Friday, September 12, 2008 at 03:53PM
The Grumbler
Now that I've been accused as a guy who grouses, I'll let it be known that the fourth T-shirt slogan that was finally vetoed was "The Grumbler".
Whether you want to call it grousing, grumbling, muttering under breath, or just flat-out banging-head-against-wall, the short sale market is VERY frustrating - mostly due to the antics of the listing agents.
Over the last three weeks I've written 20 offers, all of them short sales, REOs or properties in default, and gotten ONE accepted.
Here are the list prices, offer prices, and results:
$749,000 $650,000 seller countered $689K, even though loan was $800K-plus.
$585,000 $520,000 no response
$835,000* $800,000 no response
$503,500 $499,000 multiple offers higher
not listed $1.05 M WaMu accepted SS yesterday
$460,000 $400,000 no response
$490,000 $400,000 after 161 days onmarket, a higher offer came in the same day
$725,000 $670,000 no response
$419,900 $350,000 no response
$320,000 $326,000 countered multiple offers
$299,000* $300,000 no response
$329,900* $331,000 listing agent countered over title company
$340,000 $300,000 no response
$375,000 $375,000 multiple offers, agent will counter when banks approves short sale
$332,500 $346,000 we offer $13,500 over list, and bank counters, no termite, no HPP. We walked
$379,000 $340,000 other offer higher
$335,000 $336,000 LA said no email offers, fax only
$532,000 $500,000 ten offers in, some over list
$424,900 $390,000 won't look at offer, pre-qual not from nationally-known lender
$365,900 $345,000 no response
*price is the low-end of their variable price range
Out of twenty offers made, eight of them didn't garner an email or call back.
This is why the myself and all agents are grousing about the market - just a simple courtesy call from the listing agent would go a long way to allow the unsuccessful buyers to move on to the next property. Instead, you are left wondering if there is any hope.
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Not much hope left for this guy though. This is Brent Wilkes' house in Poway. He was the defense contractor who got in good with the politicians by running parties with hookers at the Watergate Hotel for years, including Duke Cunningham. The Duke got defense contracts sent his way, and well, you know the rest.
Brent is a Long Beach jail now, serving his time, and his 5,350 sf house was listed this week for $1,200,000 as a short sale, which is far under it's actual value. There have been two closed sales on the street this year, $2,000,000 last month, and $2,875,000.
On his property's tax rolls it shows:
2/04 $7,500,000 Merrill Lynch
2/06 $1,500,000 Countrywide
4/07 $2,000,000 United States of America
The listing agent said that the USA lien was only around $600,000, and he was trying to get the lender to pay it. Why the lender would accept an offer around $1,200,000 is beyond me, but they had 14 offers to choose from. But the agent already had his buyer's offer in with the bank, and he said he thought it was going to blow - that's why he listed it in the MLS. But he talked the bank into going back to work on his original deal anyway.
There are a lot of these behind-the-scenes deals going on now.
Jim the Realtor
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Reader Comments (18)
Did you feel at the time that those listing prices were fair, and you offered below list on account of the market direction, or were most of these priced too high and you lowballed them at what current comps would actually support?
"Instead, you are left wondering if there is any hope."
But for how long? 24 hours maybe?
If I'm househunting and I make an offer on a property, it expires in X hours. If X hours pass and there's no response, the offer expires; cross the house off the list and move on to the next one. What is it I'm supposed to be hoping for...?
I asked my realtor to set up an appt this week to see the following house (short sale on MLS for 9 days); the selling agent informed my realtor that they already have submitted 4 offers to the bank and don't want to show the house or accept any more offers (despite leaving it on the MLS). There is a conflict of interests in the short sale: the homedebtor has no interest in getting the house sold and a few thousand dollars extra doesn't motivate the listing agent; Let me know if you think you can get an offer in on this house (or if you even want to)?
1627 MARITIME, Carlsbad, CA 92011 MLS #080061510
have you tried scented paper?
despite leaving it on the MLS
That's the part I don't like - if you are going to consider it sold, then put it in pending and quit jacking people around. If they took a contingent offer it has to go into pending, according to MLS rules, why not short sales? They are contingent on lender approval, it should be mandatory that they move to pending.
It creates this vague gray area that doesn't serve the best interests of the client, the seller. The buyers burn out faster seeing them stay active, figuring that the listing agent is shopping it around trying to do better - probably looking for his own buyer.
I'll give it a try tomorrow.
ANY free-market Capitalist has A LOT to grumble about these days. And, as far as Coastal SoCal real estate goes, the simple truth is, anyone talking about it who's NOT grumbling is CLUELESS as to what Uncle Sam has done & continues to do to us all! Shame on you non-grumblers, shame on you all. Keep up the GREAT WORK, JTR. &, THANKS for sharing.
