The entire time I have been a real estate agent I have been hearing stories about how we don’t answer the phone.

Last night I read a heart-wrenching account written by someone who was house hunting and was not getting his phone calls returned.

We get a bad rap from the experts for not answering our phones. In spite of all the coaching and complaining, it doesn’t seem to get any better. There will always be agents who do not return phone calls, and we deserve all of the criticism we get — even when the calls are not actually going to us because of the way we market ourselves.

As an industry, we need to do some heavy-duty consumer education on what it is that real estate agents do, and how to work with one. Sometimes when people think they are calling an agent, they are not. Other times they are calling the wrong agent. Consumers have trouble telling a lead aggregator apart from a real estate company. They don’t understand agency, and they don’t know the difference between a broker and an agent.

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Here are some of the reasons that good, diligent agents may not be answering the phone:

1. The consumer is calling a number on a for-sale sign, thinking that it’s an agent’s number. It’s really the number for the front desk, and the receptionist is at lunch. Or the receptionist is a voice mailbox. Some real estate companies don’t let agents put their own number on the sign — probably for fear the agent won’t answer the phone, and a lead will be lost.

2. The number the consumer is dialing is a call center, or belongs to an office manager who needs to choose an agent to handle the call, which takes time. There will also be a referral fee to be paid by the agent over and above the regular split.

3. The phone number displayed with the property on the Internet is a general number for the office. After being put on hold, the caller gets an agent who just got her license last week, and who knows nothing about the property. This is only slightly better — and sometimes worse — than not getting the call answered at all. But this certainly isn’t unique to the real estate industry — I have similar experiences when I call other businesses.

4. The phone number is the agent’s cell phone, but it’s 11 p.m. and, for some reason, the agent isn’t picking up. She must not need the business. A real “go getter” would be on it.

5. The caller got the agent’s voice mail and left a message, but never got a callback, because he was inquiring about a $10,000 piece of land 50 miles away, and the agent had no interest in the business. The caller ends up calling six agents before he gets help.

6. The buyer was sitting in front of the house and called the agent. The agent was out with buyers showing them a house and did not pick up the phone so the buyer drove away.

7. The broker has decided to use his cell phone number as the main number for the brokerage. Then the broker gets very busy and starts ignoring the “leads” instead of passing them along to agents (true story).

When I read about agents not returning phone calls, I usually hear only part of the story. It’s just the part where the agent doesn’t answer the call or return a message.

Most of us give our clients better service than we give the people who call us out of the blue. We could educate consumers on how to find the right agent, and work with that person instead of calling random strangers at odd hours.

Cultivating a relationship with a real estate agent is a good thing to do. If the caller who was interested in the $10,000 piece of land 50 miles away had been one of my clients, or a friend or neighbor, I would have moved heaven and earth to help him or her.

We could also educate them as to how to leave a message and to check to see if they are actually calling a real estate agent. Consumers need to understand how third-party websites work, and that the agent pictured next to the $10,000 piece of land may actually work in a different county and may not even be able to find the lot.

In an effort to cast the widest possible net, we (agents and brokerages and third-party websites) deliberately invite phone calls and clients that we cannot serve.

If consumers really understood agency laws in the states that have them, they would know that calling the listing agent isn’t always the best course of action, because the listing agent represents the seller, not the buyer. We don’t want consumers to understand agency. We want them to call us. 

An educated consumer does some research on agents and asks for recommendations, introductions and references, instead of calling the number on the for-sale sign.

One of the first things I do when I meet with a new client is talk about various options for communication. It has been years since a client has told me that she prefers to talk on the phone. It is usually emails for discussions about properties or for answering questions, and text messages when she is going to be late or needs to reach me right away.

Update: Housing starts surged to 760K in June.

That’s well ahead of expectations of 745K.

And the previous month was revised higher to 711K.

There’s less and less question that housing his hot.

Yesterday the NAHB had

 

ORIGINAL POST: The big datapoint of the day: June housing starts.

Analysts expect 745K annualized starts, up from 708K in the previous month.

That equates to a 5.2% gain.

We’ll have the number here LIVE at 8:30 AM ET.

