Election day is over, the smoke has cleared, and the vast majority of Virginia candidates supported by RPAC came out on top. As the votes continue to roll in, it appears that at least 10 of 12 candidates endorsed by RPAC will be successful in their election campaigns (one appears headed for a recount). The successful RPAC supported candidates are:

U.S. House of Representatives

• Rep. Rick Boucher
• Rep. Eric Cantor
• Rep.-elect Gerry Connolly
• Rep. Randy Forbes
• Rep. Bob Goodlatte
• Rep. Jim Moran
• Rep. Bobby Scott
• Rep. Rob Wittman
• Rep. Frank Wolf

U.S. Senate

• Senator-elect Mark Warner

Thank you for supporting the candidates who support your business!

When it comes time to buy some piece of computer gadgetry (which, for me, could be any day ending in a Y), I love Newegg.com. It’s not just the price and selection; it’s the user reviews. When I went shopping for a new motherboard and processor, the choices were well-nigh overwhelming. Looking at Newegg’s list of bestsellers and reading all the reviews, though, narrowed it down quickly.

Ditto for Amazon — I especially love the “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” feature. I try to add my two cents when I can, but I have to admit that it’s much more fun to post a negative review. “Does a fine job trimming my weeds” isn’t nearly as satisfying to write as “Caved in half my backyard and felled two small trees — DO NOT BUY.”

Of course, that’s fine and dandy for me (and others who appreciate my sense of humor), but not for the maker of the product. Snarky comments are probably not appreciated.

In the Days of Yore™, this topic wouldn’t apply to real estate. Sure, you’d get some unkind comments and low bids from potential buyers, but you weren’t going to see “I wouldn’t let my dog sleep in those ugly bedrooms” or “Arson would be a good start for this awful house.”

But the times, they have a-changed.

Whether it’s on home-listing or -comment sites (e.g., Zillow.com) or on a Realtor’s blog, this age of comments means that the voice of The People will be heard. And often The People are way, way off key.

All this is to say that, if you’re not thrilled with the idea of the teeming millions weighing in on your home or listing, you’re not alone. The Wall Street Journal just had a piece on the very subject, “Housing Blogs Throw Stones.” A couple of quotes:

The skewering of fancy properties can be wicked fun — unless you’re the owner. One day this month, neuroradiologist Luis Fernandez was taken aback to see his four-story, 4,100-square-foot Brooklyn home, listed for sale at $2.5 million, on Brownstoner.com. The blog razzed Dr. Fernandez’s home, calling it “McMansion chic” and predicting price reductions.

and

The surge in verbal abuse doesn’t seem to be damaging the housing-blog business. Curbed.com, which has sites for New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, has seen its unique-visitor numbers climb to a million a month from 400,000 a month last year. Traffic has doubled on Brownstoner.com in the past year and spiked 11% in the first two weeks of October, compared to the month prior. At SocketSite.com comments are up about 25% over the past three months alone.

Oh, and I note that, unlike many other papers, the WSJ doesn’t allow readers to comment on its stories.

We’ve gotten used to the press’s doom and gloom mentality when it comes to the housing market. We, of course, are glass-half-full kinds of people; we want people to see the upside in home-sales figures. But good news doesn’t often sell as many papers or get as many viewers as bad.

So we braced ourselves for how the third-quarter numbers were going to be perceived and reported on. And we were pleasantly surprised.

We got a cover story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “Richmond-area home sales rise,” in which Carol Hazard wrote

After nearly a year of sluggish sales and price depreciation, the housing market in Virginia is beginning to show signs of strength, said Lisa Fowler from the George Mason University School of Public Policy, who spoke yesterday during a news media conference call.

She even quoted a Realtor from the area:

“The market in the Richmond area is stabilizing, said John Powell, an agent with Long & Foster in Colonial Heights. ‘We still have a lot of homes to choose from. We still need to see price reductions to increase sales.’”

And Bill Freehling at the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star wrote (in “Increase in home sales raises recovery hopes”)

“A trend of higher sales and lower prices in the Northern Virginia housing market has Realtors hopeful that the market will return to a more normal state by spring,”

We even got some national coverage:

“The assumption that the wave of foreclosures is going to keep driving prices down is wrong,” wrote John Berry on Bloomburg.com. “The big jump in sales suggests that prices may have hit bottom already in some areas. There are even tales of multiple offers on foreclosed properties, with buyers paying more than the asking price.”

