I had a home buyer call me after we had been corresponding for about 4 months about purchasing a project for him to buy. He was looking for something in just the right location that he could work on. It didn’t have to be perfect or even a complete home. The location was the primary focus, and everything else was secondary. If it needed work then so be it.

I almost always pre-qualify buyers before I ever show a home. I have to be very careful with my time. I’m busy all the time with my business and I have a family and friends who need my attention at times too. So being very careful about who I work with and when is an important part of what I do. However, in this case it was all a matter of answering some emails so I didn’t do any pre-qualifying.

During our conversation the buyer informed me that he thought he had found the perfect home and location and wanted my opinion. So I stopped by the home on the way back from an appointment. It was indeed exactly what he was looking for and I felt very confident that he was going to love it so I took a bunch of pictures while I was there and sent them to him by email.

He responded with an email breaking down the terms of the offer he would like to make on the home. For the record, it’s a foreclosure and banks can be tough to work with for obvious reasons. But it’s been on the market for well over a year so I was hoping he could get a good deal since it’s an unfinished home and hasn’t had any attention.

I responded asking him to forward his proof of funds so that I could merge it with the offer when I sent the offer over for his signature. His reaction shocked me. He immediately called me and asked me what I was playing at. Having no idea what he was talking about, I politely asked him to explain what he meant. He was apparently upset that I would be “so rude” as to ask to see his financial statements. I explained to him that the bank or any seller would require proof of cleared funds or a mortgage pre-approval before they accepted his offer.

The conversation was going nowhere unfortunately. He was upset and didn’t think it was the bank’s business how he planned to pay for the house. Of course, this sent up a red flag for me. When all was said and done it became apparent that he didn’t have any money, couldn’t get pre-approved for a mortgage, and really had no way to buy a home. I honestly have no idea how he planned to buy the home. Call me crazy, but I always assumed it was obvious that if you wanted to buy a home you’d have to pay for it....I pay for mine!

I took the news that Picnik was closing up shop pretty hard because I loved having a quick and easy way of editing my photos for my blogs. All the little gadgets that came with the premium service were really cool and user friendly. I guess it’s time to adapt and overcome so I’ve been checking out some of the sites that others in the community have recommended and some of them are pretty good, but many of them are kind of cumbersome or not very user friendly.

This morning I happened to be resizing a pic for a friend and realized I already had a gem of a program on my desktop that I hadn’t even thought of using for my blog photos. Allow me to introduce you to IrfanView. It’s a small program that can do a whole bunch of things. It’s not a full photo editing suite, but it’s definitely worth having considering it’s free. It can resize or resample a photo, quick fix, sharpen, rotate or flip, add effects and a whole lot more. I’ve had the program for about 3 years and never realized it did all this cool stuff. I always knew it was easy and user friendly, I just didn’t realize how pwerful a tool it was.

Click the link to IrfanView’s website to download it. I actually used it to crop the pic in this post. It literally took me 17 seconds to screen shot from their website and then crop it and save it. Pretty cool, quick, and easy. Let me know what you guys think and have fun.

There has been some noise (by noise I mean quite a few posts and stories) about whether the MLS is on a downward spiral and whether 10 years from now will there even be an MLS. I can tell you this, I don’t know how I’d do the things I do without an MLS. It’s the hub for all of the information associated with a listing. Other sites may have syndicated most of the information, or allowed the listing agent to put a few more pictures up, or any number of things. But the fact still remains...when I want to know what the “real deal” is with a listing, the first place I go is the MLS.

On to the point of this post...why should I have to pay Zillow or Trulia or any other syndication site have the right to make me pay for a buyer lead that was generated from “MY” listing? Call me crazy but the last time I checked none of these websites were on the phone with my sellers working on how to get their home sold. They weren’t on hold with the seller’s lender trying to get a short sale approved. They weren’t emotionally there for the sellers when they realize that a problem with an inspection may have just cost them a sale and or a bunch of money. You get the idea...

So I’ll come right out and say it...I don’t like the idea of having to pay some middle man to forward the email or phone number of a home buyer when I’m the one who did all the work to create the lead. If refuse to pay any of them and that’s that. I think instead of getting rid of the MLS maybe we need to come together as a community and fight for our rights! If you care, you can affect a change...

