One thing I really like about the NOMAR MLS system is that they require every single MLS listing to include the disclosures. This means that anytime a broker inputs a listing into the system, they must also add the disclosures as an attachment to the MLS listing. Any broker that sees the property through the MLS database can print off the disclosures ahead of time and bring them to the initial showing. NOMAR enforces this policy by issuing fines to any broker who inputs a listing without the disclosures. I personally love this rule for a number of reasons. This eliminates any risk of the seller forgetting to provide the state mandated disclosures to the buyer in a timely fashion. In addition, it gives showing agents more information to provide their clients during showings. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Louisiana sellers can download the state mandates disclosures at:

http://www.lrec.state.la.us/forms/Residential%20Property%20Disclosure%2001-01-11.pdf

Ask us about it. 99% of the time we can get you an E box for whatever city your property is located in. We are very fortunate to have outstanding relationships with every Association of Realtors(R) that we belong to. This relationship affords our brokerage the opportunity to order Electronic lockboxes for pick up from nearly every Association we service. If you don’t see it on the list, just call and ask us about your area. 800 657 6579.

House Sold, But With A Twist Hyphen Interiors

The attached PDF file is a first hand account of our services and how the process works from the viewpoint of an actual client.  We are extremely grateful to the seller for posting such a detailed account of our process. This blog post gives a very accurate account of what a seller can expect from our company and our service.

Why is Congress Realty different? How does Congress Realty benefit me more than other competing firms?

We are available to help you… Plain and Simple!

Today we received a phone call from a seller in a panic. To summarize, his property was scheduled to close escrow today, however, the FHA certification had not been signed. The lender would not fund the loan without our signature on the doc. I informed the seller to send me the FHA cert and I would be happy to sign & send it back to him. The original phone call came to me at about 12:20. I had the FHA cert signed and emailed back to the seller by 12:34. We beat the 1pm funding deadline and the seller received his money today.

Last week we were contacted by a local Realtor(R) in Las Vegas because they needed my signature on a document to complete a file they had just closed. (on a property we had listed) The agent could not receive their commission from their broker until they had a complete file. I immediately asked for the doc that needed to be signed, signed it, and sent it back within minutes. The Realtor(R) received their check from their broker and called me to express his gratitude. He informed me that I was the first flat fee broker that he had ever worked with that actually returned his phone calls and was responsive to his requests.

The bottom line is that we sell more properties than any other Flat Fee Brokerage. Not just List… But we SELL listings. Our listings sell b/c we go out of our way to make ourselves available to our sellers, escrow officers, lenders, and other Realtors(R).

A handful of years ago I had a property in Kuna, Idaho that I wanted to sell myself. I had tried earlier that spring w/out success. The problem I ran into was the inventory during the spring simply exceeded demand. (I recall approximately 20 active homes during the spring on the market) As a result, my property sat on the market. Later during the year, as it became colder, more and more sellers took their homes off the market. By early Dec, only 3 homes in the subdivision were on the market. As a result, I placed my home on the market and had it sold by the end of the month. So how is/was this possible?

I tend to believe that homeowners put too much weight on spring and summer sold data. The reality is that yes, more homes are sold in the spring and summer. However, more homes are also on the market during spring and summer. Homeowners should study their competition and move forward with a listing when they feel they have the best opportunity to sell their home for the most money. For some homeowners, this will be in the spring and summer, however, for others… this may very well be in the winter. Give us a call or shoot us an email and we can examine your subdivision and tell you exactly how many homes are currently on the market in your neighborhood at any given point in time. (At no cost!)

The best time to upload your MLS photos is before the MLS listing goes active. The easiest way to do this is to upload the photos to our pre listing manager at http://www.congressrealty.com/Flat-Fee-MLS-Listings/PreListing/default.aspx. (From this same interface you can also add your remarks.) An ideal MLS photo is approximately 480×640 in size. If you prefer, you can also email your photos prior to returning your listing paperwork to info@congressrealty.com. If you do not upload your photos prior to the MLS listing going active, you can upload your photos anytime after the MLS listing is active by visiting the private client area of our website and logging into your account.

Why do I want to include my photos at the start of my listing?   MLS listings with photos get more views from Realtors(R) and the public. It’s a fact. When your listing originally goes live, you want the photos to be there with the initial data. Secondly, 3rd party sites like Zillow and Trulia are notorious for only pulling one feed from the data source. As a result, if you do not upload photos with the original post, sites like Zillow can make it difficult to upload photos at a later time.

Many times when customers are considering which Real Estate brokerage to go with, they fail to ask what I think is the single most important question…. “What have you actually sold”? Not, what have you listed… Not, what is your flat fee listing price…. Instead, what have you actually sold through your Flat Fee MLS service?!

You will notice that many other “discount” brokerages on the internet will try to get your business by making claims that can not be proven to be true or false. For example, you will see other companies claim to be the “original flat fee company”… or the “leader in flat fee”, etc…. With many of these companies, it’s all about the advertising and not about the results.

Congress Realty is different from every other flat fee company out there in that we will gladly provide our sold data to our prospective clients. Not only will we provide the data, we will provide it to you directly from the MLS so that you can even verify it is accurate/honest data. Anyone can put up a website with ridiculous claims and promises. Congress Realty can actually prove our program works.

To prove my point, I ran our data versus a competing flat fee firm who advertises themselves as the lowest cost provider. You can quickly see why they don’t advertise themselves as the leader in sold properties.

Las Vegas and Omaha.