There was some negative press, to be sure — “Housing sales take a dive” was the headline in the Williamsburg Daily Press — but by and large this was a good quarter and we got good coverage out of it.

You can read the whole report right here, and you can listen to or download the MP3 of the conference call with the media by clicking the link at the top of this page.

…are more problematic than others.

With the stock market plunging , I thought it would be appropriate to repost (with modification) an article that I first wrote back in March 2008.  It is even more applicable today.

One of my martial arts instructors sent me the following quote a while back:

“Fear is your friend, panic is your enemy. Fear will help you get to your goal faster.  Panic will either shut you down or send you down an inappropriate course of action for the situation.  Unfortunately ‘fear’ has a bad rap.  It has been confused with panic in many self-defense programs, and the resulting goal is to train for ‘no fear’, this is a mistake! Fear is a motivational message.  Even under frightening conditions, a person with enough experience and the proper training can act and accomplish complex processes.“

There’s a lot of fear out there right now among homebuyers, homesellers, and people sitting on the fence deciding what to do in the current real estate market. Some REALTORS are panicking too.  It is not a time for panic.  It’s a time for REALTORS to learn all they can, digest and analyze that information, and present it in a calm and counseling way to their clients.  Mortgage meltdown, liquidity crisis, Bear Stearns collapse, emergency interest rate drops, foreclosures, short sales, media reports, stock market roller coaster, Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, AIG, Fannie/Freddie, $700 Billion bailout — all these things weigh on the psyche of those pondering the real estate market.

Don’t let your fear turn into panic! Fear is healthy.  It forces you to get educated.  Fear motivates you to find knowledgeable advisors, trusted friends, and to avoid scary situations like walking down a dark alley alone.  Fear puts you on guard and may entice you to learn a new skill.  Fear prevents you from doing stupid things.

We do live in a sometimes scary world. My wife Deborah motivated, encouraged, begged and pleaded with me to learn martial arts to increase our combined confidence when walking down the streets.  Almost 3 years of study has made me aware of my environment, confident that I can protect both of us should any compromising situation arise.  We are both more secure because I have diligently studied martial arts (in my case Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu).  Recently, I even got Deborah to sign up and she now attends martial arts with me.

Fear prevents panic.  Fear prevents irrational thought and actions.  As the quote cautions, don’t confuse fear with panic.

Explain to your clients that it is not necessary to go it alone when navigating the sometimes scary and confusing complex world of real estate. Real estate contracts in Virginia are legal documents with 20 or more pages of small and detailed legal wording.  Buying or selling a home requires knowledge of a whole new vocabulary of jargon — from appraisals and ARMs to warranties, zoning ordinances, and everything in between.

Your clients work full-time jobs.  They don’t need the added job of struggling on their own to buy or sell a home and learn about the market.  THAT’S OUR JOB! To prevent panic, we need to get out their and do our jobs.

Don’t let fear turn into panic for you or your clients.  Protect yourself.  Now’s the time for REALTORS to really enter the ring and prove their worth with calm & cool reasoning and analysis.

Next time you see me, remember to ask, and I’ll even show you how to throw a mean right hook.

Ask any kid with an allowance: If you want the toy, you need to have the money to pay for it.

In the case of the government, if you don’t have the tax revenue you can’t provide the services.

Looking at a $2.5 billion shortfall over the next two years, Virginia won’t be able to buy all the toys it wants. Unfortunately, budget cuts are a bit more important than not getting the SpongeBob SquarePants Boating School playset.

Governor Kaine announced his “Revenue Reforecast and Budget Plan” for 2009 and 2010, which reduces spending, as they say, across the board: It includes 567 layoffs and cutting General Fund spending by $222.3 million in 2009. (And yes, the Governor is taking a salary cut as well.)

The full plan — called, ominously, “FinalPlan” — is 63 pages long. As a service to you, though, we’ve separated the pages that affect housing. Specifically, two pages of cuts being made at the Department of Housing and Community Development.

Some samples: $1.1 million cut from the Virginia Enterprise Zone Program … $50,000 from the Virginia Enterprise Initiative grant program … code-compliance inspector hiring delayed … four staff persons laid off ….

You get the idea.

So next time your car falls into a pothole, or the customer service rep behind the counter at the DMV is a little less friendly, breathe in, smile and think of all the taxes you’re saving.

