ALL PHOENIX REAL ESTATE

We’ll get back to the year in review later but I wanted to get this news out first.

One of the things I love about Diverse Solutions, the company responsible for the software that powers the home search on this and my other half-dozen sites, is they’re about the most responsive group of tech-geeks (said lovingly) that I’ve ever seen. Make a suggestion and they’re almost certain to get to work figuring out how to make it happen.

Of course, that also can be a small challenge when the upgrade everyone seems to request is the same thing I’ve already been doing on my bank owned site for the past year - taking the Phoenix real estate listings as they happen and making them Wordpress friendly (good for you) and indexable by Google (good for us.)

In short, everyone now can do what I’ve already been doing technologically which would concern me if I wasn’t finding myself viewing the technology more as a means to an end rather than the core of the business.

Stop me before I subreference again.

In any event, I built a new website this morning for the Phoenix real estate listings that is nothing but listings - streaming listings, listings by city and, soon, listings by subdivision. And, best of all, there’s little of the guesswork you run into on the listings aggregation sites, wondering if what you see’s really there.

One last twist, assuming the setup went okay. If you want to follow this listings stream on Twitter, you can. Simply follow my listings account at https://twitter.com/allphxre.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you don’t want listings don’t follow. That’s all I’m going to use that account for.

Got questions or suggestions? Let me know.

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Tired of searching the Phoenix real estate listings and finding homes you like only to discover they’re already under contract?

I’m very, very happy to say that with the help of the good folks at Diverse Solutions we have a remedy for you, at least on this and my other websites.

No longer do you have to scroll through a couple of dozen “additional details” to see if the seller already has accepted an offer with contingencies; that information has been moved to the top of the screen:

Hopefully, this change will help with the confusion that often accompanies an existing contingent offer to sell; an accepted contingency offer still is an accepted offer. One of the main contingencies is the status AWC-I, which simply means the seller has accepted an offer and asked their agent to continue soliciting backups. It doesn’t mean it’s a free for all or that the accepted offer isn’t any less valid.

When I discussed this with Diverse, there main issue was integrity in the data. Active needs to mean active (as much as is possible with the local MLS rules on short sales) and consumers need to be able to trust what they see.

If the change means a few less people call, when all they were learning was the home was not really available leading to their inevitable aggravation, I’m good with it.

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At the first of the year I had what I considered to be a brilliant idea: write a post about bank owned homes in a specific neighborhood - in this case Aviano, in Phoenix’s Desert Ridge area - and include a dynamic map of the homes for sale. This post would appear by magic on the search engines and I wouldn’t have to do anything to keep the information updated.

Ah, if not for the change in the bank owned market. You see, those folks who have been visiting this post haven’t been seeing a map of Aviano. Instead, they’ve been seeing a map that will help you find Oceanic Flight 815.

Why? Because there aren’t any bank owned homes for sale in Aviano and haven’t been all that many for quite some time. Presumably some will show up given the volume of short sales in the development, but the subdivision is one of many areas in the Phoenix real estate market where the decrease in bank owned inventory has been most apparent.

As of the moment there are less than 3,000 single family detached bank owned homes for sale in all of Maricopa County, an area larger than several states. That same figure had been over 10,000 less than a year ago.

So what happened? A popular theory is the moratoriums put in place by lenders last fall to tap into stimulus dollars. Which is well and good, except the notices continued to go out on any property that wasn’t owner occupied - in somewhat lesser numbers for a couple of months, but the foreclosures kept on happening.

Another theory is the lenders are hoarding these bank owned homes and not putting them on the market in a timely fashion. This I’m inclined to believe - there are two such homes in my neighborhood where the real estate agents already have turned in their broker price opinions but the homes haven’t appeared in the MLS - but there doesn’t seem to be any widespread conspiracy. Other homes I’ve seen have appeared on the MLS within six weeks of the foreclosure date, a fairly quick turnaround.

Inventory was supposed to rise because of the end of the moratoriums but it has been declining steadily since the first of the year. Recently, the legislature passed a poorly-worded bill that would give lenders the ability to pursue judgments against homeowners who foreclose to recoup the lenders’ losses. It’s been repealed - mercifully - but some have speculated banks were waiting on the sidelines until they saw the results, just in case they could go get a few extra dollars.

Personally, I tend to go back to what we said at Schwab when the stock market was more than a little choppy back in the fall of 2000 (and into the spring of 2001, mockingly) as the tech bubble burst - once we get the presidential election straightened out, the market should stabilize.

Which was another way of saying that we didn’t have the slightest idea what was going to happen. And that’s really where we are in the Phoenix real estate market. Almost all of us expected the so-called second wave of foreclosures; some are still looking for reasons why it has been delayed while others - me included - are starting to think the wave dissipated along the way (maybe somewhere in the vast South Pacific pictured above.)

It was assumed bank owned homes would dominate the market for the foreseeable future but they’re currently giving way to short sales - an unfortunate development if ever there was one. Most of the “active” listings you see aren’t and all of them represent gambles. Will the bank accept a short sale? Will they accept your price? Will they give you any kind of answer before the 2010 mid-term elections?

Who the hell knows …

Maybe the antidote to the ocean map is switching to a map of short sales in these same neighborhoods. Though, given the loose enforcement and massive loopholes in the Arizona Regional MLS rules on short sales, the data’s not all that good.

There’s nothing worse than looking at homes you believe to be active only to learn all you can do is submit a backup offer. Unless, of course, you’re hoping to see a map of Aviano and instead you’re looking at Tahiti.

