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Jaw-Dropping Pocket Listing
One word: WOW!
Location: Palmetto Bluff, S.C.
Price: $6,250,000
The Skinny: Not yet officially on the market, this classic Lowcountry estate occupies 24 acres within the 20,000-acre resort community of Palmetto Bluff, a newish conservation-minded development between Savannah and Hilton Head. This casual compound, centered around a luxurious-yet-unpretentious 5,200-square-foot main house, includes a three-bedroom guest house and a four-car detached garage. Despite the rural setting there are plenty of amenities integrated into the Palmetto Bluff resort, including an 18-hole Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, four restaurants, a boathouse, a lawn and racquet club, an equestrian center, and the Auberge spa. That desirable combination of first-class amenities and down-home country setting brings high prices, as this estate is asking $6.25M, despite having just two bedrooms in the main house.
Source: Curbed.com
Is Spring really the best time to sell your home?
I’ve been advocating for listing your property for sale during the typical doldrums for years, and occasionally a few brave souls take the plunge. Have a look at this image below and the data used to arrive at the conclusion next time you think it’s best to wait til Spring or Summer.
Why should you list your home right now and not wait until everyone else? It’s simple: Supply and Demand. The buyers are still out there, but the homes for sale are not. So when a good one comes up, it’s like chum in a pool of great whites.
As an example, I was at two open houses Sunday with a client, one at 468 Noe, the other at 442-444 Noe. It looked like a holiday block party, or a daytime Halloween Trick or Treat extravaganza. It was a madhouse! So many buyers…serious buyers…walking in and out of those homes. When I hold my own open houses I usually have to stay at the front door and greet visitors. At these open houses I was able to walk around and hear the conversations. Real conversations about what it will take to “win” it. How will their financing stack up against a potential cash buyer. They could “live with the kitchen”, or “we’re definitely going to remodel”. It’s the same with just about every other good house, priced right, in a good location. San Francisco simply has more buyers than good, quality, property for sale, and so I say again…it’s a great time to sell.
Buyers are out there. Don’t wait until your competition lists their home for sale.
Tis The Season For “Temp-Off-The-Market” Listings
This week and last, I’ve seen countless emails like this from real estate professionals:
” My listing is off MLS for the holidays, but still available.”
” Withdrawn in MLS, but seller wants to sell before Spring!”
” Not back on MLS until January, but actively showing. Motivated Sellers!”
” Off MLS for holidays, but can still show with some notice.”
During the past two weeks, in Marin and San Francisco, almost 100 listings have been withdrawn or temporarily taken off the market- but they aren’t really off the market.
Contrary to popular belief, homes DO sell during the holiday season. Last year, in San Francisco alone, there were over 350 homes sold from November 15th through the end of the year.
So how do you market your listing during the holidays when it’s off MLS and your sellers still expect you to sell their home before Spring? You use PocketListings.net. Why? On Pocketlistings.net any post can be searched, linked to, ranked, Shared, emailed, marketed, and seen by potentially thousands of people around the world. We also feed every post you do to our Twitter page (over 1800 followers) and to our Facebook (over 1600 friends).
Your sellers may go dark for the holiday, but your listing doesn’t have to!
“Hip Pockets”
In Dallas, pocket listings are “hip.”
The vast majority of home sellers who list their homes with an agent put the property in the multiple listing service and stick a sign in the yard. But more and more folks opt to market their property on the down low. Agents in Dallas call them hip-pocket listings.
The number of such off-market home deals has ballooned as the number of properties available has declined in Dallas-area neighborhoods. The trend is especially gaining steam in affluent neighborhoods in North Dallas, Highland Park and Lakewood.
“With the shortage of inventory — especially in the Park Cities — more hip-pockets are selling,” said Amy Detwiler, an agent with Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty. “A lot of people prefer private sales because they don’t want to put their house on the open market.