In Las Vegas, Congress Realty has been credited with 80 closed sales in the past 12 months. The competing firm has been credited with 7.

In Omaha, Congress Realty has been credited with 53 closed sales. The competing firm has been credited with 6.

Upon request, we can provide the MLS printouts showing the sales referenced above and the names of both Congress Realty and the company referenced in the above comparison.

Congress Realty operates under the belief that the goal of any listing brokerage is to sell the property at a fair price acceptable to the seller.  Whether you are paying $100, $300, or 6%, the goal is to sell your property.

How do Realtor Associations protect their data? Well first off, what they call protecting their data…. I call hiding it from the public. Redfin recently decided they were going to publish agent performance data from 14 local Association of Realtors(R). What this means is Redfin was going to post to the public exactly what agents are selling properties and what agents are not. In short, Redfin was going to tell the public exactly what agents in their area are productive and what agents are not. They were going to use the factual MLS data from each area to produce this information. What happened next? Realtors and local associations cried bloody murder. Why would they care? Simple, Redfin was going to expose to the public just how few properties that “local Realtor”(R) down the street from you actually sells. (The Realtor(R) who calls himself the neighborhood expert) They were going to arm the public with knowledge that the public had never before had.

Everyone has heard the rumor that 80% of the Real Estate is sold by 20% of the Realtors(R). Redfin was going to tell the public the names of the 20% of the Realtors who are selling the Real Estate. The local board of Realtors(R) has a vested interest in keeping as many members as possible b/c each member pays dues to the association. If the public figures out that “Ricky” Realtor(R) from down the street has accounted for a total 3 real estate sales over the past 2 years, they are going to reject his listing presentation when he tries to sell himself as the neighborhood specialist. However, if the public doesn’t have the info, they have no idea that “Ricky” Realtor has next to zero real estate experience in negotiating contracts, marketing, etc… Hiding the data helps “Ricky” Realtor.

Why would companies like Congress Realty want this data to be published? Simple, we sell a ridiculous number of properties and want the public to know about it. I always laugh when a local Realtor(R) tries to sell his/her service to the homeowner by trying to explain that the owner needs a local specialist or their home won’t sell. If only the homeowner could be given the factual data to compare the agent performance data…. it would make life on the homeowner so much easier….

Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for The New Yorker and author of Outliers, famously wrote that to be an expert at anything, you need to practice that task for around 10,000 hours.  This would apply to Michael Phelps being a great swimmer just as much as it would apply to someone being a great real estate developer, dentist, table tennis player, spelling bee champion, magician, on anything else.  To put 10,000 hours into context, assuming you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week doing something, 50 weeks a year doing something; it would take 5 straight years of doing just that to become an expert.  I thought about this in context of real estate.  What if someone wanted to say they are an expert at negotiating real estate deals?  How do you define someone as an expert?

Unlike swimming or practicing for a spelling bee, it is extremely difficult to do things relevant to negotiating for 8 hours a day.  Think about all the other things a Realtor would do besides negotiating during an 8 hour day:

• Prospecting for listings
• Showing properties
• Continuing education in areas besides negotiating
• Blogging, online marketing, Twitter
• Email inbox management
• Meeting people, letting people in properties (like inspectors)
• Dealing with bureaucracy
• etc.

At the same time, has the person on the other side of the real estate negotiation table (such as the other Realtor or a buyer), spent 10,000 hours negotiating or doing tasks directly related to negotiating?  It seems doubtful in most cases.  Unless they’ve previously spent years in a field where you spend the majority of your time negotiating (such as a commodity manager for a semiconductor manufacturing company or a sports agent), are they really an expert?  So if someone has 5,000 hours and the other guy has 500 hours, is the guy with 5,000 hours an expert, or is neither one?  Should the 10,000 hours include all time in real estate related activities?  There are quite a few activities that you do where negotiating is no the main focus, but it might still be relevant.  Going through a homebuilder’s models seems like it has nothing to do with negotiating, after all, they mostly have fixed prices for everything unlike your typical resale where all kinds of different things are negotiated (price, earnest money, closing date, possession, what stays, etc.); however, it might be relevant down the road for someone selling their own home.  There might be a comment made during a negotiation, about how the buyer could buy something comparable brand new for a similar price.  Someone who is always thinking about negotiating might say, I understand what you are saying, but this house has a superior location and there are five things in the kitchen (granite countertops, beveled edges, trim above cabinets, sink in island, and pot filler) that would be considered upgrades and would add on to the new home cost (thus my house is a better deal).  Even if you can’t amass 10,000 hours negotiating, you can pay close attention to the real estate market and gain practical knowledge that is helpful down the road; even if you don’t know exactly when it will come into play.

I for one am a supporter of Colorado’s decision to do away with Entry Only Listings. Entry Only Listings put real estate brokers and homeowners in bad positions. This is exactly why Congress Realty has always made themselves available to receive and present offers to our clients, well before Colorado’s decision. Other Flat Fee companies who refuse to make themselves available to other brokers to receive offers are officially out of business. Every broker, regardless of service level must present any offer received per the state of Colorado.

Difference b/w Entry only versus Congress Realty’s Flat Fee Listing:

Entry Only – Broker inputs the listing into the MLS and then disappears forever. (what most flat fee broker’s still try to get away with)

Congress Realty – Once we input the listing, we are available to answer questions from the seller. In the event an offer is presented, a broker or buyer can fax or email the offer to our office and we will fwd the offer to the seller as a PDF attachment within minutes of receiving the offer.

We take every precaution to ensure we stay in compliance with Colorado’s new operating procedures.