In part one of this topic I mentioned that we live in a community in the mountains of southern Colorado. Our community is 15 miles long and half a dozen miles wide with one way in and one way out. Should a wildfire occur between us and our escape route we would have to remain and try to protect ourselves.  We are surrounded by the San Isabel National Forest on one side and a large tract of land that is privately owned on the other side. Very little wildfire mitigation has been done outside our community borders. Our community is known as a landowner association and therefore has a board, officers and various committees that run the association. Living in a mountainous area which is heavily wooded makes wildfire one of our chief concerns. I suspect our community is similar to many other areas that are governed by homeowner associations, and our problems are not much different than they experience. 

Our community has accomplished some wildfire mitigation over the past few years. Since the U.S. Forest Service is not going to properly mitigate many square miles of the forest  that abuts our properties we can only do what we can within our own lots and the common land we all share. The association is making some very smart decisions as well as some that perhaps have not been thoroughly thought out or fully completed

They have established dry hydrants where they can pump water from lakes and streams to a water truck that has been recently purchased. They also purchased a wood chipper that will mulch limbs and small trees, therefore reducing the fuel source. These are very good decisions and will be useful to preventing and fighting  a wildfire. There presently are no  trained personnel to man the truck or contingency personnel to support the existing equipment. We have summer residents and a small contingent of full time residents like myself.  The shortcoming of this program is that older folks like myself are neither trained nor physically able to fight 200 foot flames closing in on you.  There is talk of training some people; however to slow or stop a wildfire takes able qualified men who can work together and not be distracted by protecting their own homes or property. The plan is a good plan but lacks completeness.

Our community has an alternative escape route through the National Forest. Many visit our community in large motor homes that would get stuck on the four wheel drive alternative road. The road is one lane wide and other vehicles behind a stalled or blocked vehicle would be stuck in the open with no safe place to go.  Any plan should be fully complete and include as  many of the members of the community as can be engaged. There is a gate across the alternative road and no one knows who has the key to the gate; any delay there could be fatal. Having a plan that is not complete or sufficiently detailed can be an invitation to disaster. Sometimes no plan may be better than a faulty plan that puts people in danger. Those who live in an HOA or similar association should engage all the members of the community and develop a plan formulated with as many opinions as possible and not take it upon the shoulders of a few to devise a plan based upon limited input.

It is a good idea is to have a wood fest that eliminates wildfire fuel from the community and provides firewood for those who need it. Having those come into a community and remove fuel is a valuable benefit to the entire community. Our community is a gated community and the implementation of a wood fest seems to be a good idea. Having volunteers personally escort woodcutters into the community, staying with them, then escorting them out seems a waste of volunteer manpower. By providing wood cutters a map to a specified area, having signs along the way to keep them on route,, having a volunteer present at the cutting location to monitor cutting seems to make better sense. That way those wishing to cut firewood could be directed to seperate locations and fewer volunteers, and more firewood could be cut. Charging for the firewood per load also makes little  sense as it is the community that benefits mostly from the removal of the firewood and further limits cutting to those who can afford to pay for the privilege of cutting.  A very good idea and faulty implementation.

One of the excellent ideas our community has put into place is having a location for members to dump brush when they clear their lots. It is then burned in the winter when there is adequate snow on the ground.  Having areas for members to dump brush also encourages people to reduce fuel on private lots and acts to slow down a wildfire or try to stop it. Educating members on clearing their lots and being responsible wood lot owners is also a good idea that can expedite lot clearing.

Wildfire mitigation is important and necessary for survival but it needs to be carried out in a well thought out and proper manner and carried to completion. Associations need to invite and involve members in such procedures. Wildfire safety effects everyone and everyone should be involved in formulating a good plan. Plans are more complete when as many members as possible are able to contribute ideas and suggestions.
Our association bases many of its decisions on a local forester. Not all foresters are right all the time and additional input should be sought. For example a forester told us years ago that spruce bud worm had no natural enemies and we would have to spray toxic herbicides to eliminate the infestation. A residual of the spray is that it also kill birds. I have observed over the years how devastating the bird population has been on the spruce bud worm. Diverse opinions are worth more than one single opinion. 

