Tracy Shaffer
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Wealth-building for Real Estate Investors (or wannabes)

How do you get into the real estate investing game? One house at a time. Real estate investing, like the stock market, can be daunting for some, but the payoff is worth the learning curve. My client, Kevin, became a landlord in 2007 with the purchase of his first rental property, half of a duplex in the City Park neighborhood of Denver. With a $150,000 purchase price and some minor upgrades to suit his specifications, Kevin was able to create positive cash flow within a few months. Two years later, we looked for another property, scouring for a neighborhood where you could still find a bargain, yet prices were pitched to rise. We found a larger single family, bank-owned home between Park Hill and Stapleton and were able to close on it for $136,000. The rehab was more inclusive, but with Kevin’s skill and good taste he created a very desirable rental which drew a very happy tenant. More cash flow. Today, we closed on his third rental property, in the heart of Park Hill. The $107,000 purchase price gives you an idea of what the market has done over the past few years and why Kevin is a happily building wealth through real estate. With a low down-payment, a well-planned fix-up budget and great interest rate, Kevin will be putting a total of $1,000 a month in his pocket this summer from his three investment properties. When you add in the tax benefits and property appreciation that comes with buying now and holding a long-term investment, Kevin is coming out way ahead.
Buying rental property is a great way for creative people to build long-term, sustainable wealth. For Kevin, this is the perfect blend of creativity and commerce and we’ll be following his journey through the fix-up process. Do you think this might be a good path for you? Call, text or email me, I’d be glad to show you successful strategies for building wealth through real estate. Till then, THRIVE BABY!

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Tracy Shaffer
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Denver Townhome For Sale in Mayfair!

You’ll love the look and feel of this remodeled brick townhome in fabulous Mayfair! Situated on the corner it feels like a single family home. Keeping all of the 1945 charm, the updated kitchen has been opened up, offering a light and cheery feeling. Granite counters and handmade cabinets, stainless steel appliances, Viking stove, convection/microwave oven, hardwood floors, custom window coverings, designer paint~ it’s clean as a whistle! New windows, new bathroom fixtures and new vintage-style tile floor, patio with the option for private fencing and a strong HOA make this perfect for your first time home buyer! Great condo alternative and the best in the neighborhood. Call me for a showing, you really should take a look!

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Tracy Shaffer

It’s a mixed bag… but then what isn’t?

Hello Friends. Sharing a bit of information with you on this beautiful Friday afternoon, aggregated from my sources. It’s a mixed bag… but then what isn’t?

Auto sales, manufacturing, jobs and retail all up. Historically, housing has led the nation out of recessions. This time it is employment, incomes, and trade that will lead housing out. And for several months in a row each of these key indicators is heading in the right direction. Will it be quick? Likely not. But we are headed in the right direction economically speaking for the first time in 2-3 years. Get ready for a slowly improving environment for housing sales in 2011. Does this portend a rebound? Pending home sales jumped in October, showing a positive uptrend since bottoming in June, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The Pending Home Sales Index rose 10.4 percent (for the US) to 89.3 based on contracts signed in October from 80.9 in September. The index remains 20.5 percent below a surge to a cyclical peak of 112.4 in October 2009, which was the highest level since May 2006 when it hit 112.6. The data reflects contracts and not closings, which normally occur with a lag time of one or two months. In the West the index slipped 0.4 percent to 104.3 and is 15.6 percent below a year ago. The US is improving overall but the Western states seem to be lagging in the RE recovery.

Foreclosure homes accounted for 25 percent of all U. S. residential sales in the third quarter of 2010 and the average sales price of properties that sold while in some stage of foreclosure was more than 32 percent below the average sales price of properties not in the foreclosure process — up from a 26 percent discount in the previous quarter and a 29 percent discount in the third quarter of 2009, according to RealtyTrac’s Q3 2010 U. S. Foreclosure Sales Report. A total of 188,748 U. S. properties in some stage of foreclosure sold to third parties in the third quarter, a decrease of 25 percent from the previous quarter and a decrease of nearly 31 percent from the third quarter of 2009. The average sales price of properties not in foreclosure was $249,721, up 6.42 percent from the previous quarter and up 4.36 percent from the third quarter of 2009. Sales volume of non-foreclosure properties decreased 29 percent from the previous quarter and nearly 31 percent from the third quarter of 2009.