When I worked in retail in college (a period in my life that various psychiatric professionals have tried to help me erase), we were always warned about the “secret shopper” — someone hired by the company who would act like a troublesome customer in order to grade our performance.

But there are other kinds of secret shoppers, too. They’re checking for discrimination, and they say they’ve found it in Virginia.

The folks at Housing Opportunities Made Equal conducted a “fair housing audit”; they sent people with “similar profiles” (age, income, marital status) to the same rental homes and documented the treatment they received.

In two-thirds of the visits — 66 percent — HOME says that white testers were offered lower rent, lower security deposits, lower fees, and shown other available units. Black testers were more likely to be asked for identification to view units, and white testers were more likely to receive follow-up calls. (To be fair, in six percent of tests, black testers got favorable treatment.)

HOME doesn’t say how many of these property managers were REALTORS® — I’d like to think the number is somewhere between zero and, well, zero. Heck, in this day and age you’d think that anyone acting in a professional capacity (that is, not Joe Schmoe renting his house) would at least know the law even if they don’t have the ethical backbone to do what’s right anyway.

There’s more in the HOME report, too. Despite the federal Fair Housing Act requiring that multi-family housing units be accessible to people with disabilities, it found that 88 percent didn’t meet those accessibility requirements — mailboxes and trash facilities weren’t accessible, there weren’t curb cuts for wheelchairs, kitchens were too small, and so on.

There may be some people who roll their eyes at required ethics and fair housing training — how hard is it to know not to offer the white guy a better price than the black guy? But some people, clearly, have a lot to learn.

I was reading Time magazine this weekend and stumbled across an article on ‘communal homeowners’, which they dubbed ‘Co-ho’s’.  Basically, a communal homeowner, co-ho, is someone who buys a home with friends.  The story profiled several different pairs of homeowners who bought with friends; all were in their 20s and were looking to maximize the size and quality of home they could purchase by pooling their resources with a friend.

For singles who might be stretching it to afford a one bedroom condo if they purchased alone, co-ho’ing it allowed for more square footage: one pair bought a row house in Baltimore, another bought a house in Columbus, Ohio.  They typically split the mortgage, utilities, tax break, cost of upkeep, etc, with some sort of long term agreement in place of how and when the home should be sold.

I’m interested to hear if anyone has seen this happening in our local market (Baltimore certainly isn’t that far from Virginia) and whether it was a successful situation.  I’ve helped family members (brothers) purchase a home together before, but never worked with a pair of friends investing together. I can see the benefits of pooling resources to jump into the homeownership pool, but I’d be cautious of the downside: combining finances, on some level, with a friend, can potentially lead to a strained relationship and problems if things don’t go according to plan.

Has anyone worked with buyers in a situation like this? How has it worked out? Should we look to encourage this type of purchase with the 20somethings on our contact lists?

Cheers,

Heather Elias

One of the best explanations of the whole subprime/credit crisis we’re watching now comes from a segment of NPR’s This American Life. It’s a beautiful bit of reporting, going into enough detail to make you say, “Ahhhhh!” without overburdening you with too much financial detail.

Even better, it’s available as a very readable transcript.

There are problems. Individual mortgages are too big a hassle for the global pool of
money. They don’t wanna get mixed up with actual people and their catastrophic
health problems or debilitating divorces, and all the reasons which might stop them
from paying their mortgages.

So what Mike and his peers on Wall Street did, was to figure out how to give the
global pool of money all the benefits of a mortgage – basically higher yield - without
the hassle or the risk.

So picture the whole chain. You have Clarence. He gets a mortgage from a broker.
The broker sells the mortgage to a small bank, the small bank sells the mortgage to
a guy like Mike at a big investment firm on Wall Street.

Then Mike takes a few thousand mortgages he’s bought this way, he puts them in
one big pile. Now he’s got thousands of mortgage checks coming to him every
month. It’s a huge monthly stream of money, which is expected to come in for the
next thirty years, the life of a mortgage.

And he then sells shares of that monthly income to investors. Those shares are
called mortgage backed securities. And the 70 trillion dollar global pool of money
loved them.

You can download it here. Highly recommended.

Jay Thompson posted this on Agent Genius last month.  I finally had a chance to watch this in its entirety - what an impressive look at the change in how we store, process and refine information.