Selling your Silicon Valley home? The common wisdom is to interview at least 3-4 real estate agents, ideally from as many brokerages,  before selecting one to work with you on the listing, marketing, sale and escrow of your home.  Many Silicon Valley home sellers don’t do that, though – in fact about half hire the first person they speak with – for better or worse.

But let’s say you’re doing your “due diligence”  and have interviewed a few agents.   How do you dismiss the ones you aren’t hiring?  Today I want to present a few thoughts and ideas on this for you, and I’ll keep it brief.

1. On the off-chance that your property doesn’t sell with the agent you are now selecting, you want to keep the door open for future business with the other agents whom  you’re not hiring now.  In other words, if the agent you hire today ends up being a dud, you do want to be on good enough terms that you can go back to one of the agents you’re rejecting today to hire later. So # 1, be polite and friendly with every agent, even the ones you aren’t going to employ.
2. Additionally, many of the agents you are now dismissing may later have a buyer who’s perfect for your home later. So again, be polite and friendly with every agent.
3. Please remember that for Realtors and other real estate professionals, each listing presentation or buyer presentation is really a job interview.  Just as you would be waiting anxiously to hear back if you’re going to be hired for a position, so do they wait for news to learn if they are employed or not!
4. It is important for agents to know what you’ve decided, even if they don’t get the job.  If they’ve done a good job, but you’re selecting someone else anyway, do tell them that you appreciate their hard work but are hiring someone else at this time. Sometimes it is really difficult to choose whom to hire if you meet a few stellar agents.   The worst thing is for them to not hear back from you at all, or led to believe that you’re going to hire them, only to have someone else’s sign show up in the front yard.  Almost every agent I know has had this happen and it’s one of the low points of being in real estate when it does happen.

Agents often spend many hours preparing to meet with potential seller clients, studying the market, pulling comps, and gathering presentation materials as well as listing papers, most likely, in case you want to sign with them when they arrive. (One of the worst things an agent can do is to show up at a listing presentation and not be prepared to sign a listing if the clients want to do so – and that does happen at times!) Whether you decide to hire them or not, it’s best for them – and for you – to communicate nicely and clearly what your decision is.

Related Reading:

What do Silicon Valley Real Estate Agents Do?

Selling Your Home in Silicon Valley

Yesterday Jim and I attended the Los Gatos Creekside Sports Park kickoff celebration (will nearly touch Vasona Lake County Park and is just off of University Avenue) and as we often do, drove east on Blossom Hill Road to get home. Straight ahead of us, hanging over south San Jose and Santa Teresa and extending north, was a huge and darkened cloud. Smoke? Smog? Rainclouds?

We drove up Harwood Road and to the top of Harwood Court to get a better view of it. It did look like it started in south San Jose or further south than that. Some hikers were trekking up the challenging hill and we asked them if they knew if it were a fire. “Can’t smell it,” one replied “so it must be smog – just awful!” Smog, though, tends to dissipate from side to side and not hang together so tightly as what we saw.

View from Harwood Court in Los Gatos of the smokey skies created by the Cal Fire "controlled burn" in south county

We flipped on KLIV, the San Jose based AM radio station (channel 1590) that best covers local news & traffic, and learned right away that it was a controlled burn. This morning I googled the fire and learned that it’s a 2 day burn at part of Henry Coe State Park, overseen by Cal Fire, with more scheduled for today.

The Morgan Hill Times reports that “The prescribed burn is part of the ‘Western Zone Complex’ controlled fire in the remote area of the park. The fire will take place on the Middle Ridge Trail off Hobbs Road, about eight miles northeast of Morgan Hill, according to Calfire fire prevention specialist Chris Morgan. “

Our fall weather here in Silicon Valley is acting like spring weather – bouncing back and forth between warm, dry days and cold, wet ones.  Should this impact the way you present your home to the real estate market if it’s for sale?  Absolutely.

