One of my favorite folks from Trulia Voices made another appearance the past couple of days. It seems the search for a bank owned property in Verrado has not gone well for Jane. Eight-six single-family detached homes have sold in Verrado, a master-planned community on Buckeye’s eastern edge, but Jane has not yet been able to get a home under contract after several months of trying.
The reason? Not the lowball offers, even as the bank owned market quickly became a sellers’ market with multiple offers. No, the issue here is the listing agents themselves.
EVERY time a foreclosure pops up for sale in this neighborhood, it seems like there are SEVERAL offers already made on the house BEFORE ANYONE else even gets the chance to bid. AND, I’m pretty sure MOST of the one’s that have SOLD that are REO, have been sold to the Listing Agent’s Clients so that the LA can get ALL the commission. I KNOW it’s ILLEGAL AND UNETHICAL, but I’m tellin ya, IT’S HAPPENING HERE, sad as that is.
Checking the Arizona Regional MLS, though, there were 25 sales of bank owned homes in Verrado. Want to know how many homes were sold by the listing agent to his or her own clients?
Three.
Bank owned homes in Verrado are remaining on the market an average of 31 days and are selling within a few thousand dollars of list price on average. Contrast that with a strategy that in the past has involved offering substantially below list price.
For several months I’ve wondered why Jane keeps asking the plebicite advice on how she should purchase a house, even once comparing the philosophy to trying to win a car on The Price is Right. Jane has an agent. I presume she even listens to her agent though it’s never been clear whether the agent’s advice matches that coming from the hoards hoping to pick up a scrap of business by helping the agent be cuckolded.
But she is right … Trulia Voices is a Q&A Forum by design. Agents need only choose not to answer should they realize they’re interfering with another agent’s relationship with his or her client, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, one can sit back and watch folks who presumably have other clients running full comps for someone working with another.
Bank owned homes are a different beast at the moment. I’ve written as much not so long ago when confronted with nine offers on one house in one day.
Still, one Canadian buyer just closed on a bank owned home in Goodyear. Another young couple will be moving into their soon-to-be-former REO property in Tolleson within the next couple of weeks. Another young couple moved into their former REO in April.
There’s no mass conspiracy to only sell bank owned properties to our own clients. Most agents here are so desperate for a sale that they’ll be more than happy with their own side of the commission without greedily lunging like the dog and the bone peering into the stream.
Before casting wild (and thoroughly incorrect) accusations about why a purchase has not been successful, perhaps it would be better to heed Albert Einstein …
“The definition of insanity,” Einstein said, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
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