Category: Real Estate

Brokerages Should Allow Agents to Enter or Change Their Listings on the MLS

At Golden Real Estate, each agent (under my supervision) enters and updates their own listings on the MLS. I believe that helps to promote accuracy.

But many brokerages block their agents from accessing their own listings, sometimes resulting in incomplete or inaccurate data. One would hope that agents in those brokerages check to see how their listings were entered and tell their admins when mistakes have been made or data omitted, but there’s no way to know that.

Did you know that in addition to the “public remarks” for listings, there is a place to enter a description of every room in the house?

Very few listings — under 50% by my count — include a description of any rooms, and some listings don’t even list rooms other than bedrooms and bathrooms.

Dimensions can be entered for each room, too (rounded to the nearest foot), but I find very few listings with that information either. Our office policy is to enter room dimensions and descriptions for every room in every listing.

Brokerages which require all agent listings to be entered by their unlicensed administrative staff are less likely to have these non-mandatory fields entered. If they would make each agent responsible for such data entry and then monitor their work as we do, I believe that buyers would have much more useful and accurate information for each listing. Other non-mandatory fields in the MLS include the following:

> Is the property owner-occupied, tenant-occupied, or vacant?

> What is the zoning?

> What direction does the home face?

> How close are bus stops and light rail stations?

> Is it in an incorporated or unincorporated area?

> What are the dimensions and features of the garage/carport/RV parking?

> What appliances are in the house?

> What kinds of flooring is there?

> Does the home have any fireplaces, and where are they?

> If there’s an HOA, what are the fees and what do those fees cover?

Our office policy is not only to complete every field on our company’s MLS listings, but to share our MLS data entry in draft form with the seller before making the listing live on the MLS, which also helps to assure accuracy and completeness of our listings.

Bidding Wars Are Slowing — for Higher Priced Homes

This is my regular update on the real estate bidding wars. This week I chose to analyze the closings that occurred last Thursday, July 22nd, to see how the bidding wars have evolved over the past few weeks. As before, the source for this monthly analysis is REcolorado.com.

As I did in previous months, I limited my analysis to sales within a 15-mile radius of downtown Denver. I limited my search to listings that were active on our MLS at least one day and not more than 6 days before going under contract. Those are the homes that likely had bidding wars.

On July 22nd there were 36 closings up to $500,000, compared to 55 closings on June 28th. The median home sold for 6.3% over its asking price, compared to 5.4% on June 28th. The highest ratio this time was 18.5% for a home in SW Denver, compared to 20.8% on June 28th for a townhome in Littleton. Three listings sold for the asking price, and three sold for less than listing price, compared to four and six respectively on June 28th.

There were 48 homes that closed on July 22nd for more than $500,000, compared to 53 homes on June 28th. The median home in that group sold for 3.2% over its listing price, compared to 8.7% on June 28th. Only six sold for the listing price, and six sold for less than the listing price. The highest overbid in this group was 18% for a home north of Denver’s City Park, compared to 32% on June 28th.

To have a statistically significant number of closings over $1 million, I analyzed the 87 such closings that occurred from July 12 to 26. The median closing for those high-end homes was 5.4% over listing price, compared to 6.6% from late June. Nine homes sold for the listing price and 8 homes sold for less than the listing price, compared to 12 and 6 respectively in late June. The highest overbid was 24.8% for a bungalow in the Hilltop neighborhood, which was listed at $950,000 and sold in three days for $1,186,000. Of those 87 homes, 24 were listed under $1 million. Last month four million-dollar homes sold for more than 30% over their listing price.

Can We Say Goodbye to Agents Claiming to Be ‘5280 Five-Star Professionals’?

For years I have complained about colleagues who claimed that 5280 Magazine had honored them as “Five Star Professionals” when in fact the magazine had nothing to do with the honor.

Rather, Five Star Professionals is a Minnesota company which runs the program by that name and would purchase a large block of pages in the September issue of 5280 Magazine every year to promote the “winners” of that award.

Each year I am notified of my “nomination” to be named a Five Star Professional, and one time I responded to see how their program operates. It’s basically a scheme to get agents to buy, among other things, large display ads at inflated prices within that large block of advertising within 5280 Magazine’s September edition. What bothered me the most was that both 5280 Magazine and Five Star Professional looked the other way when the “winners” would then promote themselves as “5280 Magazine Five Star Professionals” for years to come.

