We owe you some absorption rate figures; they’ll be coming online in the next hour or so. Time has been short of late for reasons I’ve discussed a couple of different times. Part of the time over the past week has been spent with a pair of buyers, who I will call Jane and Stella just for fun.
Stella has been living in an apartment and decided she wanted to get back to living in a house. She found us through our Arrowhead Ranch website and we sat down for about an hour a couple of weeks back to discuss what she wanted in a home. Her absolutes: formal dining and around 2,000 square feet under a set price. About everything else was flexible.
Normally with such wide parameters I would e-mail a couple of dozen homes to a client to get a better feel for what they want. Simply by eliminating homes from the list, I can get a sense of what’s important to the buyer who doesn’t know what’s important to them. The problem was Jane didn’t have e-mail. And so we embarked on a tour of homes last week to get a feel for the market.
Five homes into the tour we found the perfect house - a great floor plan, pink window coverings, tile with a pinkish shade in a great neighborhood at the right price. Escrow opens tomorrow.
Stella was a different situation. She had e-mailed me from Calgary after reading this blog and wanted more information on real estate here in the Valley. At first I said if she was looking in the East Valley I’d find her an agent but after multiple e-mail conversations, I decided to work with her wherever she was searching.
Three trips to Gilbert, East Mesa and Apache Junction later we found a new build with a floor plan close to what she has at home. There were a handful of sticking points, including the price of a certain elevation - the architectural styling of the front of the house - but I was able to get the builder to take an additional $3,000 off the price tag even after all of the standard incentives.
(Still wonder if it pays to bring your own agent to a new build? The answer the first time was no. It was no again the second time. The third time - and the very real threat of a lost sale for the builder - was the charm.)
Stella wrote the contract with the builder this morning at 6 a.m.
Later this week I hope to tell you the story of a third client who wanted a casita close to a community pool in Westbrook Village. I found three within a few hundred feet, all in good condition and all with workable floor plans.
Here’s the point about flexibility … allowing buyers to search the Internet for homes, as some put it, is all well and good. I’m content to allow people to search as much as they want without ever having to register. There’s a group of them I’m sure I never hear from and never will. But that’s fine.
Not everyone has access to e-mail listings, however. For these folks you need to be able to kick it like it’s 1985 and go back to the basics of listening to someone’s needs and helping them find the perfect home. And even those who do search online quickly learn there’s a huge difference between the photos online and the true view of the home.
Some things you can’t learn until you walk into the house and get a feel for the decor, for the condition, for the possibility of deferred maintenance. Often it helps to have an agent who can walk in the front door and immediately known the intricacies of a given floor plan (as my buyers agents and I can do in Westbrook.)
I’m sure I’m borrowing this line at least indirectly from the Tom Clancy novel I’ve been reading but as good as satellite imagery is, it doesn’t compare to the view from the ground.
That’s where you’ll find me.
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Tags: Phoenix Market, General Real Estate, Tips for Buyers by Jonathan Dalton
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