Photo courtesy of Kheel Center, Cornell University at Flickr

I had an offer come in on one of my listings today which was pretty low when compared to the recent comps sold. Along with the offer, the buyer’s agent spelled out the buyer’s thoughts on why his offer was so low.

Firstly, the property needs some work so he had discounted his price based on the cost of the required repairs (about $6,000). Ok, I get that and it’s probably fair to do so. Secondly, he had discounted his offered price by $16,000 because he was going to have to furnish the home. Hmmm...

Not making a lot of sense to me on that one. Furniture (no matter how nice) is not a part of real property. Furniture is personal property which doesn’t normally convey with a property unless the buyer is paying for it.

I’ll give you an example...let’s say a home is listed for $100,000 (unfurnished). The 3 most recent comps have sold for $89k, $97k, and $103,000 (this particular house sold fully furnished). Just to make it easy, let’s average those and make that our market value (again, only for ease of demonstration) of $96,333.

Then let’s say you offer $80,333 due to the fact that you have to furnish your new home. You are still offering $9,000 less than the lowest recent comparable sale (two of which were sold without furnishings just like the subject property). Can anyone see the flaw in that logic? The homes that sold for $89k and $97k without furnishings make up a good portion of how that market value is calculated and the buyer has completely dismissed them with his offer as written.

We haven’t even covered the fact that the furniture in the one comp that sold furnished was old and used while the buyer is trying to discount the price in order to buy brand new furniture. So as you can expect, I advised the seller to counter this offer with a more fair price.

This guy can’t be serious! A cash buyer is interested in the listing (been listed for 503 days), he has proof of funds, and he’s ready to make an offer...and you won’t make one quick phone call to the seller? Really? The buyer had just one question before making a full priced cash offer. No wonder the home hasn’t sold. That’s just sad.

You can’t make this stuff up. It would be against our Realtor ethics to inform this seller what kind of horrible representation they are getting. And that is sad because there is nothing I can do to help them. That seller is stuck with an agent (if you can call him that) who obviously does not have their best interests at heart and my buyer is stuck looking for another home after finding what he felt like was the perfect home for him. All because this Realtor was too lazy to make one phone call and answer a simple question.

I’d go more into detail about the question, but I’m respecting the buyer’s wishes by not discussing that publicly. But the question isn’t really the point. The point is that if you are going to take a listing and sell a home....then sell the home! Nobody ever sold a home sitting on their butt in an office. Make the call! Show the house! Market it! Something!!!

Have you had this call? I must get that same call from people representing Realtors on Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo, etc. at least twice a week. So recently I decided to have a little fun with one of these guys. I asked him how he got my number. “I Googled Davenport Realtor,” was his reply. Strike 1.

Then I asked how he could help me. “We help Realtors get recognized on Google.” Being the smart ass I am I said “Well it sounds like I’m already recognized on Google, you found me didn’t you?” At this point he started getting upset. Strike 2.

Then I mentioned that my number is on the do not call registry and I’m pretty sure it’s a $10,000 fine for each offense. Now he’s yelling. “Well your number is advertised online so that makes it ok to telemarket to you.” “That may be, but I’m not convinced that the federal government will see it that way.” At this point the guy is fuming mad. And I’m sitting there thinking about how funny he must look getting all angry. “Sir, could I get you name please?” Click, he hung up on me. Strike 3. You’re out of there!

While telemarketing might be legal, it’s still really uncool. If I want your services I’ll look you up on Google, just the same way you looked me up. Have a good evening everyone. Just thought I’d bring a little humor to the world.

This is something that has always bothered me. Have you ever noticed that no matter what news channel you turn on it’s always negative stuff? I can’t remember the last time I saw a news story about Habitat For Humanity helping a family in need. I sure haven’t seen any news stories about the Toys for Tots program that will give out thousands of toys this year. Why is that?

On to the focus of this post...why won’t the media report on the real estate recovery as passionately as they did about the recession? I believe the media as a whole damaged our country. They reported on everything negative there was to find that could raise their ratings and they piled on needlessly. Now the housing market is recovering and you don’t hear a peep. I think they owe it to the American public to help undue some of the damage they caused.