I won’t dispute Five Star Professionals vetting process here (although I have in the past), but I welcome the fact that their advertising may no longer appear in 5280 Magazine and that “winners” can no longer mislead clients and colleagues by implying that the magazine awarded them the Five Star Professional citation.

I only realized this change when I saw Five Star Professional’s block of advertising in last Saturday’s real estate section of the Denver Post. My question now is whether the “winners” will now claim to be “Denver Post Five Star Professionals.”

Searching my email inbox just now, I found several emails with phrases such as the following in some agents’ email signatures: “Recipient of 5280’s ‘Five Star Real Estate Professional’ Award 2019 & 2020!”; and “5280 Magazine Five Star Professional Ten Year Award Winner.”

Most recipients of this “award” are also Realtors, meaning they are bound by the Realtor Code of Ethics, which they are violating when they represent that 5280 Magazine gave them an award that it has nothing to do with.

In my email, I also found a 2017 email from Five Star Professional, offering me, as an awardee, a 1/9th-page display ad in 5280 Magazine for $1,250.  A 1/4-page ad was available for $2,095.

One red flag in Five Star Professional’s program of identifying nominees and awardees was that they would never disclose, even to me, who nominated me. Instead, I got an email which said, “One or more of the clients you work hard to serve every day has nominated you for the Five Star Real Estate Agent Award.”

I consider the whole program suspect and just another example of profiteering on real estate agents who are easy targets for such promotional programs. 

Xcel Energy Is Penalizing Small Businesses Which Offer Workplace Charging

Golden Real Estate is justly proud — if I say so myself — of having a Net Zero Energy office, meaning that our solar photovoltaic panels produce all the electricity needed to heat, cool and power our office as well as to the charge the five Teslas owned by our agents and me and offering free EV charging to the general public. (We have four EV charging stations at our office — two for our own use and two for the public.)

Meanwhile, Xcel Energy boasts that it is moving in the direction of 100% renewable energy and facilitating the adoption of electric vehicles. A big part of that is promoting “workplace charging.”

Xcel is right to promote workplace charging over, say, charging stations at retail stores, because cars are parked for up to 8 hours at one’s workplace — long enough to fully charge almost any EV using a standard Level 2 (240V) charging station.

So why is Xcel Energy penalizing small companies like Golden Real Estate which have already installed workplace charging stations for EVs?

As stated above, we generate all the electricity needed at our office on South Golden Road. Until this March, our monthly Xcel bill was under $11 every month — the cost of being connected to Xcel’s electric grid.

But now our Xcel bill is over $300 per month, even though we are still generating all the electricity we use. How can that be?  It’s because one day in March we drew over 30,000 watts of energy during a single 15-minute period, converting us automatically from standard “commercial” service to “demand” service. That means that in addition to the charges for electricity consumption, we are now charged for the highest amount of electricity that we draw during each month.

So our electric bill at Golden Real Estate is now over $300 per month regardless of the amount of actual electricity we consume during any particular month. To put it in numbers, we are charged about $15 per kilowatt for peak demand, and our monthly maximum draw of power is usually about 20 kilowatts.  Thus, we are charged $300 each month even though our net consumption of electricity is zero!

The only way we could draw over 25 kW of electricity at a given time is because we are charging cars at all four charging stations, something Xcel says they want to encourage.

When I communicated my dilemma to Xcel Energy, the response was to tell me that they’re introducing a new EV charging tariff later this summer. Unfortunately, the tariff requires that Xcel install the charging stations and offers nothing to those of us who were early adopters and already have charging stations in place.

Under Xcel’s proposed EV tariff, my penalty would drop to a little over $100 per month. But that’s still a $100 penalty.

The logical solution would be for Xcel to modify its commercial tariff to make the demand threshold 50 or 75 kW instead of 25 kW for forcing small businesses like us into their demand tariffs.

Now some good news.

I made these same arguments during public comments at a May 13th virtual hearing before an administrative law judge (ALJ) adjudicating an Xcel Energy rate case. This Monday, that ALJ published his ruling and cited my own testimony in ordering Xcel to increase its demand threshold to 50 kW.

I had made the same argument a couple years ago during public comments at a regular PUC meeting, but I got no satisfaction at that time, so I wasn’t expecting to be more successful this time, but I was.

