Have you ever driven down the highway and noticed chains hanging from the side of an 18-wheeler? Have you ever wondered to yourself why exactly there were chains seemingly hanging at random from a truck?
If you live somewhere other than the desert southwest, particularly the Phoenix area, then it may seem like a remarkably silly - virtually rhetorical - question. You're likely saying to yourself, "those are snow chains, you idiot! How could you not know that?"
But when you've lived your life in Los Angeles (for the first eight years) and the Valley of the Sun (for the past 34 years, split between Mesa, Glendale and Peoria), snow chains are a foreign concept. The idea that people would willingly drive to an area where such things were necessary, much less live there, is almost incomprehensible.
It wasn't until I watched Ice Road Truckers, plowing through two past seasons in advance of this year's premiere, that I realized why there would be chains hanging from the side of a semi. That bit of information, of local knowledge as it were for colder climates, was totally outside my experience.
I also try my best to avoid areas totally outside my experience on Q&A real estate sites such as Trulia Voices or the Q&A area on Zillow. Answering questions about details of the real estate contract in Rhode Island may make me feel important and help my totals for questions answered but there's almost no chance that my answer is going to be useful when I don't know how things work in other locales.
Which is why it is maddening to me to see agents from around the country jump into the forums for Arizona and the Phoenix metro area and start firing away without any understanding of the language of our contract, the way transactions are conducted, the peculiarities that make Arizona what it is.
For instance, telling a would-be buyer about attorney review might be extremely helpful in New Jersey, Illinois and other states where attorneys draw up the contracts. Here in Arizona, there is no attorney review; the state constitution allows agents to write the contracts.
Talking about what happens at the "closing table" bears as much relevance as tales from the Knights of the Round Table, since there is no closing table here in Arizona. Sellers sign separately, buyers sign separately 0and the twain rarely meet.
Discussions of earnest money - who gets what in the event of a dispute, what happens with a short sale - don't have pat answers unless you have a contract in front of you and even then there's gray area. I'm sure Mississippi's a nice place but your contract isn't the same as ours.
Before I ramble further, the moral of the story is this ... don't attempt to prove your own expertise in markets outside of your own without consideration for whether you actually know anthing about that market. It would be as silly as me telling someone to toss those snow chains in the trash because there's never snow and ice in the road, based only on my own local knowledge.
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