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One of my clients and I are looking for condominiums in a certain complex in Northeast Phoenix - Parkside. I am using the MLS. She’s using the Internet. Our results have been decidedly different. Care to hazard a guess which one of us has the correct information?

If you’re going to be searching online for homes and are convinced you can do it without the assistance of a real estate agent with access to the MLS, here are a few things you ought to know:

1)  Sold listings never die, they don’t even fade away. Our listings often are being fed to locations we’ve never thought of before. As such, not all agents know all the places they need to go to update their listing information when a home sells. Just because you’re seeing a listing active on a Zillow, Trulia or any other site where the agent and brokerage aren’t necessarily directly inputting the listing doesn’t mean the property’s available.

My client sent me two yesterday - one sold in June, the other sold in July.

2) While looking at dead listings, you’re missing current ones.The search here on this site is pretty good and pretty accurate. Does that mean that all of the listings are here, though? Not necessarily. Brokerages can “opt out” of having their property listings advertised on the Internet, which means they don’t appear on the IDX feed here. Does it make sense for them to do so? Absolutely not, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Not all listings are sent to the large aggregation sites, something not everyone seems to know when they visit the Zillows or Trulias of the world.

Also, the way in which you search can limit what you see. It’s extremely helpful when you know exactly what you want, except for when you’re searching. Generally speaking, the more specific you are with your search the more listings you’ll exclude - including those that should be included but aren’t because the listing agent didn’t click this field or that when they should have.

3) The devil is in the details. One of the changes I hope to see on the platform I have from Diverse Solutions is a more visible message when a home is listed as “Active With Contingencies” since these properties only are technically active. (There are reasons the change hasn’t happened which I understand but still hope to overcome.)

What they can’t do anything about are homes that are listed as Active but aren’t, and the only place to see that is the private REALTOR remarks. Examples are bank owned homes where the bank has verbally accepted an offer but signed paperwork hasn’t been completed, or short sales where the parties have signed the one form that allows the home to remain active after a listing is submitted.

This only addresses the dozens of listings where agents are kind enough to give some sort of warning, as opposed to the hundreds of listings where you’re on your own - these are the short sales you see active for 100 days only to learn they’re nowhere close to active.

Bottom line - do you absolutely have to have an agent when searching for Phoenix real estate? Probably no more so than I had to take my car to the dealership yesterday to replace the valve the helps burn off excess fuel. But I’ll tell ya, the odds for disaster are lower using the services of a professional - and in my case, I don’t cost you anything out of pocket.

Wish that had been the case at the dealership.

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The refrain was familiar … “if I can’t trust what I’m seeing in the MLS, how am I supposed to find a home?” … except this time, it was coming from a consumer and not a real estate agent.

While the Internet has provided an abundance of real estate information for those looking for homes, that information remains incomplete. The result is akin to looking through several layers of lattice at the same time - no matter how much coverage you have, there always are going to be gaps.

That wasn’t today’s issue, however. The caller was frustrated because of all of the short sale listings she had found showing as “active” actually weren’t. Some of this can be due to the quirks of the various IDX services that make it difficult to tell the difference between an Active listings and one Active with Contingencies (essentially, an offer’s accepted and the seller is soliciting backups.)

MLS rules for short sales have kept open loopholes allowing listing agents to keep their homes in “active” status long after an offer has been submitted to the bank. And as best I can tell, enforcement of those simply flaunting the rules has been slow most likely because of the already existing loophole.

(If both buyer and seller sign a Multiple Counter Offer form, the listing agent can keep the offer as active. If the seller doesn’t sign an offer and just sends it to the bank, technically the listing can be kept active though there are some ethical and other considerations for this course of action, as Arizona Regional MLS advises.)

Following the rules doesn’t always mean serving the public’s best interest. And serving the public’s best interest doesn’t always equate to serving an individual sellers’ best interest.

Which is a long way of driving back to a comment received on an ancient Active Rain post that I wrote about the long-deceased Open MLS initiative.

how would an open mls be with out agents? without middlemen? i think it would turn into something like the stock market. there will be less ambiguity with price because there will be one less piece of friction between buyer and seller.

if an agent is needed. i think it would be enough as a consultant. like a lawyer. As we learned from crowndsourcing, the consumer wants to participate. Handholding is a thing of the past .

this is the future of real estate. Open MLS and a free market

Let us count the potential issues …

1) Who is going to police the data to make sure correct information is entered? Don’t look to the various Realtor associations, not if you’re pushing them to the side. Stock markets have regulatory agencies watching what’s happening. Not so the real estate market.

2) Who is going to set a standard set of rules that provide buyers with the assurance that what they’re seeing is accurate, at least in terms of status? (Buyers already are on their own with respect to MLS data - there are disclaimers everywhere that the data’s deemed reliable but not guaranteed.)

3) Who is going to tell a seller who realizes it’s not in their best interest to accept one short sale offer and no more that they have to change their data or be dropped from the MLS?

4) Who is going to compel individual sellers - those not using agents to enter any data in a national MLS anyway?

Some may call what buyers’ agents do these days handholding. Okayfine. But with the ever-increasing wave of partial data, it’s becoming more and more important to have someone who can help you navigate the waters to determine where the reef really is. In that respect, we’re more like harbor pilots than Captain Steubing.

Except when it comes to short sales. There, the rules are such that we’re about as screwed as everybody else. Even the best harbor pilot can’t avoid a gigantic, sucking vortex of concentrated evil like that.

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