What’s wrong with people? Beware rental scams.

In my latest installment of “What’s wrong with people?” I shall revisit the popular rental scam.

Rental scams are nothing new. We began seeing them on Craigslist years ago. This is how it goes. Some despicable person, one who presumably finds that holding down a real job or otherwise being a productive member of society is just too much trouble, decides to instead steal. They find a home for sale online, and they pirate the photos and text. Next they find the name of the owner in public records and set up a bogus email account that might suggest they are the owner, something like gregjones77@yahoo.com. (My apologies to Mr. Jones if this is, in fact, his real email address. Just in case, let’s refrain from sending him messages this morning like “Kris wrote about you on her blog, you scum bucket!”)

Then, and this is the really good part, they take this home for sale and post it as a too-good-to-be-true rental. The monthly rent is always something exceptionally enticing like, say, five dollars — including utilities. When contacted, the “owner” will usually say that they live out of the country but will arrange for a friend to show it when they get a deposit. They will always ask for payment by cashier’s check or wire transfer.

Alert would-be renter Christina forwarded this email she received from one such pond scummy person on one of our listings:

Hello,

My home is still available for rent, We are renting this home to a responsible and neat individual or family who will treat the house as his or her own. Well,Our house has been put up for sale until my wife advised me to put it out for rent. My home has 4 Bedrooms 3 full, 1 partial Bathrooms , while the size is 2,425 sqft. I am asking $1,300 while the refundable security deposit is $1,300. Pets are also allowed. How soon are you willing to move in if we finalize arrangements with you now?

At least he blamed his wife and didn’t kill me off. Unfortunately, Josh Taylor, a Tennessee agent, met a untimely virtual death.

Last week, two of our own listings were scraped for fun and profit. In one case, our client found himself arguing with the showing agent, an agent who had seen both our online listing and the bogus rental listing on the same site (Trulia) and insisted that her client could lease the place if he wanted. The Internets don’t lie!

In the second instance, my client found a highway patrolman at his door. An upstanding citizen who neither speeds nor knocks off banks in his spare time, he was a little taken aback, until he realized that the police officer was just looking for a place to rent – for five dollars a month.

The thing about the rental scammers is that they are evolving. Where we used to only have to worry about Craigslist, now they use listing syndication services to victimize across multiple sites. In the case of our recent evil-doers, Postlets (powered by Zillow) was their syndication service of choice. In Zillow’s defense (Did I just say that?), they swiftly pulled the listings once I reported them as fraudulent. But I simply don’t have the time to police all of our listings every day, and these rental listings will likely reemerge tomorrow under new phoney accounts.

Phoenix guy, Jay Thompson, had a fabulously funny exchange with a rental scammer. I filed that one under “Things I wish I had thought of,” but the reality is I am too lazy to set up a non-traceable email account. I’m glad Jay is around to do my dirty work.

The reach afforded by our online world is a double-edged sword. It is both glorious and an opportunity for abuse, which I suppose describes most wonderful things in life – like those little white chocolate sugar cookies they sell at Trader Joe’s. So, please, use a little common sense when doing your online rental shopping. Only deal with folks you meet in person, people who will show you the big ticket item before demanding you commit. Never send cash or the equivalent. And always do a little cross-checking to confirm that the listing agent is really dead before pulling your own trigger.

Automatic showing feedback requests and self-cleaning ovens

Automation can be a beautiful thing. It can streamline your business and make you more efficient, freeing up valuable time for less mundane tasks — like automating other stuff.

Automation can also be the devil incarnate (incarnate, if you consider a computer to be a human being, which I do).  The problem is that once we automate a task, we tend to write that task off as having been accomplished. No need to worry about that “thing” anymore! It happens all by itself.

The problem is that, even when you delegate, some continued involvement is still required. Transaction coordinators and self-cleaning ovens come to mind.