If you live in an HOA or similar association I encourage you to get as many opinions as possible and formulate complete and workable plans.  Sometimes HOA’s don’t welcome diverse opinions, but they should if they want the best plan possible. Personal feelings and egos need to be set aside and all members of a community need to work together on certain projects  like wildfire mitigation  Some people are not comfortable in a group setting or speaking in public.  If the HOA leadership has to go door to door for ideas and suggestions they should do so. Protecting yourself and your community should be a community effort that everyone will benefit from.

Our association has made many very good moves toward wildfire mitigation. I therefore believe we can all learn from each other if we just make the effort to engage all members of a community.  Some ideas will be good ones and others maybe not so good but all contain value if a person pays close attention. None of this has been written to diminish the good works that our community or any other community has put in place. Sometimes if we fail to all work together, fractured and incomplete plans are put into place that could have been improved if more opinions were sought.  I hope my observations will help others to formulate that perfect wildfire mitigation plan and when your do, please share it with the rest of us.  The plans for our community is still a work in progress and hopefully it will reach completion prior to a wildfire

By Jack Hough

Mark Zuckerberg uses an adjustable-rate mortgage. Should you? Probably not.

When the billionaire Facebook founder refinanced his mortgage with First Republic Bank earlier this year, he scored an adjustable-rate loan that started with a 1.05% rate in May, according to Bloomberg. The rate resets monthly and is equal to the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, plus 0.8 percentage points. The one-month Libor rate was recently 0.25%.

By one measure, the loan is so cheap that Mr. Zuckerberg is making money on it. The inflation rate was 1.7% over the year through May, according to the Labor Department. That’s a modest rate by historical standards, but nonetheless, it’s high enough to suggest that the dollars Mr. Zuckerberg owes are losing value faster than his loan is accruing interest.

A one-month adjustable-rate mortgage is a niche product available only to the wealthy, says Greg McBride, a senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com. But one-year ARMs are common enough that rates for them are tracked by mortgage specialist Freddie Mac. The latest rate is 2.69% — safely above the inflation rate.

So how did Mr. Zuckerberg score such a low rate? By posing near-zero credit risk. First Republic currently pays little to attract deposits. It latest published rate for a three-month certificate of deposit is just 0.05%. With funds that it doesn’t use for conventional lending, it can invest with negligible credit risk by buying, say, U.S. Treasury bills. But three-month ones recently paid just 0.06%.

For Treasury-like safety with a much higher return, the bank can instead make a collateralized loan of just under $6 million to someone who is worth nearly $16 billion, which is what it did. Mr. Zuckerberg may be making money on his loan, but so is First Republic, because it can raise money at rates that make 1.05% look lavish.

For homebuyers who would have to pay mortgage rates closer to national averages, ARMs don’t hold much appeal at the moment. Their rates have fallen more slowly of late than those of fixed-rate mortgages. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate recently averaged a record low of 3.56%, down nearly a full percentage point from 4.51% a year ago. That 2.69% rate on a one-year ARM, meanwhile, has fallen by only around one-quarter of a percentage point, from 2.95% a year ago.

Also, ARMs save borrowers less cash than they have in the past. The difference between the one-year ARM rate and the 30-year fixed rate is just 0.87 percentage points. Over the past 20 years, it has averaged 1.61 percentage points.

That’s a minimal savings compared with the added risk of a rise in interest rates from current lows during the next 30 years. The only kind of borrower who doesn’t have to worry about such a thing is one who has enough money to pay his loan in full whenever he pleases. It also helps if he, like Mr. Zuckerberg, can negotiate a rate that is safely below the inflation rate.  Those who are borrowing because they need the money, meanwhile, should stick with fixed rates.

LOS ANGELES — Sales of newly built single-family homes rose last month to their highest level in more than two years, adding to evidence that the U.S. housing market is on the mend and no longer dragging down the broader national recovery.

Real estate helped bring the U.S. out of past recessions as interest rates dropped, home sales increased and construction jobs jumped. But perhaps one of the most significant repercussions of the industry’s collapse has been that housing hasn’t been available to play its traditional role in the recovery.