Jim you have every right as far as short sales go. You're working far harder than a traditional agent for even less, so that the bank can save tens of thousands thanks to you. You're the real solution to the real estate market - empty houses sitting unsold is lose-lose for the bank and would-be buyers. Foreclosure is far worse than a proper short sale. Every month of delay is thousands of dollars in interest the bank loses on top of the deficiency in equity loss.
That just goes to show you..........soft landing? I have a friend trying to buy a house and is getting outbid every time. It's a crazy market in Southern California.......There is always demand. It's a completely different market than in other part of the country. It seems the bottom part has bottomed out, it's just the middle and top that has to catch up. Will So Cal always be this crazy?
Jim hang in there,there are people out here that are following this blog, myself included. I have to say, you are blowing my current RE away.
Jim,
You have every reason in the world to grumble about this.
Best thing for everybody would be for the banks to encourage and efficiently deal with short sales. That way, they could avoid things like your tagged-up WAMU property posted below. Fools, all fools...
I showed your vids to my wife about a month ago, thinking she would get a kick out of the decrepit shacks you've been assigned.
The thing that stuck out to her was all the grumbling - I had never noticed until she mentioned it! I think most of us average joe males like me don't notice it - it just part of the male persona and we let it roll on by. But it may affect prospective female clients differently.
Keep up the great work with this site, Jim. I really enjoy the stuff you dig up and share with us.
I personally find the "grumbling" amusing and refreshing. What I would really hate is if you went through these dumps trying to convince us that the house's defects were really attributes, that we should overpay for a glorified shack, and that the ice cream trucks were really just a complimentary home dairy delivery service. Finally a real estate professional that gets it and isn't afraid to let the public know what is going on behind the scenes.
Thanks for the pro-grumbling comments!
I'll try to do better to keep it in check, you can bet it's a hotly-contested topic around the casa.
You decide if this is worth grumbling about:
The listing agent that wouldn't take our offer by email (fax only, so they are time-stamped) has now called back to say they can't take the offer because it has both husband and wife on it, and the lender pre-qual only has the husband on it.
I probably would have gone for a "grumbler" shirt.
Jim:
I've got to comment on the subject of grousing, since I think I'm the client on 3 of those 8 no responses. For the record, you don't grouse as much as I do. :)
For all Jim's video or blog grousing, he's an total prince when it comes to dealing with the client and other agent. We've patiently submitted nearly 20 offers in the past months on various homes; most below list, but all prices he and I thought were fair for the property, and to date we've only got one of them (a small condo that I've converted to a rental).
Jim's never complained once, presumably because I'm a serious, if picky, buyer, and because most of the fault lies with the listing agents. On our 20 offers, I'm guessing we're up to nearly 10 now where we've simply gotten no reponse. In other cases a response has been received weeks or months after the fact, nothwithstanding good followup from Jim. It's getting weird out there--or at least it's odd behavior from a bunch of folks (banks) that say they want to get houses off their books.
As for "how long do you wait" when you don't hear back, I should note that the one that Jim and I have successfully navigated didn't even call us back for 30 days after we offered. Even then it was a surly acknowledgement--notan actual notification of whether we got the deal. Nothign seemed to happen, so Jim pestered them 60 or 90 days later. The whole transaction was one that I was half-hearted about in the first place because it was priced so wrong, and had to be so cheap to pencil out as a rental, that I figured we might be wasting out time even sending in an offer.
In the end, a few months after the offer, they called back to accept it, at approximately 60% off peak pricing (after my rehab costs are factored in) and at less than half the price the proeprty was originally listed at. It's now a rental at about 6.5% cap rate, so I don't see that it hurts the buyer to let the offers sit there if the banks are overloaded--when they get to it, they might take a very favorable deal, particularly on properties (like this) that needed a lot of work. That said, for Jim's sanity, I hope you all don't start asking him to pepper the county with half-priced offers...I think we just got lucky.
I'm in a comfortable rental, have plenty of time on my lease, and I've got a wide range of property types that are all more or less equally interesting to me for my primary residence, so I'm in an easy spot to send out offers and wait for the right one. But the whole environment must be terribly frustrating for someone who has their heart set on a very particular neighborhood or home style.
The only danger for me is the longer it takes, the more irritated I become and the less patience I have to even bother considering an offer on anything that doesn't look relatively easy (i.e., I'm running short on patience for short sales or serious fixers where the banks don't have a realistic sense of how much it will take to make it right). I think Jim's point is a good one, that even with the massive inventory, it's still not easy to find the right house.
Thanks, Jim, for your effort in this. Justice indicated that I say something so that other visitors to the blog didn't get the wrong impression: whatever the grumbling, it sure doesn't seem to affect your enthusiasm for trying to make a deal where it's possible.
I'm grousing...
I was one of the 14 offers on that Poway house - offering well over list with a very clean bid. And I was highly annoyed to find out that they already had a buyer before they listed it and were moving forward with that contract. That just seems highly unethical to me.
timeye,
He put that listing in pending, so I guess it's done. Or at least he's serious about not showing it.
Keep plugging!