Let’s start with the self-cleaning oven. There is no such thing. I demonstrated as much this past Sunday. It started innocently enough, with a certain husband who we shall call “Steve” (maybe not his real name).  “Steve,” the one who wouldn’t know dirt if he was riding shotgun in a backhoe, suddenly recognized that our oven didn’t look like other ovens in the ‘hood.

Eleven years of culinary disasters had done a number on the old guy. (I’m talking about the oven here, but I could just as easily be talking about Steve.) Sunday, apparently, the charred remains of a decade’s worth of pizzas and briskets, not to mention one unfortunate exploding potato mishap, reached Defcon 1 status in his mind. It was then that he eyed the magic “self-cleaning” display. “Let’s do that!” he squealed.

Now, we all know that “Let’s do that” is marriage code for “You do that while I watch the Charger game.” So I dutifully pushed the magic button. Then I waited while the internal temperature equaled that of the surface of Mercury, the oven cooled, and the oven unlocked, a process that took me well into the third quarter. And after I spent the next two hours, four sponges and one can of Bar Keeper’s Friend scrubbing the bowels of the Staphylococcus chamber, voila! The oven had self-cleaned.

The truth is that nothing in life can be entirely automated, except perhaps Ryan Seacrest, which brings me to my current beef. It has become all the rage for real estate listing agents to rely on automation for showing feedback. Adding to the popularity is the fact that our real estate association now offers an automated feedback service as a free member benefit, with the “free” part being the operative. If our Association of Realtors offered free spinal taps, I guarantee you there would be a shirtless line out the door.

The problem with automating the feedback process is three-fold.

1. It is spam
2. It still requires some human intervention
3. It is spam

I shall offer as Exhibit A the feedback request I received yesterday. The email included the standard language. “Please provide feedback by clicking here or by going to the link below to answer a few quick questions. It will take less than a minute and my seller and I appreciate the courtesy and I will gladly return the favor for your listings.”  Now, I can forgive the run-on sentence. Hey, who’s perfect? What I can’t forgive is this. While I had indeed shown this home on multiple occasions, and while my clients did in fact like the home very much, they liked it so much that they are closing escrow on it today.

This is where the spam part comes in. I get these nonsensical queries all of the time, three days after I have already spoken to the agent about my client’s interest level or, as in this case, three months after my client’s offer was accepted. It happens so often that I now simply hit the delete key without processing.

If an agent isn’t paying enough attention to monitor their automated systems (and to turn the darn things off when it makes sense to do so), I wonder how much time they are spending monitoring the responses and exercising a little agency on the client’s behalf. I suspect that as I write this, some agent somewhere is sitting in a listing appointment using this very hip and now duty delegator as a valuable selling tool. For the love of leftovers, don’t buy it! You are hiring an agent to use their noggin and to work for you. One personal, conversational email or, dare I say, phone call is going to be infinitely more effective than a thoughtless, often unmanned robo-message.

Go fish. Scripps Ranch listing inventory is oh-so-low.

This is the trend for inventory of Scripps Ranch homes for sale (Altos Research, 92131 Zip code). It’s ugly.

It’s ugly, that is, if you are a buyer.

I was reminded that it might be time to touch on the little empty shelf syndrome we are currently experiencing when I found myself, yesterday, at the weekly Scripps Ranch broker pitch session. The pitch session is a long-standing tradition in many communities, Scripps included, where agents from all offices gather to network and promote their new listings.

Now, I’ve been a bit of a negative Nellie about the pitch session in recent years, having long argued that this relic of the good ol’ days has essentially been relegated obsolete by things like, oh, the Internet. It seems rather goofy to stand in front of a rather insignificant subset of the Realtor population (insignificant in terms of numbers) and as many vendors – Title reps, loan officers, home stagers and others who will never bring a buyer to one of my transactions but would very much like to earn my business – and read from the MLS. Yet we do this, week in and out, because old habits die hard.

As this week’s meeting wrapped and we were swapping idle banter before hitting our Realtor mobiles to visit the newest offerings, it struck me that our current market may be serving to validate, at least temporarily, this industry throwback to the simpler days of water cooler back slapping. I watched as several informal discussions were taking place around the room between agents. Some had buyer needs, others had upcoming listings, and all were dealing from their respective decks in a real estate game of “Go Fish,” attempting to make that all-important match.