And on a smaller note…
McMansions are rapidly becoming the housing equivalent of harvest gold appliances as more Americans are opting for smaller residential footprints, according to a new Relocation.com consumer lifestyle survey. Homeowners and buyers were asked to weigh in on what they saw as the ideal home size. Forty-eight percent of the respondents indicated that their ideal home size would range from 1,000 to 1,999 square feet, while 29 percent prefer homes that are 2,000 to 2,999 square feet. By comparison, five years ago, according to NAHB (National Association of Homebuilders) the average home’s square footage was 2,400 square feet, nearly 400 square feet bigger than what many homebuyers desire today. The survey also found many Americans still find the suburban lifestyle attractive. Desiring a home near the city but still away from the ‘hustle and bustle,’ 54 percent of Americans indicated a preference for living in a suburban neighborhood. Urban and rural neighborhood settings were only preferred by 24 percent and 22 percent, respectively, of survey participants. Surprisingly, the survey revealed that cost of a residence is not the main deciding factor when purchasing a home. In fact, only 29 percent of respondents stated living costs as the most important reason when considering a move.

Home Prices to Stay Flat but Economic Growth Could Strengthen Home prices will remain near their current levels for the next few years but the U. S. economy could grow faster in 2011 than the consensus forecast shows, according to predictions made at the annual business and economic forecast luncheon of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Unemployment is expected to stay high for the next few years, the forecasters agreed. NOTE: I would expect prices of smaller homes to do better, and very large home price to decline.
“We will not see a recovery in housing prices in the near term nor do I expect home prices to drop further,” said Erik Hurst, a professor of economics at Chicago Booth and one of the speakers at the event at the Sheraton Chicago hotel. “That is my take it to the bank prediction for 2011.” He cited as reasons the excess supply of houses on the market and continued weak demand from homebuyers.

Economic growth in the U. S. next year as measured by the percent change in GDP, could reach 3.4 percent and exceed the consensus of economic forecasters, according to Randall Kroszner, who served as a governor of the Federal Reserve System from 2006 to 2009 and another speaker at the luncheon.
“I don’t agree with those who say we are in an extended period of low growth,” said Kroszner, a professor of economics at Booth, “but we are unlikely to have a powerful recovery either.”

And for my skeptical readers, I thought I’d throw this in to be fair.

Housing optimists can’t deny market indicators.

BY STEVE BERGSMAN, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2010.
Inman News
For most metro areas, home prices peaked some time in 2006 and except for a few minor bumps, it’s been all downhill ever since. 2010 has been no exception. So, if we tally up all the annual sales data since 2006, it’s been a four-year run of bad news regarding the direction of housing values.
Enough is enough, you say, and we should begin 2011 with renewed optimism and vigor. I got your back there, but it’s a weak defense, because intersecting trend lines, including an unexpected, but very strong post-tax credit slump and a shadow inventory problem will keep housing prices heading in the same direction — down. Expect another 5 percent to 10 percent decline in housing prices in 2011. Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Erkan Erturk tries to stay optimistic when it comes to reporting about the housing market. “Looking at where we are today as compared to the days of 2008 through mid-2009 when home-price indices (S&P/Case-Shiller) were showing over 10 percent declines on a 12-month basis, the market has, indeed, stabilized, even improved,” Erturk reported. However, that stabilization doesn’t diminish the fact that Standard & Poor’s analysts predict home prices will decline another 7-10 percent in 2011. The good news, Erturk stressed, is that declines have decelerated. The bad news is, the timeline for declines continues to stretch out into the future.
1. First, unemployment is still a major weight on homebuying trends. Not only are unemployment numbers persistently high, but even those citizens with jobs are feeling insecure, all of which means people who would normally be looking for a new house definitely won’t be. Demand continues to trail supply.
2. Secondly, back in November, the Federal Reserve unveiled a new stimulus plan involving the purchase of $600 billion of U.S. Treasuries. It was thought this event would push mortgage rates down. The opposite has happened. Mortgage rates have been going up. Higher mortgage rates will not be helpful in getting more people to buy homes, which, in turn, would stimulate prices upward.
3. More REO inventory on market. Thirdly, after holding back on putting foreclosed and distressed properties back into the market, banks have been getting more aggressive. As these properties leak into local markets at reduced prices, home values cannot move upward. In fact, home prices are more often than not pulled lower.
“If distressed inventory comes into the market slowly, it is always helpful, as the market can digest the new supply,” said Erturk. “At the same time, if they come into the market too slowly, you are prolonging the problem and the market won’t hit bottom for a few more years.”