Ironically, I had already written this column with no clue that the ruling was about to be handed down. Indeed, this column was uploaded to three Jeffco weekly newspapers Monday morning without this news.

The ALJ’s ruling has a few more steps before it is finalized.  Parties to the case can make final pleas and seek Commission reconsideration, akin to last ditch arguments, but I’m hopeful that my Xcel bill will return to $10.26/month soon.

Are More Contracts Falling Because of Bidding Wars?

A contract on one of my listings fell on inspection last week, but the buyer would not say why and would not release the inspection report. Meanwhile, the inspector had met the seller during the inspection and expressed shock when told that the contract was terminated. The logical conclusion was that the contract fell due to buyer’s remorse, i.e., a change of mind about buying the home.

The buyer and their agent could have simply stated that, because it’s a perfectly valid reason for terminating under the inspection contingency. It practically says as much in the contract itself. (By the way, the home quickly went under contract again with a new buyer.)

The seller asked me how common buyer’s remorse terminations are, given the way buyers are being rushed into making purchase decisions (at inflated prices) due to bidding wars.

So I did some research and found that contracts are not falling at a statistically significant higher rate than they did, say, two years ago during the same week.

Here are the specifics from my   research on REcolorado.com:

Of the 100 highest priced closings in early July that were on the market 1 to 20 days, 8% had a contract fall before a successful closing. During the same time period in 2019, 7% listings had a fallen contract before their successful closing.

Of the 100 lowest priced closings in early July that were on the MLS 1 to 20 days, 15% had a contract fall, compared to the same time period in 2019, when 16% had a contract fall before a successful closing.

It was a reasonable theory, but not true.

Every Industry Is Facing Disruption of Some Kind. How About Real Estate?

I just finished reading a white paper by the founder of Dotloop (part of Zillow Group) with the catchy title, “The End of the Traditional Real Estate Brokerage.”

The premise of the document is that unless a brokerage adopts that company’s “end-to-end collaborative platform,” it is destined to fail.  Hmm…. Is my successful brokerage, Golden Real Estate, destined to fail?

Basically, the argument is that mobile and digital technology is disrupting every industry and is also disrupting real estate.

“Disrupting,” however, implies winners and losers. I prefer to say that technology is revolutionizing real estate (as indeed every industry), but I see no end to Golden  Real Estate as a small, some say “boutique,” brokerage.

In my two decades as a Realtor (i.e., a member of the National Association of Realtors, not merely a licensed real estate professional), I have seen major transformation of the technologies, tools and software made available to brokers.

When I first got my license and joined the West Office of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Lakewood, we wrote our contracts on 3-ply NCR forms created for each of the many documents required in a real estate transaction. We used typewriters to complete them, or pressed firm with ballpoint pens.

Nowadays, virtually every agent uses on-line contracts. In our market, CTM eContracts is dominant in providing these contracts, and the integration of documents by agents on both sides of every transaction is impressive and… revolutionary. We love it!

Occasionally I will received a contract from an out-of-area agent, as I did just last week on one of my listings, that is not on CTM and uses a third-party e-signature program, DocuSign, for signing each document. (CTM has e-signature capability built into it, and it works great.)

Showing service technology has also evolved beautifully. The near-universal vendor in our market is ShowingTime, and it’s great how they have simplified the process of setting multiple showings, with well-timed route planning and management of feedback requests.

REcolorado, the Denver MLS, is introducing a replacement showing service called BrokerBay, which will have some further enhancements (and be included in our MLS fees), but it will have to be spectacular to be better than ShowingTime.

The MLS itself has been radically improved in the quarter century since it became web-based, and, as with their showing service proposal, continues to do the heavy lifting for us brokerages so that we have only the task of learning new ways of operating.

Despite these changes, I don’t think the in-person model of working with buyers and sellers is up for displacement, merely rapid and ongoing improvement.

An Update on the Ongoing Bidding Wars

This is my regular update on the real estate bidding wars. I was planning to do this analysis next week, but I’ve observed a definite slowing of the market, so I moved my report to this week, analyzing the closings that occurred last Thursday, July 1st, to see how the bidding wars have evolved since my last report. To my surprise, this analysis shows only a slight slowing, likely because those listings went under contract 30-45 days earlier.

