As REALTORs, our brokers, our MLS associations and the National Association of REALTORS tends to frown on the practice of inflating or misrepresent the marketing of a home when we know it to be defective or in really bad shape. Omitting serious defects by labeling the home in "AS IS," condition is a "crappy at best way," to try and hide obvious defects.
Marketing a home as a "unique fixer upper," is not a good idea when the buyer see it and realizes the only tool they need for the home is just a bulldozer.
In some cases home owners are so desperate to sell their place, they've resorted to tossing in all kinds of perks and incentives. The cartoon below shows the home owners tossing in their "kidneys," to help sell it.
Our real estate industry has a unique name for agents who tend to stretch it a bit too far when it comes to selling the home.
They call it; Puffing.
Which brings me to the point of today's blog post and food for thought.
There is a home in Santa Fe that is curently being marketed as... "the home needs a little tender loving care for the right buyer with a vision."
So instead of cleverly omitting the obvious defects, I'd rather the agent simply say:
"This home was neglected for a long time. It is not a stick built on-site home so it cannot appraise as the others will with honest-to-goodness concrete foundations. The home was literally manufactured and hauled up here from Albuquerque in two parts and glued back together.
The sun bakes the ground out here in the summer. Without a concrete foundation, the heat literally radiates from under the crawl space and bakes the occupants like a brick oven in July August. Summer cooling bills average $240 a month.
The home endures a double whammy because the Winter months are not that good, either when it comes to heating.
The owner of the home failed (for whatever the reason) to file in time to get any money from the Entran II lawsuit. For those of you who do not live in new Mexico, Entran II was a type of flexible tubing produced by Goodyear that was defective. They produced more than 25 million feet of bad flexible radiant tubing from 1989 through 1993. It is instantly recognizable from it's reddish orange tube color. A lot of this tubing wound up in the radiant heating systems in the floors of homes in norther New Mexico and Colorado.
The hot water pumped through the system simply started to dissolve the tubes in over 90% of them that were installed.
One day you wake up and you step out of bed expecting your feet to meet a warm floor -- and instead you step into a pool of cold water.
Outraged home owners filed lawsuits and well... the homeowners won.
The home owner never filed for his "share" of the lawsuit, so he missed out on getting $25,000 or more of money that could have been used to replace the Entran II radiant heating system. That money could have been put to good use.
Nearly all of the double pane windows have cracked seals, so the insulation value is ZERO. The berber carpet is dead. The cracks from the doors on the weather stripping allows ants, scorpions and these horrible looking spider creatures to get into the home.
The back patio is wooden and is 90% rotten so this needs to be replaced.
In England, this house would fail with an F-rating from the EPC for the Carbon Footprint emissions test. We do not (yet) have this system in the USA yet, but it is coming in a few more months.
A firm called VirtualVue.co.uk is bringing the Carbon Foot printing system to America and will be teaching home inspectors how to use the new tools and rate the homes).
A sample of a listing with the Carbon Footprint system is here.
The agent makes NO mention of Entran II nor the numerous other house defects. It is in fact, simply listed "AS IS CONDITION."
I've never liked to "sugar coat," or "white wash," things. So when I hang my license in Colorado, I will not be representing a client with a home in the kind of condition I've described above.
Which brings me to hammering some of the advertisers we see here ------>>> to the right of this blog. The Advertisements for GET the BEST IDX Website. (Says who?)
Real Estate Leads is another one.
It looks like the ad itself was paddled out by my Dog on a 2005 copy DreamWeaver MX . It seems this company forgot about packaging and marketing the day they were teaching this one in Advertising School.
60 exclusive leads per month for $599. Uh-huh. Right. And I have a bridge to sell you with nice waterfront property in Santa Fe, New Mexico, too.
Who the hell is buying any of this crap, let alone remotely believing it?
I blame management at ActiveRain for even allowing this kind of "crap advertising," to be shown here. I say this because I've been on the other end of the phone when REALTORS come calling us for help AFTER they were over-promised to and got under delivered by these firms.
FREE doesn't work.
FREE is actually quite expensive because you find out in 6 months FREE wasn't a good deal and now you've missed the entire 2010 market for buyers. You cannot turn the clock back, so this means you (the REALTOR) has to prepare to make better decisions for the 2011 season.
Let's analyze some things and let's pull RealEstateLeads.net into the harsh light of day. There's lots of things you can do right now to see if this passes your BS Meter.
1.) The website resembles the same templates you can buy from MonsterTemplate.com for $79 bucks. This is the BS detector #1 going off in my head.
2.) The date stamp on the bottom of the site. © 2009 Real Estate Marketing. I did a look up on the USPTO and Copyright Office. It's NEVER been copyrighted. I checked.
3.) Overall look and feel to the site. Lots of bunk here. Web design is amateurish at best. I would trust the Website lead sharks: Reply.com or Housevalues.com and even HomeGain.com over this one.
Rule of Thumb: If the website fails #1, #2, and #3 above, chances are good you can pick up your checkbook and go somewhere else. Real "honest to goodness" websites will have spent $50,000 or more on their website with a national advertising agency like Young & Rubicam, J Walter Thompson, etc. 99% of the websites offering $599 a month services when they failed #1 through #3 are not to be trusted.
Trust me. I've seen FREE cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is no such thing as a FREE lunch, No such thing as a FREE Website or FREE IDX.
Period. End of discussion.
I see too many REALTORS grasping at straws because too many of you will believe whatever the claims are in ads like these. And all you have to DO is Google them. Google the name of the company plus the word: complaints. There's truth in numbers out there.
Education is the key to NOT being a sucker for crap advertising and watered down real estate marketing services. In my 11 years of doing real estate sales and real estate marketing -- I've learned three valuable lessons about 99% of the offers you will come into contact with today.
1.) They all lie.
2.) The success stories they painted are less than 1% of their total sales.
3.) The service you are buying isn't new. It's just been cleverly repackaged.
Good Stuff about Ben Kinney. Go to a RainCamp. Get Educated.
I've sent more than 27 colleagues to RainCamp. I've pushed about 40 more. And I've never once asked Active Rain for a referral fee. If you do ever get the chance to get out to one, be sure to attend one of Ben Kinney's workshops.
Famous Life Coach, Tony Robbins says that Success and Failure leave clues.
Ben is one of those people where you can learn a lot from. His GCI was reported to being over $865,000 last year. And to prove my point about avoiding advertisers peddling their worthless marketing services... he didn't get there by buying a FREE real estate website, a FREE IDX or watered down lead sharks offering 60 leads per month for $599, either.
The sad fact is, the real estate market we once knew and loved continues to erode beneath our very feet. The smart REALTORS are realizing you need to get to more solid ground. Unfortunately you will have to navigate your way around a lot of land mines before you reach (safer) and higher grounds.
The way to do this is to document where you want to be. I know it's almost 1 July, but if you don't write down where you want to be in six months or a year from now -- you are going to be the victims of "Niagra Syndrome."
This is where you simply flow down river with a lot of the others.
One day you wake up and hear the rapids and you will realize you simply could have avoided a big fall had you made better decisions upstream.
Everybody needs a little help once in a while.
My broker helped me with my 1st commission advance many years ago. When things got tough, I was thinking I'd have no problem getting a 2nd commission advance six months later.
Did I get a 2nd commission advance?
What do you think hapopened?
Make 360 Video Tours. WOW
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