One of the biggest obstacles to house prices moving higher and not lower is the unexpected aftereffects of the home-purchase tax credit that was successful for what it was designed to do: stimulate demand by enticing buyers into the market. Sambucci is another optimist with bad news. “We don’t like being bearish,” he said, before letting me know that he thinks home prices will decline another 7-9 percent in 2011.
Perhaps the biggest roadblock to getting home prices to reverse direction is shadow inventory overhang. Shadow inventory — and I’ll use S&P’s definition — consists of outstanding properties whose borrowers are, or recently were, 90 days or more delinquent on their mortgage payments, and properties in foreclosure and REOs. According to S&P, the time it will take to clear the supply of distressed homes on the market, or those that need to be resold because of defaults, declined after reaching a peak in mid-2008, but has been on the rise again since fall 2009. As of mid-year 2010, S&P estimated it would take the existing shadow inventory 40 months to clear. Another way to look at this problem is: Approximately 2.09 million properties were in servicers’ foreclosure inventories at the end of October, according to Lender Processing Services Inc. Combined with the number of loans that were 30 days delinquent, the total number of noncurrent loans reached 7.04 million.
One optimist who has mixed the numbers to look almost good is Alex Villacorta, a senior statistician with Clear Capital in Truckee, Calif. Some analysts were saying home prices would decline 5-10 percent in 2011 as far back as September 2010, Villacorta noted, but between August and November 2010 prices had already fallen 7 percent, so the big decline may have happened sooner than later.
“We will see a majority of the falling prices during the winter,” he said. “I don’t think that minimum 5 percent decline will be spread out through all of 2011. If it does occur, it will be in the first part of the year.”
During the housing bubble, individual markets generally moved downward in a consistent line, but now markets are “splintering.” Housing prices in some metros continue to decline, some are stabilizing, and a few have now reached recovery.
“When people talk about national averages, historically, that was OK,” he said. “But with the volatility these markets have seen over last couple of years, it’s a brand-new ballgame.”
Villacorta likes the trend lines for New York and Washington, D.C., and suspects the housing market in those two cities have already hit bottom. He’s a little concerned about Denver, which was moderately affected by the deflation of the housing bubble only to be hit hard by the economic recession. At the bottom of Villacorta’s list are the usual hard-hit areas of the country in Florida, Arizona and California, but taking the crown as the worst of the worst is Las Vegas, where almost three out of four homes have been foreclosed.

Hope you’ve found this interesting and helpful. Now go out and grab yourselves a weekend!

Tracy Shaffer

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Tracy Shaffer

Becoming (W)hole

It was so many years ago and it was yesterday. I was caught in an unfortunate situation, one that was not of my own making… or was it? The world was in chaos as America was suffering from the gaping wounds of 911, I was the mother of two small sons, working in the theatre and watching as my beautiful husband began to unravel. Not unravel like the sleeve edge on a sweater, but the hyper-spin of the Zoom Loom in reverse motion on steroids.

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Tracy Shaffer
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Getting to (W)hole Part VI: Standing Naked in High Heels.

