Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

real estating

Some interesting stories I’ve seen recently about the housing market:

• Washington Post: “Dress Up Your Home for a Quicker Sale” (09/09/2006)

  A slower U.S. housing market means sellers can no longer bank on having their pick of offers for properties showing their age and the wear and tear of everyday living. Dressing up a home with a thorough cleaning and decorator touches may be vital to luring increasingly fussy buyers.

  Sellers work within a range of budgets as they prepare a property for sale, often from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Yet many critical fixes don’t cost a dime.

• Washington Post: “In a Slowing Market, Price Is Only the First Step” (07/29/2006)

  In the past year, though, the number of homes on the market has tripled. Some sit for months instead of days. To sell, the experts say, the price has to be right and the house has to look move-in ready.

  Setting a price at or below market, cutting it within weeks if buyers don’t respond, helping buyers with closing costs, making your house stand out with new paint or new appliances — those are traditional strategies in competitive times.

  Now, some sellers also are dangling offers of vacations and cars. Others are turning to auctions, normally associated with foreclosures and fire sales. Some are just praying.

  Here’s a closer look at some sales tactics for today’s market.

  I’ve seen the price cuts and occasional offers of help with closing costs in local listings. The offers of cars and vacations? Not so much. My guess is that maybe the difference is that I’m looking in a more high-demand area, so there’s not the same level of desperation.

• Boston Globe: “When sales fall, they call St. Joe” (08/20/2006)

  Donald Ward Cranley doesn’t need to look at the latest economic indicators to know how the real estate market is faring. He just checks the inventory in his shop, Ward’s Gifts, on High Street in Medford.

  If sales of the beige, 5-inch St. Joseph statues are slow, it means the real estate market is strong. If sales are brisk, the market is weak. Lately, all signs point to a real estate meltdown: He’s selling 300 statues a month.

  “We can’t keep them in stock,” he said. “Everybody comes in here looking for them. Realtors are buying a dozen at a time.”

  St. Joseph statues have long been used by sellers to help move property. Tradition has it that if you bury a statue upside down and facing the property you are trying to sell, St. Joseph will direct a buyer your way…

  The tradition of burying St. Joseph statues started about 500 years ago in Europe, according to Cates. An order of nuns, needing more land for a convent, buried their St. Joseph medals in the ground. They got the land, and word spread. The medals eventually turned into statues, and Joseph, a carpenter, who with Jesus and Mary makes up the Holy Family, became the unofficial saint of real estate.

  Word of St. Joseph has spread among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Today the statues can be bought in little kits. Some include tiny shovels for burial and personalized burial bags with the names of realtors or mortgage lenders printed on them. Almost all have instructions — some cheeky, some sincere.

  (Link found via Al’s Morning Meeting.)

• New York Times: “The Last Stand of the 6-Percenters?” (09/03/2006)

  WHEN David and Annette Wolf decided that their family was outgrowing its Seattle area home, they also decided that they did not need much help finding a new one…

  But the seller’s agent refused to show it to them. Why would she turn away an eager buyer? Not because of the Wolfs’ race, creed or color. Instead, Mr. Wolf, a software engineering manager at the online directory InfoSpace, said he and his wife were shunned once the agent learned they used an online broker called Redfin.

  Mr. Wolf said they turned to Redfin because it gives two-thirds of its sales commission (which is usually 3 percent of the sale price) to its customers. “I didn’t want to pay 3 percent for the opening of a door,” he said. But customers like Mr. Wolf — affluent and comfortable with the Internet — are a frightening prospect for real estate agents who, as a group, reap at least $60 billion a year in commission income.

  Redfin and other innovators, including ZipRealty and BuySideInc.com, are using technology to reduce costs and to save time for their brokers. Agents don’t find and recommend homes — customers do that on their own, using Internet listings — and that enables agents to charge less for the services they do provide, chiefly handling the paperwork and negotiations.

  The Internet has radically changed the way consumers buy books and airline tickets, trade stock and learn news. But the real estate industry has resisted change — and protected its commission structure — by controlling the information on its Multiple Listing Service database of properties for sale.