If you want to make the best impression on potential home buyers, your house, townhouse or condo needs to be inviting no matter what the weather may be doing.  In the heat of summer, sellers are tempted to close up all the curtains to keep out the sun and heat – it’s a mistake because buyers typically don’t respond well to dark, cave like homes.  The wet weather brings different challenges that also must be handled appropriately if you are to snag that best buyer!  Here are a few tips to make your listing the one that appeals to Silicon Valley home buyers who come out to see it:

1. Make sure that your downspouts are directing rain water away from your house or any structures (often 6′ or more is suggested); it is imperative that there be no “pooling” of water, especially near the home – this will cause buyers to worry about water in the crawl space and what it may be doing (foundation cracks, mold, etc.)
2. Trim bushes and vegetation back from walkways and sidewalks.  When it’s wet outside, these lovely bunches of greenery collect water and as visitors go past them, they can spill water onto the passers by. Not pleasant.  Look at your sidewalks, driveway, and walkway and make sure that wet bushes and branches won’t be hitting anyone coming up to your front door.
3. If your gutters leak, they’ll be noticed and will indicate that your property hasn’t been properly maintained, so repair or replace them.
4. Indoors, keep the heat on if the temperature would be below the comfortable range – cold buyers don’t linger, and buyers who don’t linger don’t buy! I suggest at least 66-67 degrees. (more…)

Normally I don’t publish press releases, but this one is important – and has some consequences that I think should be mentioned lest weary, distressed home owners think that they are now out of the woods with short sales in California.

First, though, the press release from the California Association of Realtors (a trade group to which I belong).  Afterward, I’ll mention (some of) the negative impact and discuss why I see short sale lawsuits looming on the horizon in Silicon Valley and why this change may add one more reason for litigation.

CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® applauds Gov. Brown on signing SB 458 into law

LOS ANGELES (July 15) – The CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) applauds Gov. Jerry Brown on signing SB 458 (Corbett) into law.   SB 458 extends the protections of SB 931 (2010), to ensure that any lender that agrees to a short sale must accept the agreed upon short sale payment as payment in full of the outstanding balance of all loans. (more…)

The Silicon Valley real esate market is heating up but it’s not heating “evenly”.  Some price points and areas (or school districts) enjoy a hot seller’s market while other segments are lagging.  A big factor in the overall health of the realty market in the San Jose area is the percentage of listings which are distressed properties, meaning short sales and bank owned homes.  Today we’ll see the ratios of these homes to the regular sales using graphs to get a quick visual take on the market trends and statistics.

Today we’ll look at homes listed on the MLS in all of Santa Clara County (including San Jose, Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga etc.) by price point. All of the graphs in this post will reference houses and duet homes combinesd(about 99% houses), not condos or townhomes.

Overall, it looks like about 1/3 of all homes for sale in the county are distressed sales. Next let’s look at this data by price point and then we’ll check it by area.  The images below will be smaller but the colors will represent the same elements in each one (green being regular sales, brick being short sales and light orange being REOs).

(more…)

Who could blame her for wanting to relocate to a warmer climate that’s more like her own natural terrain?  Koko, the amazing and famed Gorilla who resides in the hills over Menlo Park, together with her partner Ndume, have a 70 acre preserve being prepared for them and for the great gorilla study in Maui (the Maui Ape Preserve).

Even though the public cannot visit Koko and Ndume (talk about your “gated community”!), it’s been nice to know that they are around and that wonderful work with inter species communication is going on.  Once our economy recovers from this great recession, the Gorilla Foundation hopes to finish obtaining the funds to make the move possible for these beautiful animals and the work of the foundation.

There are many ways to help (donating of course, but not exclusively that way!) If you’d like to help, please check out the foundation’s website at Koko.org, or use this direct link:
http://www.koko.org/friends/donate_other_ways.koko.html.

Sometimes sellers want to sell their home without the representation of a licensed real estate agent.  But to try to encourage agents to show their home to a buyer, those same sellers might offer a buyer’s agent a commission (often somewhere between 2.5 and 3%, but it varies).  The sellers are surprised when they don’t get a ton of real estate professionals clamoring to see and show their properties.

What’s going on?  Why are licensed real estate sales people sometimes (or often) reluctant to show the home of an “unrepresented seller” (or “for sale by owner” seller)?

There are a couple of reasons why Realtors and other licensees may not be wildly enthusiastic about getting into a transaction with an unrepresented seller.

1. There is more liability for the licensed real estate professional
2. There is the risk of “implied agency“

Sometimes, as you know, transactions don’t go as planned and buyers or sellers are both unhappy at the end and the whole mess may end up in court.  (Knock on wood, this has not happened to me!) If it does, the judge may well look at everyone involved and find that there was one professional real estate person in the bunch.  The liability may shift greatly onto that person – even if he or she was not representing both sides (was not a dual agent) and was not compensated for the responsibility of both sides. (more…)