The fog lifts, the clouds part and the music swells as 2010 becomes the year of living visibly. After a few years under the radar I’m now accelerating through life full throttle with the Fuzz Buster on. The shoes have fallen and I’ve put them on my feet, the thread has unraveled leaving me naked to the world (except for that stint as Mrs. Robinson, but that was not my doing).
When we began rehearsals, the play had a different ending. Ames had deconstructed her creation and reconstructed it in a different configuration to form a completely different message. She had picked up the elements of her life and put them back together, but had not traveled forward or backward into the new. She was still in the same place, it just looked different. After the first read-through that same, strong voice came to me clearly but this time it said “Go, baby. Go there”, so I did. When the final image is revealed, Ames has returned to herself, just as I have. Though I consciously put my life together this year using what was left and returning to what was there in the first place, it is only in the writing of this blog I’m aware of the parallels between creator and creation. I’m no longer content with separating myself into fragments: the Realtor, the soccer mom, the artist, for the world is all of it at the same time.
Last night I jammed my foot and think I broke a small bone. It is uncomfortable to walk, slightly painful, and believe it or not feels better when I’m in high heels. But then, I always feel better in heels. The funny thing is that the show opens tonight, the “break-a-legs” have been pouring in…I am such a literalist.

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Tracy Shaffer
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Getting to (W)hole Part III: The other shoe.

I endure hardship, folding it into life like melted butter into batter. It is an expected guest, though an unwelcome one. What unfolded in the summer of ’08 was an unexpected test. I could no longer swim in the waters of chaos, the vortex of mental illness is far too strong. The dam broke in the marriage in February of ’07, flooding me with the realities of raising two sons solo as a Realtor® in a declining market. Two soccer schedules at two different parks had me driving in circles, keeping the boys in their schools meant a ten mile daily commute; I spent many a morning burrowed in the underground parking lot, napping in the back of the Volvo before going to my office. Endurance is endearing, enduring is exhausting. Under the circumstances, this was a trade up; at least the chaos was my own. Slowly, putting one stiletto in front of another I moved forward, no longer sacrificing my life on the alter of addiction. While he took to climbing mountains, I became adept at moving them. It got better. Until the other shoe dropped…
The boys had been with their dad for the Fourth of July weekend. I was on my way to meet them half way for the kid swap when the phone rang. No one had heard from my brother since Thursday. Now if Steve hadn’t called me, his wife or his life-long friend in three days, something was seriously wrong. I promised to go by the house and check in, I called the boys to say I’d need more time, and I got dressed slowly and methodically, thinking ‘are these the glasses you want to wear when you talk to the coroner? Should I take a sweater in case it’s cold in the morgue?’ Driving across town I wished I had some dry cleaning to pick up, contemplated a drive through the Starbucks, anything to delay what I knew was inevitable. I ran through my mental Rolodex, looking for someone who might meet me there, cursing and asking, ‘Why do I have to do this alone?’ Tears were welling but not falling, waiting in the traffic jam of my numbness. The ten minute drive felt like an hour. I pulled up to the house; his car was catty-wampus in the driveway, the keys lying on the threshold of the front door. My deepest fear confirmed in that moment. I walked around the back of the house to check the back, stood at the sliding glass door looking in. A clear voice spoke to me, very strong, “No baby, don’t do this. Don’t come in, you don’t have to do this.” I knocked as a matter of protocol and called the police. “My brother is dead.” “Are you with him?” came the first of many questions from the 911 operator. “No, he is dead at the bottom of the stairway.” I said, having no evidence save the premonition I’d had months earlier as I followed Steve down the stairs. I waited for the cops to come, alone. My real estate partner, Lea, called with a question about condo rules. I answered in a trance and told her where I was. She landed there in minutes, like an angel; staying the five hours it took for detectives and coroners to process the scene. I didn’t break until the photographer arrived. Steve had been a professional photographer and in our LA days I’d been his model, rep and muse. I was crushed under the weight of irony. The family gathered for the “Shaffer Shiva”, a ritual that requires more vodka than prayers. And time passed.

