your home is $600,000, which is $100,000 above the $500,000 exclusion. The 3.8% tax will be calculated base on the lesser of the $100,000 gain OR the excess over the AGI limit. In this case, the new AGI is $5 plus $100,000, or $100,005, which is less than the $250,000 limit. Oh, happy day!  No 3.8% tax for you.
• Your AGI is $240,000. The gain on the sale of your home is $550,000, which is $50,000 above the $500,000 exclusion. In this case, the new AGI is $240,000 plus $50,000, or $290,000, which makes the excess equal to $40,000. You will be taxed 3.8% of $40,000 (because $40,000 is less than $50,000, duh), or $1,520.
• Your AGI is $0. The gain on the sale of your home is $1,000,000, which is $500,000 above the $500,000 exclusion. In this case, the new AGI is $500,000, which makes the excess equal to $250,000. You will be taxed 3.8% of $250,000, or $9,500.

To summarize, the Medicare tax will apply only to high income earners and only after the current primary home exemptions. And, keep in mind that the gain on your home is calculated by subtracting your cost basis from your sale price. The cost basis is not what you paid for it but the adjusted cost after taking into account the escrow, title, and other real estate fees you paid when you bought and sold, not to mention the cost of the new water heater you had installed in 1993.

It's quite possible I made a mistake here somewhere, so check my math carefully. There will be a test later.

I could almost hear the mournful, whistling theme song – the one that plays in every Western movie right before the gunfight scene. I could almost see the tumbleweeds dancing playfully across the desolate badlands of my computer screen.

Life without email is a lonely existence.

For nearly twenty-four hours, we found ourselves without email. Twenty email boxes in all were affected. The first stage of the mourning process is panic, of course. I imagined the emails I had been missing. “I would like to sell my $4 bazillion home. If I don’t hear back from you in five minutes, I will be listing with someone else. And I will call you bad names on Yelp.”

Stage Two is where you become The Problem Solver. You spend two hours on hold with your mail server’s crack technical support team, a team whose only support is to provide you with an unending barrage of “support numbers” while your case is being “escalated,” during which time you are forced to listen to Pachalbel’s Cannon on an infinite loop until you are compelled to impale yourself on a two-hole punch, if only you still had one of those throwbacks to simpler times.

During the third stage of mourning, you (and “you” would be “me”) become very angry, at which point you start tweeting mean things about an unnamed mail host (Network Solutions), hoping to harness the power of social media to force some divine intervention. And you post mean things on Facebook, too, because you have a lot of free time on your hands.

Finally, comes acceptance. You accept that your husband is really tired of your whining and may actually make good on his threats to find “a replacement wife.” You accept that while you may in fact lose a couple of business opportunities, no one is going to die. And you remember that an unnamed mail host intent on ruining your life and livelihood (Network Solutions) can’t keep you down. You are better than that. You still have Internet.

A victim of circumstances, I spent a lot of time catching up on reading. Mostly, I read Facebook and Twitter – until my eyes glazed over and to the point where I now consider myself the world’s foremost expert on “trending topics.” Oh, and I also managed to avert my eyes from the little black box and get out to show a home or two. So, in the spirit of sharing, I now bring you:

A Few Take-Aways From That Time My Email Was Down

1.     “The effect that political signs in yards has on buyers’ evaluations of the neighborhood should not be under estimated.” This was tweeted by one of my friends and colleagues in Virginia. Cosign!!

You see, people have biases. They like people who are like them. Which is the same reason it is poor form to leave family photo galleries or religious artifacts on display when showing your home. And it is the reason all of those agents I see on Facebook espousing their political views are violating the first rule of business development: Don’t alienate half of your potential clients.

2. “We’re at the bottom, but it will be long and flat.” This was tweeted by my “BFF’s” at Zillow and is a quote from their chief economist, Stan Humphries. Actually, the concept is being tweeted by nearly everyone in the industry. And they are right.

Inventory is nearly non-existent in our market, and buyer demand is crazy-strong. Case in point: When I pulled myself away from my depths of email-less despair to show a new listing to client, one that was being held open (the listing, not the client), we thought we had mistakenly stumbled into an Apple store on Free iPhone Day.

3. “I’ve been stuck on a plane, and was too timid to pull an Alec Baldwin.” The point here is that my Twitter-prolific daughter is apparently flying somewhere. Good to know. If not for social media, I would have no clue where the girls are or what they are up to.

4. “If you are meeting someone for the first time, and you have no idea what they look like or what kind of car they drive, don’t make assumptions.”  That’s from me. At that same open house (see #2 above), I was meeting a new client for the first time. Did I mention that this open house was well attended? And let’s assume that I was meeting “Dave” at 1:00. So, at precisely 1:00, I stood in the driveway clutching my MLS printout and wearing my best, “happy to meet you” grin.

And as each car slowed in front of the home around 1:00, all seventy-two of them, I proceeded to wave them into the nearest parking spot, greet them at the driver’s side door, and enthusiastically pump their hand. “Hi, I’m Kris!” I said, seventy-two times. “Hi!” they replied, looking rather confused. “I’m William (or Suresh or Daniel or, well, just insert seventy-two names here that AREN’T Dave). When “Dave” did finally arrive (there were no parking spaces left), the home was full of people talking about some whack job out front who must be running for office or something.

5. “Welcome to Akin country. Webster Groves, Mo.” Ah! So that’s where she was going. My daughter-the-political-journalist is in Missouri. Again, good to know.

6. “How to See 20% More Listings, One Week Faster,” tweeted Refin. The link was to the Redfin Blog where they talked about a recent study they commissioned that found that (gasp!) the listing inventory on major national, third-party portals like Trulia and Zillow are fraught with errors, incomplete and lagging. I could have saved them the trouble of paying an outside consultant. 

I do have to give them kudos for the spin they put on the findings, however. “The study found that Redfin has 20% more agent-listing homes for sale, and gets new listings 7 – 9 days faster,” they wrote (emphasis theirs). Well, that is true. But, here is the other true part: The same holds true for all other broker, agent and MLS websites with a search-for-homes features – including OURS. It’s through the magic of a little thing called IDX (Internet Data Exchange), and Redfin doesn’t have a corner on the purest, most time-certain listing data; the entire brokerage community does. Just sayin’.

7.  And speaking of IPO’s (were we?), Realogy Corp. just had their own IPO. As reported by Inman News, Realogy, franchise giant behind brands including as Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and Better Homes and Gardens, “has said it will use proceeds from the IPO to pay down more than $7 billion in outstanding debt.”

Zillow, Trulia and now Realogy. I am starting to think that I should do one of those IPO thingies like all the cool kids. Sure, San Diego Castles Realty has no debt, but what the heck. Who couldn’t use a little cash infusion? Maybe I could buy myself a new toaster oven or something. I’ll have to chew on that one.

8. “All my dreams of never becoming First Horse are finally coming true,” wrote @RafalcaRomney. Trust me, I am not getting all political here. As we covered in #1 above, it would be foolish of me to tip my hand as to my own political leanings. It’s just that I find it hysterically funny that a fake Twitter account for a Presidential candidate’s horse has 8,897 followers, so I can’t help but “follow” him myself. (I find it equally funny that I have over 5,000 followers, but that is puzzle to be solved another time.)