“It is privacy issue,” says Detwiler, who estimates that 30 percent of the sales in her office are hip-pocket transactions. “Sometimes I put a sign up after the transaction closes, but not before.”So rather than endure legions of weekend lookie-loos and have images of the inside of their properties plastered all over the Internet, these buyers and their agents keep the listing a secret.
Well, sort of. To sell the house, someone has to know about it. “We rely on our Realtor network to get the word out for hip-pocket listings,” said Karen Luter of Allie Beth Allman and Associates. “We have a hot sheet, and they get spread around at Realtor networking groups,” she said.
Luter said some sellers she represents don’t want to go through the entire process of putting their house on the MLS, with photographs and scheduling open houses.
“There is also an unspoken prestige with hip-pocket listings,” she said. She’s marketing another North Dallas property that the owner doesn’t want to list formally right now. If it doesn’t sell, the home might get a traditional listing after the first of the year.
“If they have a great property, they can give it a shot,” she said. “But the property has to be very unique — it has to be best in show.”The scant number of homes on the market in some neighborhoods is the chief reason off-market listings are on the rise, agents and analysts agree.
“It says that market for good listings is getting very tight,” said Steve Murray, founder of Colorado-based residential brokerage consulting firm Real Trends Inc. “This is happening in other markets as well, especially in higher-priced segments.
“This may be the case for some time as prices haven’t recovered enough to bring new supplies of inventory to match the demand from buyer.”
The number of homes for sale in North Texas has dropped about a third since mid-2010. There is only a 4.5-month supply of houses on the market. A six-month supply is considered a balanced market by real estate analysts.
“In a seller’s market, you always have more hip-pocket listings as the market turns around,” said agent Lydia Player of Ebby Halliday Realtors. “And it still only works if you have a realistic price — people aren’t going to overpay.” “We have only a two-month inventory in that neighborhood,” she said. “And the owners don’t want to have a parade of people through their home.
There’s a lot happening that never shows up in the MLS numbers.
Source: DallasNews
The MLS syndication movement continues; large New York brokerage stops syndicating to Trulia & Zillow
In January, a San Diego-based ARG Abbott Realty Group took a very public stance in its decision to immediately stop syndicating listings to third-party websites — including Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com — with Jim Abbott, the company president and managing broker, explaining the decision by his 25-agent firm in a YouTube video.
The company’s action echoes a similar move announced in November ’11 by Edina, Minn.-based Home Services of America subsidiary Edina Realty Inc., a brokerage company with about 2,100 sales associates and 60 offices.
Now, a big New York-based brokerage is the latest to stop syndicating listings to Zillow and Trulia, claiming the sites do a disservice to homebuyers and sellers by serving up stale data, and that their platforms are not worthwhile advertising outlets for the company.
Rochester, N.Y.-based Nothnagle Realtors closed 8,070 transaction sides last year and, by that measure, was the 37th-largest U.S. brokerage, according to rankings compiled by Real Trends Inc.
Nothnagle Realtors President and CEO Armand D’Alfonso said complaints from buyers and sellers about listing inaccuracies on sites like Zillow and Trulia were one of the main reasons the brokerage decided to withhold listings it represents from the portals.
D’Alfonso also said the brokerage doesn’t want “to pay to direct traffic away from our site.” Some third-party sites, including Zillow and Trulia, sell ad space to agents with competing brokerages that appear next to listings that aren’t “claimed” by agents or “enhanced” by the agent or brokerage representing the listing.
A recent study sponsored by technology-focused brokerage Redfin found more than one-third of agent-represented listings on Trulia and Zillow were no longer for sale. The study, published last month, found the sites also lacked data for about one-fifth of properties that were listed for sale in an MLS (Realtor. com, thanks to its ties to the National Association of Realtors, gets listings directly from MLSs, and has not been a target of complaints about listing accuracy).
FULL ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.inman.com/news/2012/11/21/large-new-york-brokerage-pulls-out-zillow-and-trulia