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Tracy Shaffer
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Getting to (W)hole Part II: The Shoe Falls

The years that followed moved between triumph and tenuousness like the tide: constant and somewhat soothing in its constancy. The devil I knew was the one I knew well.
I am loyal by nature, a stoic by necessity, in denial as an act of mercy; traits which have kept me alive and would have been handy as a member of the Donner Party. Thankfully I’ve not been driven to eat my young… yet. But who knows when the shoe drops?
As my husband picked up the pieces, adjusted the meds and found gainful employment, I continued writing, submitting and getting response. We were now in the early single digits, Saints & Hysterics was being produced and (W)hole was being work-shopped for a staged reading at the National New Play Network Showcase. The story was still young, as uncertain of what it was as a teenage girl, but there was a continual stream of interest. Whether they found the concept intriguing or it was the morbid curiosity of watching a train wreck, there was momentum. There were some shamans along the way, each with variations on the same message: “Intriguing the characters are, clarify the plot you must”,
And so I continued, researching quantum physics and color theory, took the scenes out of order, put them back differently, added capers, alien abductions, and a musical number (Bold-faced a lie that is), and took them away, tossing them in the ‘dramatic ARC’ bag as I learned to trust and to listen.
Focusing on the story was a welcome distraction from all that was only held together by duct tape. Late nights at the computer was the place of calm in the tempest, the only place I felt fully alive. As a mother, an understudy, and the wife of a man struggling with sobriety, I was invisible, dutiful and achingly lonely. Like Carla. She sprang forth when I began working as a personal assistant to a friend. Once my student, I was now one of her ‘people’. I was intrigued and mortified by this turn, but the money was good and sorely needed. Alcoholics are not known for their financial savvy, as the disconnected phone and the car missing from the driveway would attest.
Things falling apart, picking up the pieces, shattering and sweeping up after; these were the days of our lives. Struggling to be seen and bursting at the seams, something had to give. It was the acting. The one thing in my life that I’d always held as the sacred expression of my soul no longer had a place. I could not bear the process, of needing to be “picked” in order to create, and that’s what the audition process is really. To be any good at all you have to open up, invest yourself you have to fall in love, and lay yourself bare. And then you have to deal with every manifestation longing that goes with unrequited love. After long walks, streaming tears and railing at god on the Highline Canal, I made the decision to gave it up. (Which is very different from giving up.) At that point, I had no idea who I was;I was letting go of what had defined me for decades. In this act, I learned to trust.
The play was what I had left, and no one had to give me permission to create it. It was the quilt I could stitch together from whatever pieces of myself I had left at the end of the day. It was also the only time I could finish a sentence. There is an exchange in (W)hole between Carla and Ames where Carla says, “You saved my life.” Ames “Yes, and now I’m responsible for it, how does that work? I’ve never understood how that works.” Guess I was talking to myself again. But now I was listening.

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Tracy Shaffer
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Getting to (W)hole Part 1: The loose thread.

I got a call from Denver Post theatre critic, John Moore, last week about an advance piece on the upcoming production of (W)hole. I answered the call, it’s the press after all, and was surprised by his first question. “Tracy, this script has been around for a long time, hasn’t it? Why did it take so long to get produced?” I hadn’t thought about it, but he was right. “Well… this script hasn’t been around for years, other versions of it have. The story took some time to find itself” (as most stories do) I answered. Scripts don’t feel autobiographical as I write them; and though a seed of an experience or observation lives within me the characters find their own voices and take over quickly. John’s question put me in a state of reflection on the journey from inception to production, through the decade it took to write, all that transpired and the things that took me to my knees or helped me stand again. I’m looking for the string theory that ties it all together. So how did my experience affect the redemptive story?