As I did in previous months, I limited my analysis to sales within a 15-mile radius of downtown Denver. I limited my search to homes, condos and townhouses that were on the MLS at least one day but not more than 6 days before going under contract, since those are the homes with bidding wars. Once again I divided the results into listings which sold for up to $500,000 and those that sold for more.

On July 1st there were 33 closings up to $500,000, compared to 40 such closings on June 10th. The median home sold for 5.9% over its asking price, compared to 6.3% on June 10th. The highest ratio this time was 20% for a bungalow in Aurora compared to 19.6% on June 10th for a condo in Golden. Four listings sold for the asking price, and three sold for less than listing price, compared to none on June 10th.

There were 44 homes that closed on July 1st for more than $500,000, compared to 37 homes on June 10th. The median home in that group sold for 7.4% over its listing price, compared to 7.7% on June 10th. Only one sold for the listing price, and not one home sold for less than the listing price. The highest overbid was 29.7% for a contemporary 1969 home on Lookout Mountain, compared to 20.9% on June 10th.

To have a statistically significant number of closings over $1 million, I analyzed the 123 closings between June 16th and July 1st. The median closing for those high-end homes was 5.7% over listing price, compared to 6.1% from June 1-13. Fifteen homes sold for the listing price and 9 homes sold for less than the listing price. The highest overbid was for a 1985 home in “The Ridge” south of downtown Littleton which was listed at $900,000 and sold in five days for $1,200,000, 33.3% over listing price.  

Note: 27 of the 123 homes that sold for over $1 million were listed for under $1 million.

Winning a Bidding War Is Harder Than Ever for Buyers

It is a lot harder working for buyers these days. You’d be hard pressed to find a buyer’s agent who hasn’t lost more bidding wars than he has won for his clients. I don’t mind admitting that has certainly been true for me.

Last Sunday, however, I had a big success. My buyer fell in love with a patio home that backed to her alma mater, a Jeffco high school. Like her, the seller was a single woman, so maybe there was some sympathy there — I wouldn’t know.

It’s not accepted nowadays to present “love letters” from buyers, because they could lead to a fair housing violation, but it is okay to say things in a cover message with the contract written by me, not the buyer, so I made a point of saying that my buyer was an alum of that high school and relished buying this house. I don’t know if that helped either, but it didn’t hurt and it didn’t constitute a fair housing violation.

What did help was that I learned from the listing agent that while the seller was moving out of state, she was going to move her furniture to a friend’s house in the greater metro area. We have a moving truck which we make available to our buyers and sellers, but we can also offer it free to another agent’s client if it will help us win a bidding war. That did the trick for my buyer in this situation, and it also saved her several thousand dollars. Here is how and why.

In our offer we added an “additional provision” that Golden Real Estate (not my buyer) would provide totally free moving of the seller’s furniture anywhere in the Front Range, using our own moving truck and personnel, moving boxes and packing material.

Then, instead of a typical “escalation clause” offering to beat any competing offer by one or two thousand dollars (or more), I wrote that “buyer requests the opportunity to match any competing offer in order to retain for the seller the above mentioned totally free moving benefit.”

It worked. We were told the dollar amount of the best competing offer and were allowed to match, not beat, it. My buyer is now happily under contract for her dream home.

Any agent could make the same offer on behalf of his or her buyer, paying for the cost of moving. It’s just that we have the economy of having our own truck and moving personnel.

Since I’m often on the listing side of a bidding war, I have seen other strategies used by agents hoping to win a bidding war for their clients. A common one is to make a quick first offer that is substantially over the asking price but with an early acceptance deadline, hoping to get it under contract before anyone else can submit. This can pose a dilemma for the listing agent when his strategy, like ours, is to wait four days so that every possible buyer gets a change to compete.

Agreeing to accept an early offer like that should be the seller’s decision, however, not mine. Yes I gave my word that we would not sell the home in less than four days, but now I modify that promise by saying that, “in the event the seller wants to accept a particularly attractive early offer, we will give sufficient notice to every agent who has set a showing so that they can accelerate their showing and offering schedule.” We don’t want any buyer or their agent to be blindsided. As we like to say, “the only way a buyer will lose out is if he or she drops out.”