That appears to be turning. Sales of new single-family houses in May rose 7.6 percent compared with April and 19.8 percent from May 2011, the Commerce Department reported Monday. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales was 369,000 last month, the highest level since April 2010, when a federal tax incentive for buyers that had been juicing the market expired, sending sales and prices into a renewed decline.

“This is the first time I have heard any kind of pulse in the home building business in the last five years, and I think it is legitimate,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist for PNC Financial Services Group. “The housing market will be a source of strength to the economy for the first time in years.”

Last year, new home sales were so weak they set a record for the most dismal performance on the books. Sales have now rebounded 35 percent since hitting a low in February 2011. The widely read economics blog Calculated Risk has argued for months that a recovery in housing is underway.

“It might be hard to believe, but earlier this year there was a debate on whether housing had bottomed,” the blog’s chief author, Bill McBride, wrote Monday, following the release of the new home sales statistics. “That debate is over — clearly new home sales have bottomed — and the debate is now about the strength of the recovery.”

New home sales statistics are often unreliable, and many economists caution about placing too much weight on one month’s report. IHS Global Insight economists Patrick Newport and Michelle Valverde wrote in an analysis that a three-month moving average of new home sales data shows the numbers are “inching up nationally.”

Real estate investment has contributed to economic growth, albeit meagerly, for the past four quarters, according to real gross domestic product data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. With the steady rate of improvement in sales, housing will probably continue to be a moderate boost to the shaky economic recovery, rather than a drag.

Although sales of newly built homes account for only a slice of the overall housing market, economists keep a close watch on them to get a read on consumer sentiment and job creation, particularly in the construction industry.

The new data add another layer to the ongoing debate over the strength of the recovery. Last week, research showed builders breaking ground on fewer homes in May but requesting the most permits in nearly four years. Home-builder confidence is still weak but home prices are turning around. Mortgage rates are at record lows.

Michael D. Larson, a housing and interest rate analyst for Weiss Research, said he was skeptical that recent improvements in housing data would translate into a strong rebound. The turnaround, Larson said, probably reflects low interest rates making housing relatively affordable and increased confidence following the moderate jobs recovery this year. Those steps forward could be easily threatened by another economic downturn or even sluggish growth, he said.

“The question is whether we are going to be able to sustain this,” Larson said. “You have to be a little concerned about the economy.”

The housing market this year has been squeezed by tight supply, helping stabilize prices. The data on new home sales released Monday showed inventory of new homes rising for the first time in more than a year, to 145,000. That works out to about 4.7 months of supply, well below the six months that economists consider a healthy inventory.

The median sales price of new houses also improved last month, up 5.6 percent from the same month last year, to $234,500. That median price was also substantially higher than May’s $182,900 median sales price for previously owned homes, as published by the National Association of Realtors.

“The implication appears to be that Americans are becoming more willing to splash out on the extra cost of a new home,” Paul Diggle, an economist with Capital Economics, wrote in a report.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Christopher Low, chief economist for FTN Financial, said the recovery for new home sales and construction remains isolated to regions where there was no major boom during the go-go years. The suburbs of cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago continue to see little growth.

“We are seeing quite a bit of demand in housing in North Dakota, Montana and Pennsylvania, where thousands of new oil and gas industry jobs have been created,” Low said. “We are seeing demand in part of the old industrial Midwest, in Ohio and Michigan, outside of Detroit, where manufacturing jobs are making a comeback.”

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The buzz around the nation is that the Senate may vote on the economic stimulus bill as early as this evening. The legislation currently includes a clean energy financing initiative, which, according to NPR, “would provide loan guarantees and other measures to encourage the private sector to invest billions of dollars in green energy.”

Some senators are trying to cut funding for clean energy investments from the bill, however. President Obama put more pressure on Congress earlier today to pass the bill, so with time running out, it’s imperative that we speak up in support of clean energy technology, which will stimulate the economy by creating green jobs and reduce global warming in the process.

Use the Senate website to find your senators’ phone numbers, and call them now to encourage them to keep the stimulus green.