The play deals with an artist whose life unravels before our eyes and we watch as she stitches her soul back together, all within 90 minutes of stage time. Things which shatter and transform us take longer in real life; the altering instant happens in the slow-motion speed of a car crash. In 2001 (W)hole was ‘the play I wasn’t writing’. At that time I was an actress, writer, and mother of two young sons, living in a placid central Denver neighborhood. As one of ten playwrights who comprised the Denver Center Theatre’s Playwrights Unit under the guidance of Writer in Residence, Gary Leon Hill, I was focused on another script. We’d only had a few of our bi-monthly Sunday night meetings before the planes hit the towers and their impact changed everything in the world. As America searched its wounded soul and rattled sabers, artists sat, collectively staring in stunned silence at the empty page and the stark white canvas, considering the significance of our creations. It was in this moment that (W)hole was conceived. Relationships seemed to be abruptly spinning 180°, a universal shifting of power everywhere I turned: globally, nationally, locally, internally. It was the season of the great unraveling.

Somewhere, deep within my beloved’s brain a random thread was pulled, a synaptic snag untethered him as he began a slow downward spiral. Whatever had held him together for so many years began to crack, leaking rational thought. Alternating episodes of the manic, the depressive and the paranoid wove themselves into my daily life, based on the pharmaceutical whims of his psychiatrist. I began to line up the proverbial deck chairs in perfect rows, I bailed helplessly against the chaos with a beach pail to keep us all from drowning.

He’d been working on a business venture with a friend, a young Pakistani man whose family had taken exile in Oslo during the 1979 Revolution. In the post 9/11 daze, the man I’d married developed a firm belief that because of this association the FBI was following him, tracking his car and bugging our home as we sat on the couch watching CNN. I would come home from the theatre to find bits of insulation on the floor under the attic access panel where he’d been crawling around searching for cameras and microphones. Maybe it was his way of dealing with our national horror, by disconnecting completely from reality as I was doing with the rigor I applied to my vegetable garden. And I wrote to keep myself sane.

To be continued…

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Tracy Shaffer

Le Muse du Musee

I met Natalie Rekstad-Lynn in 2005, she was sitting along the wall of my acting class with the rest of the students at the Denver Center Theatre Academy. She’d only made it to a few classes but did not go unnoticed. Her eyes were clear blue and clearly focused, her ballerina’s body and the intensity she brought to her work lifted her above the rest. One night she stayed behind a bit to apologize for her absence, let me know she enjoyed the class and something about driving from Boulder and having a new baby. We chatted for a while in “mom speak” about babes and shifts they made to careers and hips. She offhandedly mentioned an ‘ annual fundraiser’ she did to benefit the arts. I, in my rush and snobbery, thought she was speaking of a hobby; a little like Mommy and Me with Degas. Ha! I had no idea who I was talking to for Natalie Rekstad- Lynn plays on a role far bigger than those I was coaching.
Inspired by the great European art salons of the late nineteenth century, Ms. Lynn founded Salon d’ Arts in 2001 and by 2006 she had built a nationally recognized arts event featuring museum held artists from around the country. The goal has always been to spotlight Colorado as a world-class fine arts destination, promote artistic integrity and education through visual and performing arts and to strengthen the cultural ties between Colorado non-profits. She has reached and exceeded this, expanding herself, her life and the artistic community in the process.
Through the years the Salon d’ Arts has been held in local galleries and benefited more than one non-profit. Working in collaboration with DAM’s outgoing and incoming Chief Curators, Lewis Sharp and Christoph Heinrich, Lynn narrowed Salon’s focus as a funder for the Denver Art Museum, moving the 2009 gala into the Fredrick Hamilton Building with the Embrace exhibit and Salon du Musee was born. On Saturday night la tradition jeunes continued with a beautiful soiree and a major tweak. This year marks the first museum-wide collaboration to form one exhibition.
Denver Art Museum curators selected works from significant artists from each department. The result is a sublime exhibition of more than eighty works ranging in value from $250 up to $100,000. This year’s event and art auction is a unique opportunity to understand the breadth of the museum’s collections represented through new objects from each genre, while giving collectors an opportunity to add vetted curator selections to their personal art collections.
The selections were a spectacular smorgasbord of sensory delight. The VIP reception began with champagne and artist Daniel Sprick speaking of his hauntingly elegant oil paintings. The whimsical irony in Bill Amundson pencil drawings, the graceful graphite of Marc Brandenburg, Bill Starke‘s sculptural rock climbers, and others provided nourishment for every aesthetic palette. And the event was a work of art in itself raising funds through silent and live auctions.
Who knew the modest, self-described “Boulder mom” would be hostess extraordinaire? In the five years since our meeting I have learned that with Natalie Rekstad-Lynn that there will always be a great surprise. She is a force of benevolent nature, bursting with passion for a life of beauty, a deep connection to friends and family and a guiding mantra “The impossible just takes longer”.