Here’s why. In Scripps Ranch this morning, there are 62 active detached listings. That’s it. 62. Consider that in the context of approximately 8,000 detached homes standing and in the context of a “normal” inventory of listings being approximately double what we have today. It’s slim pickings.

By the numbers:

Traditional sales = 44
Short sales = 11
Bank-owned homes = 7
Average days on market = 75 days*
Median price = Approximately $725,000**

* This is fakey days on market, because so many of these have changed agents or otherwise relisted and, therefore, enjoyed an opportunity to reset the old odometer. The real average is actually longer.

** “Approximately,” because of a stupid value range price that, in this market, no one understands and makes little sense.

So, these days, the more tenacious agents are left to their own devices to try to make choices materialize for their buyer clients. And, sometimes, it works. Twice in the past two months, agents from our own little shop found a matched pair, pre-MLS, to the delight of both parties to the transaction.

And, yesterday, I found myself engaged in one of those little card games with two other agents. One had an unmet buyer need, another had a client who was preparing to sell a home that met their criteria but needed to find a replacement home, and I had a home currently being staged to debut next week that sounded like a fit for the middle man. The first agent called it a possible trifecta. Or maybe it is a hat trick – depends on your sport.

As a result, two showings have been scheduled. It may work; it probably won’t. But, crazier things have been known to happen, and desperate times call for desperate measures. The moral to the story is that there are buyers out there. Listings? Not so much.  And to all those folks who ask if they would be better off to wait until after the holidays to list, just remember that the new year will bring with it new buyers but, also, more competition. If you do hold off, at least make sure your agent is stumping for you in the meantime.

Watch out, Trulia and Zillow! Sandicor is coming!

From my inbox to you:

San Diego’s four Association of REALTORS® and Sandicor are excited to announce the release of a new consumer website! This website is designed to turn the consumer’s focus back to Brokers and Agents and away from third party sites such as Zillow and Trulia that rank among the top 20 websites in the category of San Diego real estate.

First, I will say that this is a step in the right direction. Everyone and their uncle have been displaying (read: monetizing) the data for consumer consumption for years – except the owner of the data, our MLS. So conceding that the ol’ cat is out of the bag and finally offering of a consumer-facing search portal is long overdue, the first step in a healthy 12-step program.

Here’s where they got it wrong.

This site can’t compete, at least not in its present form. It can’t be a category killer for two reasons: Data displayed is only a subset of homes for sale (San Diego County); and it lacks depth.

I’ll get to the former, subset, issue in a moment. Where the latter is concerned, this could be easily addressed if our MLS and local REALTOR® associations were willing. But are they?

As it stands, this site offers no more than any agent or broker site with an IDX (Internet Data Exchange) solution, mine included. So the consumer can search “unbiased, timely and comprehensive” MLS data on my site. Unless you provide something more, something different, this is neither a blockbuster opportunity for the customer nor is it a “tremendous benefit” to me. In fact, it will only serve to drive local traffic away from my site, as I am fairly sure my MLS will ultimately beat me in an SEO thumb war.

So, be different, and maybe over time this industry-sponsored offering will morph into something more robust. If all the consumer wanted was a list of homes for sale and a couple of links to school and chamber of commerce sites, I would be retired. What they want is the rest of the story, ala Redfin.  These are the things I would like to see because, heck, you can do it. The data is yours!

