No, no Beaker this time.

Here’s an actual excerpt from Thursday’s panel on “Tapping the Global Real Estate Market” at Inman News’ Real Estate Connect in San Francisco. Glad the story was written since I’d forgotten what I said.

RE/MAX Realtor Jonathan Dalton, said that when it comes to the Canadian buyer, there is a limited opportunity because of the weak U.S. dollar. Dalton advises agents to be patient, and to target foreign buyers with their marketing.

“Canadians absolutely love looking at homes and once in a while they’ll buy one, too,” he said. “The key is to have a program in place where they are able to get on a listing search if nothing else, and get them onto your Web site. When they are serious they will come to you.”

When I first was introduced I was the president of RE/MAX Desert Showcase. Fame must be fleeting as I’ve gone back to just being a REALTOR.

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Purchasing real estate in the Phoenix area is a fairly straight-forward proposition, especially from the standpoint of the fees above and beyond the purchase price that are part of the transaction.

For those accustomed to transfer taxes, sales taxes and the like, rejoice … there are no such fees attached to a purchase in the Phoenix real estate market. In fact, the total fees you’re likely to encounter generally hover around 1% of the purchase price if there is no American mortgage involved and around 3% if there is a mortgage.

• Escrow fees - these are the fees paid to the escrow company for coordinating the entire transaction, making sure all the paperwork’s signed correctly and that the deed is recorded.
• Title insurance - the buyers’ title insurance policy insures that you have clear title to a property, even if you really don’t. Case in point - one of my clients once purchased raw land that later was determined to be landlocked. The title company, however, in reviewing the title never said the property was landlocked (why would my buyer have purchased land they couldn’t legally access?) but because the title company had insured the title to the property and insured legal access, it had to purchase the easements to give my client that access.
• HOA and insurance impounds - both the insurance company and the local Homeowners’ Association are going to want to see a couple of months’ worth of payments booked at the time of closing.
• Property taxes - most buyers will see a credit from the seller for taxes because property taxes in Arizona are assessed on January 1 but not collected until October and March 15 in semi-annual payments. But the buyer could be paying the seller if the seller has paid their taxes in full at some point before the close of escrow.
• Loan fees - These can run the gamut from doc fees to origination fees and discount points, depending on your loan.

There also may be small miscellaneous recording fees, but the above are the fees common to nearly all transactions. Also, you can expect to spend another $450 to $500 to hire a professional home inspector and termite inspector to review the property. And another $350 for an appraiser, though an appraiser isn’t mandatory in a cash sale.

One final note - Arizona is a non-attorney state, which is to say attorneys aren’t needed to complete the real estate transaction. Agents write the contracts and the escrow companies take care of the rest.

Got questions? We’ve got answers.

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One of these things is not like the others … one of these things just doesn’t belong.

That Sesame Street ditty easily could have been playing at the start of my panel discussion today at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. “Tapping the Global Real Estate Market” featured a higher-up from Century 21 Canada, another from Immobilie, a third who owns several branch offices in the Bay Area (as well as villas in France, as we later learned) and me … a man whose claim to faim when it comes to global real estate is using “hooped” correctly in a sentence.

In front of a packed audience - packed in more ways than one, actually - we talked about what it takes to make a dent in the global real estate market and how we as agents here in the states can attract buyers from elsewhere.

Given the location, Arizona is a destination for Western Canadians but not much else. Buyers from Eastern Canada and Europe go to the East Coast, buyers from the Far East stop in California. There are exceptions, naturally, but the geographics and demographics hold up fairly well.

One of the agents on the panel said the best way to attract international buyers was to attend personally the major global social events - Wimbledon, Cannes, the Monaco Yacht Festival - somehow she skipped the running of the bulls.

Now call me crazy, but I think a world tour might be financially challenging to say the least. And the commissions generated from any sales you receive are going to be burned mostly on air fare and hotels and not on activities that grow the business further.

Here’s where I was able to shed a ray of hope. Working with buyers from outside the United States doesn’t require a full passport or tons of frequent flier miles. It simply involves knowing the details of the real estate transactions and translating a buyers’ expressed needs in a property into actual bricks and mortar (or stucco and wood, in the vast majority of cases here.)

Like many things in real estate, some believe the best solution is to throw money at whatever you’re trying to accomplish. That’s simply not the case. Yes, it takes money to market listings and yes it takes money to build and sustain a business.

But building a business with Canadian and other foreign buyers at the core? Worry less about the money and more about the service that’s provided and everyone will walk away from the experience happy.

Speaking of happy … being this was my first such conference I was more than a little nervous. I probably owe some links but hopefully they’ll all see this anyway - to Ines and Debbie, Jay and Kris, Lani and Ben, and Missy, Maureen and Teresa, thanks for coming to the session. Surrender seemed the best option as everyone read off their lengthy resumes but the pack of supportive faces in the personally packed audience was a blessing.

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It’s the second most common question I hear, trailing only “why do you use your photo instead of letting Tobey roll solo” - “how much should I offer for this house?”

In truth, there’s no one right answer. If a home already is priced at the lower end of the current market, there may be less flexibility than if it’s priced higher. At the same time, it might be more difficult to get a home seller who has overpriced their home to come down to a reasonable level because they’re often convinced of their property’s inflated value.

Days on market are a less useful indicator than many believe. A high Days on Market count has an equal chance of being indicative of increased motivation (the seller is getting anxious which will lead to desperation) or a lack of motivation (the seller is convinced that “they know what the home is worth”) and isn’t inclined to budge.

What I can tell you is in reviewing my own numbers for this year, my buyers have ended up paying around 95% of sales price on properties ranging from starter homes to near-acre properties in Desert Hills. Add in the seller incentives we’ve been able to negotiate and the net price paid drops to around 94%.

These are the numbers you’re not likely to hear at a cocktail party, though. No one will brag about buying a house for five or six percent below list even if that’s what they really did. What you’ll hear is you shouldn’t offer more than 75 cents on the dollar and that real estate here in Phoenix can be had for pennies on the dollar.

Good stories. Entertaining. But not close to true.

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“How fast can we close?”

There are different answers to that question here in the Phoenix real estate market. From the perspective of the title company, a transaction can be completed in about a week. From a lender, the answer might be three weeks to 30 days. From the standpoint of an agent staring at the AAR Purchase Contract … well …

Cash buyers can close as fast as the title company allows. Still, I usually recommend giving at least a three-week window between offer acceptance and the closing date. This allows for a full 10-day inspection period, plus the five-day windows for the sellers to decide what they are going to fix and for the buyer to decide whether to accept the sellers’ decision on the repairs.

Three weeks also gives the buyer the full five days to review the Sellers Property Disclosure Statement, the title commitment and the CLUE report (the CLUE report details the insurance history of the home for the lesser of five years or the amount of time the seller owned the home.)

Three weeks also gives time for all of the repairs to be completed, so you don’t have a termite treatment and a roofer comingto the house on the closing date hours ahead of an inspector coming for a final walkthrough … not that such a thing happened this morning.

Closings can be accomplished in less than three weeks but unless there’s an incredibly compelling reason to do so, take the 21 days … it moves much faster than you would imagine.

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