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Tracy Shaffer
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The Trouble With FSBO

THE TROUBLE WITH FSBO.

There are a million real estate stories in the Mile High City; this is one of them. The story you are about to read is true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. This is a story of one girl’s nightmare. Me. I’m a REALTOR®. But I’ll try not to let that get in my way.

It was a hot summer in cool real estate market. The rolling boil of winter’s tax incentives had simmered into springtime and left the pot dry. Houses sat for weeks without a showing. Sweaty listing agents tied balloons to open house signs as potential buyers rolled by on fat-tired bicycles. My phone rang. It was the clients I’d put into a downtown duplex some years before; cute couple, new baby, good debt-to-income ratio and a spanking clean credit score. They were smart enough to see it was time for a move up, down to the bucolic suburbs. Interest rates hadn’t been this low since… well, ever.

We set out shopping, searching for nothing less than the dream home: that elusive slice of Americana where you know your neighbors, raise a family. And we found it, love at first sight, a bit like Bedford Falls but in Technicolor. The drawback? It was a FSBO. *bum-bum-bum-bummm*.

Now I’m a kind of do-it-yourself type dame, within reason. I don’t mind doing my nails or washing the dog but I have to draw the line at what I don’t know, like removing a kidney or my taxes. It’s not that I couldn’t do it if I had to, but it wouldn’t be in my best interest. Some folks get all DIY when it comes to selling a house, I mean, how hard could it be, ey? Stick a sign in the yard, a couple snapshots on the Internet, throw some poor schmuck a few clams for an MLS input, then sit back and watch that baby sell.

As my old pal, Joe Friday, once said, “Ah, sure, but just like every other foaming, rabid psycho in this city with a foolproof plan, you’ve forgotten you’re facing the single finest fighting force ever assembled.” REALTORS®
The problem here stemmed from a lack of access to accurate data. Zillow, Trulia and the CMA done by the affable agent who sent the Broncos schedule doesn’t give a true representation of home value. My hunch is that they took the range provided by the neighborhood expert, added 20 to it for ‘negotiation’ and called it a day. They missed the mark in this game of real estate pricing horseshoes. By 35k . When our offer came in at market value and the appraisal backed it up they went into a tailspin, losing sight of the larger goal of selling their house. Every part of the negotiation was tinged with bitterness as dates, deadlines, inspection items; things that are standard part of the deal became emotional and difficult because they had no neutral party working on their behalf. A house is an emotional commodity and real estate transactions are a fine balance of the human and the business transaction. A good Realtor is adept at holding the deal in balance, by being rational, informed and calm. Our high-centered sellers almost lost the sale numerous times because they lacked the two most important things in the real estate process: accurate information and an advocate. Without these things you’re left vulnerable. Very vulnerable. Just like performing that kidney transplant with a Swiss Army knife and a yard of dental floss. It seems like a good idea at the time, but then you realize how much you don’t know.

Statistics show that 81% of FSBOs sign with an agent within 30 days, at least the smart ones. Because not only do you reduce your headache and legal liability with a REALTOR®, you actually make more money. Have I made my point? So if you’re considering a move in this hairy market, do yourself a favor and call a Realtor®, hopefully me, and ask a few questions.

Oh, and that cute couple? They made it to the closing table alright and are happily ensconced in their beautiful new home.

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