• Property histories – Instead of showing just the CliffsNotes on active listings, show sale histories for these properties. Allow folks to search in all categories – active, pending, contingent and sold. Throw in the tax records if you dare; these are public records, after all. In short, lay it out there. Others are.
• Agent information – Fine, so your members would tar and feather you if you even hinted at displaying their production numbers. And on the cusp of the Agent Scouting Reports debacle, we know that getting the numbers right is next to impossible. But, simply offering a search-by-name roster is meaningless and a waste of real estate on the site. How about at least showing “Member since…” next to the agents’ names? At a minimum, consumers would know how long an agent has been around these parts.
• Statistics – Again, let me remind you that you’ve got the data. Use it! This has long been a beef of mine, the fact that I can’t use the MLS to compile any reasonable statistical analysis or download customized market trend information for my clients, at least not without a lot of sweat, time spent in the profanity zone, and spreadsheet gymnastics. So, I am left to go to third parties for the information, third parties who get the data from you, manipulate it, and sell it back to me. If one of your goals is truly to “Lead to a reduction in the fees paid by Brokers for participation in national third party sites,” then let’s start here. If you won’t do it for me, then do it for the customer.
• Listing display – You can do better. For starters, include the agent “supplements.” Have you noticed how so many of the remarks say “See Supplement?” That is because the supplement is the place where we have the opportunity to spew a glorious 1896 characters describing the home. Think of the remarks as the headline and the supplement as the story. (This is admittedly a minor nit in the scheme of things, but it has long been my nit.)

There is more, of course, if I wanted to think that hard this morning. But I am going to stick with my story that this is a good idea poorly executed. And I will cut Sandicor and our associations some slack, given that this is (I hope) still in Beta.

My real agitation, or maybe discontent is a better word, is with the rhetoric in the big unveil I received.  As explained by Sandicor, these are some of the “benefits for brokers and agents” that will result:

Facilitate a consumer’s search for San Diego County real estate information and properties. Sorry to be the one to break the news, but they can already do this.

Allow the consumer to find an agent using a name, affiliated office or location. I don’t see a list of thousands of names absent any context being a big help to anyone.

Permit county-wide Open House searches. This is not new. Have you checked out Redfin lately?

Provide valuable Community Data. Just make sure it is more “valuable” than they can get on dozens of other (gasp) third party sites.

Provide links to helpful information such as Population Statistics, School Systems, and Government Resources. Been there, done that.

This is admittedly all minutia.  So there’s nothing new here. So what? Turning the MLS front-facing is an idea whose time long ago came.  But, these last two objectives suggest that either our leaders are seriously delusional or it is propaganda intended to sell the agents on the idea.

Lead to a reduction in the fees paid by Brokers for participation in national third party sites, and Drive traffic back to brokers and agents and away from third party sites like Trulia and Zillow.

Neither will happen. Don’t kid yourselves. The issue of incomplete data, incomplete in the sense that the site necessarily only displays San Diego County properties, is arguably the biggest reason why. That, and the fact that while you are running a local MLS, others are out there securing and spending venture capital and IPO-ing their way into the hearts and search boxes of the consumer on a national level and providing a richer consumer experience to boot.

I continue to hold that this was a great idea, but it is a great idea that should be implemented on a larger stage. It’s not Sandicor’s fault that they can’t. If my member organizations really wanted to “drive traffic back” and “lead to a reduction in fees,” the effort needs to start with NAR.

Remember Realtor.com? The official site of the National Association of Realtors? That’s where this play should be occurring — without charging agents for enhanced listings and side bar ads, without forcing me to pay an evil third-party site (my site) to redeem my listings and drive traffic back home.

Until that happens, all Sandicor’s consumer site will likely accomplish is to clip the wings of any member agents with a respectable digital footprint by effectively competing for local traffic.

Free Real Estate Advice

photo credit: Solo, with others

There is a lot of free real estate advice out there, and sometimes you get what you pay for.

It’s becoming more commonplace for our clients to turn to the Google God throughout the process to either seek elusive answers (“My home has been on the market for seven hours. Why hasn’t it sold?”), or to just make sure we are doing our jobs.  I’m all for checks and balances, but trust is becoming a four-letter word.

The problem is, you can’t always trust the search box. There is some very good information out there, to be sure, but there is just as much horse doodie being spewed that ranges from silly, to wrong, to outright dangerous. My Golden Retriever, the one with one functioning brain cell who eats rocks, could publish a real estate how-to article if he had opposable thumbs, and someone, somewhere would be waving it around as the smoking gun of his own agent’s incompetence.