Poinciana, FL was one of the worst hit communities in America with thousands of foreclosures and market values falling almost 70% between 2006-2010. Over the last year home values have been stable and over the last 3 months home values have even begun to rise. But you wouldn’t know that if you left it up to the media to tell you.

So how about it media types? Do you have the balls to start reporting the truth for a change? We’d all love to hear what’s REALLY going on in the world for once....Here’s what we want...the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!

A few months ago I had a buyer looking at homes in a 55+ community named Solivita in Kissimmee, FL. Solivita is a top notch community and there is some pretty stiff competition when trying to get an offer accepted. We saw quite a few homes and made a few offers that were not accepted. Well, we finally found “the one” and made an offer that was pretty generous. The buyers needed financing so their offer was not as competitive as it could have been and they knew that going in.

The home was being sold as a short sale and when we drew up the offer they decided to allow the sellers to accept back-up offers. During the time the 3rd party short sale negotiator (also a bad idea) was working with the seller’s lender a couple back-up offers were received by the sellers. One of them had no contingencies and was for $40k more than my buyers had offered. It was a damn good offer and very clean.

I wasn’t worried because...who in their right mind works for 4 months on trying to get short sale approval and then walks away from the current qualified buyers? Well this particular seller was not in their right mind apparently. When the contract was due to expire we sent over an addendum extending the short sale approval deadline. They wouldn’t sign it and canceled the contract. No one did anything wrong, unethical, or illegal. The deal just didn’t work out because the lender took too long giving approval and there was a better offer on the table.

The lesson I took from this situation is to advise buyers on a short sale not to allow sellers to accept back-up offers while we are under contract. Without the other offer I think the sellers would have just extended our contract and kept working at the lender. As it was, they had an offer that looked better to the lender and felt like they could gain short sale approval quicker with the offer executed.

This is funny because, if I’m the listing agent instead of the buyer’s agent, I would advise the sellers not to accept an offer unless they can take back-ups. However, I would not advise them to throw away a good qualified buyer’s contract. Either way I would advise whatever is in the best interest of my client.

This post is part of the ActiveRain contest “The one that got away - a contest for learning”. The point of this contest is to share our experiences with failure in the hopes that we can help someone else avoid the same failure by providing a lesson learned. As well as learn from everyone else’s experiences. On that note...I hope you learned something and have a great 2012!

Image courtesy of mikesansone at Flickr

Bimini Bay in Davenport, FL was supposed to be a one of a kind vacation home community located near Disney World. The community was supposed to rival the likes of Regal Palms and other such vacation communities. However the reality is far from the dream unfortunately.

Bimini Bay now stands in the middle of controversy and alleged mismanagement. The community has received some bad press of late as well. This Orlando Sentinel article about the troubles Bimini Bay is going through was written on December 3, 2011. The article reported that many residents are quite upset about how their community has been mismanaged.

This last summer I had a few investors who were curious about the available deals in Bimini Bay, so I called Bimini Bay to ask about expected improvements to the community. I was told at that time that the HOA had plans to rebuild the clubhouse, which burned down earlier this year. They also told me that they still had plans to build the water park that residents expected when they purchased their homes sometime in the future. From the flowery language they gave me, it sounded like things were on the mend and they would soon be transforming the community into the vacation hot spot is should be.

As the Sentinel article points out, as of this writing, the clubhouse is still just a shell, there is no security, maintenance has suffered, and there is most certainly no water park.

However, there is a silver lining. A 4 bedroom townhouse can be bought for less than $50,000 in Bimini Bay right now. Where else are you going to buy a 4 bedroom townhome 3 miles from Disney World for $50k? Nowhere, that's where. Investors know that the time to get in is while the market is down. This community will recover sooner or later, and when it does the investors who bought into it now will be sitting pretty. The community is located less than 3 miles from the gates of Disney World and within a half hour drive from almost every attraction in Central Florida. There's nowhere to go but up for Bimini Bay in my opinion.

Homes For Sale In Bimini Bay Davenport, FL

Photo courtesy of Merfam at Flickr

It’s Friday afternoon and it’s almost quitting time. The work week is almost over. the stress is almost over. What do you do to relax? Do you remember when the last time you danced was? When was the last time you danced with the kids? You should try it, it’s really fun and no matter how bad you suck at dancing your kids still think you’re the best. Here, I’ll start....