Abuse of Lockbox Access Is Serious But Rare

Access to listed properties has changed significantly over time. Long before I became a real estate broker, an agent wanting to show a listed property might have to go to the listing office to sign out the keys and bring them back after the showing. That approach would certainly not work in today’s market where 10 or more showings might be scheduled in a single day.

Then we saw the introduction of lockboxes, usually with alphabetic dials, like those padlocks on high school lockers. When I first confronted one of those lockboxes as a new agent, I had forgotten which way to turn first, and I took way too long to open the lockbox. It was quite embarrassing. They don’t teach that skill in real estate school!

Lockboxes with numeric push buttons are more common now, and they are my favorite for two reasons. First, you can open them in the dark, since you remember where each button is located. Second, no one will know what the code is by looking at it after you open it. Lockboxes with dials allow a buyer to look at the lockbox after it is open and memorize the code for unauthorized use later on.

Agents should never allow their buyers to know the lockbox code, nor should they give it to another agent, inspector or vendor without approval from the listing agent. Writing the code on a listing sheet or other paper which could be seen by the buyer is a no-no.  I record the code for individual showings on my iPhone where only I can see it.  If I’m showing several listings, I print out the agent instruction sheet for me, giving my client a version which does not have the lockbox codes.

Abuse of lockbox or other access is a serious matter that can subject a broker to suspension or loss of his/her license.

Electronic lockboxes are struggling to gain acceptance in our market, although they are quite common in other markets. These boxes will only open for agents when they are allowed access, preventing them from returning on another day or at another time without additional permission. Codes are unique for each showing agent, allowing listing agents and their sellers to know exactly when each agent came and left.

The main reason electronic lockboxes have not caught on here is that abuse of the mechanical lockboxes has been quite rare. We have insurance to protect our sellers from losses related to unauthorized access, but in two decades as a listing agent, I have never filed a claim, just as I have never had a loss sustained during an open house.

Don’t Fall for ‘Title Lock’ Services. They Are a Waste of Money and Don’t Provide Much Protection.

Perhaps you have seen advertisements or received a solicitation to purchase “title lock” service. A reader asked me to find out if it was a scam, so I asked my friends at First Integrity Title to check it out. Here’s what I learned.

The premise of the service is that the company monitors your public property information. It is supposed to alert you to changes to your home title (similar to credit monitoring) but is not as helpful or as necessary.

The truth is that it really isn’t as easy to steal your home’s title as they claim. Also, this is a monitoring service only. There is no “insurance” or help if your title is found to have changed, although Home Title Lock’s website does claim to provide a million dollars towards legal fees and costs to defend title from one of these scams. Doing so wouldn’t be terribly risky for the company, since the fraud is so rare and so easy to repair legally.

The reason a scammer would pretend to own your home is to take out a loan against it, pocket the money and disappear. The best target for such fraud would be a home that is owned free and clear. Any lender would require the purchase of title insurance, so if the scammer were successful in fooling a title company to insure that loan, it would be the title company at risk, not you.

Jerry Spaeth, a lawyer and the CEO of First Integrity Title, reported that in 22 years of doing title work, he has never seen a case where someone has been able to “steal” tile and then take out a loan, as they claim. And for only $15 a month, which such services typically charge, it would be difficult to be anything more than a monitoring service. 

It is difficult to find out how many such frauds have been committed, because they would be lumped together statistically with wire fraud and identity theft. 

The likelihood of needing this service is greater if you have several properties that you own, or if you own your home free and clear — and if you are elderly. The victim might not be able to receive the letters from the new mortgage company that a payment is late.

Again, you aren’t going to be getting support from most title lock services. They are just letting you know if something has taken place.

The title policy you received when you purchased your home does not provide protection for a fraud incident after the purchase of the policy. You can, however, monitor your property on assessment websites to verify that you are still the rightful owner.  Every year you should be receiving valuation and tax notices from your county assessor and treasurer. If you don’t get such notices, contact the county to find out why.

If you have a credit monitoring service, as Rita and I do, you would be notified if a new loan is taken out in your name, and a no-cost “credit freeze” with the three credit bureaus would stymie anyone seeking to obtain credit in your name. 

In conclusion, title lock service is not necessarily a scam, but it is questionable how useful the service is if there is little or no protection that comes with it.

Remember that Google is your friend. I found some useful information by Googling “title lock protection,” including a September 2020 piece from Fox 5 Atlanta calling title lock service a “Waste of Your Money.”