I found myself again shaking my head when I heard that a client had latched onto this helpful article penned in 2008 and published on MSNBC.com as the final authority on how to “dump” a house “fast.”

Granted, the article dates back a few years, but not much has changed when it comes to marketing a home. Certainly, the general vibe of the market is not measurably different. So, I thought it would be fun to revisit this little public service checklist of yore (“yore” being 2008-ish), particularly given that we were bopped over our heads with it this week, and offer my own annotations.

Let’s start with the Five Biggest Mistakes.

Making small price reductions again and again. I’ll agree with this one. But, the article goes on to say, “Find out what your house is worth by looking at similar properties in the neighborhood and price it 10% below them.” 10%? Why not 7 or 12%? How about this for a novel idea? Find out what similar properties have sold for, determine a probable market value and sale price, and price your home very close to that probable price. If it’s priced right to begin with, we wouldn’t even be talking about reductions.

Hiring the wrong broker. No argument here. But the author goes on to say, “Personal recommendations from friends and colleagues are often the best way to go. If someone outside the real estate business with nothing to gain is bringing up a broker, you can be pretty sure you’re on to a winner.” (Emphasis added.)

A “winner?” Maybe, but not necessarily. Take those recommendations, and then conduct your own interviews and due diligence. Different folks have different personalities and unique expectations. I like my friends very much, but some of their friends, people they really like, are nut jobs.

Waiting it out. This is mostly correct. But, again, I must offer a big old maybe, maybe not. It depends on your particular circumstances. The one thing I can say with relative certainty where today’s market is concerned is that, if you are waiting for prices to be measurably higher, you need to be prepared to hunker down for a long time.

Showing your house before you get rid of your clutter. Duh. I’ll concede this one.

Not taking the first quick bid. The first offer is often the best, but not always. I suppose it depends on what the offer is, no?

Now here’s the fun part – the tactics for luring more buyers. I’ll focus on my favorites.

Rent a wide-angle lens ($24 to rent for three days). Forgetting for a minute that we don’t rent anything (except Eric, a professional photographer who knows far more about this stuff then we do), we are told that a wide-angle lens will make your home look “larger.” The problem is that buyers get really testy when they walk into a cracker box yet, based on the photos, were expecting a scale model of the Capitol rotunda.

Sell your house on eBay. Oh, yeah. That works. And on Craigslist and in the PennySaver.

Organize a neighborhood open house.  “Include a latte cart or a giant inflatable house in the backyard for kids to jump on.” I can’t tell you how many clients have said, “We would have bought that home if they had only had Venti Mochas!” As for the inflatable, that’s fun. Just don’t forget to renew the umbrella policy.

Include a financial goody bag for the buyer. “You can… pay for a year of landscaping, pool cleaning or maid service. Be creative and see what kind of incentives you think would entice a buyer.”

I’ve got one! What about setting a reasonable price? It’s so crazy, it just might work. “I know we are priced 40% higher than other homes in the neighborhood, but we have lattes and a bouncy thing. And we’ll pay for your next oil change!” doesn’t seem overly compelling to me, but I could be wrong.

Offer a big broker incentive. “Consider offering your broker a weekend in Paris or a luxurious day at the spa.” Hey, now we’re talking! Because I might not do my job just for the promise of, say, our agreed-upon compensation.

Rent a local billboard in your neighborhood. Uh, yeah. That makes sense in suburban San Diego.

The author continues, “You could also create magnets for your car to advertise your home (with house picture and contact information). Or dress your kids and their friends in “Buy My House” T-shirts and send them to town. Sometimes whacky tactics like these pay off.” Trust me, do these things and you will not only find yourself friendless, but childless. If you can get your children and their friends to wear “Buy My House” T-shirts, I want pictures, and rest assured you won’t be buying any prom dresses. And if you find yourself toodling around town with promotional car magnets on your minivan, call me. You are dangerously close to an exciting career in real estate.