A Mel Brooks Moment
Here’s a test of your real estate acumen: your house has sat on the market, unsold, since August. You want to sell it. Do you (a) drop its price; or (b) raise its price by $500,000? If you answered, “b”, congratulations—you have company in town. A homeowner recently did just that, thereby reducing the number of potential buyers by half and convincing me at least that he’s a fruitcake. It reminds me of Cleavon Little pointing a gun to his head and holding himself hostage in Blazing Saddles: “Oh Lordy-lord, he's desperate. Do what he say, do what he say!” What’s the owner going to do when no one buys his house at its present price, threaten to raise it another million?
Let’s (Not) Kill All the Lawyers
Ask almost any agent about the role lawyers play in real estate transactions and they’ll insist that they’re nothing but deal killers. William Raveis, founder of the firm that bears his name, has long campaigned to eliminate lawyers from the process of buying and selling homes, claiming that they do nothing but slow down the deal and, often, derail it. I disagree.
Lawyers and real estate agents play different roles. An agent wants to sell a home, a lawyer wants to protect her client. That means, sometimes, that the lawyer is the one to ask embarrassing, “deal-killing” questions like, “how come there are five bedrooms when the septic field is only sized for three?” Or, “did you know that your neighbor has an easement that allows him to operate a used-car lot in your backyard?” As agents, we hate when that happens.
If I were investing a few million casual dollars in real estate, I’d want some legal advice. I would not be content with a standard form contract, I would not be comfortable with a person untrained in law explaining the provisions of that contract to me. It is true that some lawyers can be overly protective, some can let their egos ruin a deal and some take so long to draw up a contract that the prospect suffers buyer’s remorse and flees to another property. It is also true that most attorneys who work in real estate in this town are not like that. In the dark days when I practiced law, I could usually guess whether a pending deal would go through just by checking the name of the lawyer on the other side. One of the Kaye brothers? We were (almost) certain to close. If it was Humbolt Pinkytwee (and if you think I’d actually name a real, practicing lawyer, you’re nuts), the deal was in trouble before it started. Lawyers draw up contracts, negotiate terms, inspect title, discover open building permits, hold your hand, deal with mortgage contingency extensions and attend to a thousand details you never dreamed of. The good ones hold deals together, rather than cause them to fail. And for all of this work, they are paid very little. Which is just one reason I am now an agent, not a lawyer.
One Midwood Road
Sally Maloney (Sotheby’s) new listing in the Deer Park area off Lake Avenue is a very nice home indeed. Extensively and carefully upgraded (the windows, for instance, were restored rather than replaced, the owners have added a new roof, new wiring, had the chimneys rebuilt, and so forth), it still looks as nice as it must have when it was built in 1920. $5.275 million, if you’re searching for the perfect wedding present.
This One Thing I Know
Grossly over-pricing a house snuffs out bids more effectively than anything else an owner can do. And there are a lot of such houses suddenly coming on the market. We’re on the brink of war, the Dow is busy diving to new lows and yet some people think that they’ll look like chumps six months from now if they let their house go at today’s prices. So they’ve jacked them up to an in-their-dreams level and there, I predict, the houses will sit. The owners will look like chumps, alright, but only because they’ll still be owners. There is nothing wrong with the Greenwich market; houses are selling quickly, when the price is right. But there is no sense of urgency among the buyers I represent, no fear that the market is going to take off and leave them behind. So they aren’t interested in your over-priced house—sorry.
Here’s a test of your real estate acumen: your house has sat on the market, unsold, since August. You want to sell it. Do you (a) drop its price; or (b) raise its price by $500,000? If you answered, “b”, congratulations—you have company in town. A homeowner recently did just that, thereby reducing the number of potential buyers by half and convincing me at least that he’s a fruitcake. It reminds me of Cleavon Little pointing a gun to his head and holding himself hostage in Blazing Saddles: “Oh Lordy-lord, he's desperate. Do what he say, do what he say!” What’s the owner going to do when no one buys his house at its present price, threaten to raise it another million?
Let’s (Not) Kill All the Lawyers
Ask almost any agent about the role lawyers play in real estate transactions and they’ll insist that they’re nothing but deal killers. William Raveis, founder of the firm that bears his name, has long campaigned to eliminate lawyers from the process of buying and selling homes, claiming that they do nothing but slow down the deal and, often, derail it. I disagree.
Lawyers and real estate agents play different roles. An agent wants to sell a home, a lawyer wants to protect her client. That means, sometimes, that the lawyer is the one to ask embarrassing, “deal-killing” questions like, “how come there are five bedrooms when the septic field is only sized for three?” Or, “did you know that your neighbor has an easement that allows him to operate a used-car lot in your backyard?” As agents, we hate when that happens.
If I were investing a few million casual dollars in real estate, I’d want some legal advice. I would not be content with a standard form contract, I would not be comfortable with a person untrained in law explaining the provisions of that contract to me. It is true that some lawyers can be overly protective, some can let their egos ruin a deal and some take so long to draw up a contract that the prospect suffers buyer’s remorse and flees to another property. It is also true that most attorneys who work in real estate in this town are not like that. In the dark days when I practiced law, I could usually guess whether a pending deal would go through just by checking the name of the lawyer on the other side. One of the Kaye brothers? We were (almost) certain to close. If it was Humbolt Pinkytwee (and if you think I’d actually name a real, practicing lawyer, you’re nuts), the deal was in trouble before it started. Lawyers draw up contracts, negotiate terms, inspect title, discover open building permits, hold your hand, deal with mortgage contingency extensions and attend to a thousand details you never dreamed of. The good ones hold deals together, rather than cause them to fail. And for all of this work, they are paid very little. Which is just one reason I am now an agent, not a lawyer.
One Midwood Road
Sally Maloney (Sotheby’s) new listing in the Deer Park area off Lake Avenue is a very nice home indeed. Extensively and carefully upgraded (the windows, for instance, were restored rather than replaced, the owners have added a new roof, new wiring, had the chimneys rebuilt, and so forth), it still looks as nice as it must have when it was built in 1920. $5.275 million, if you’re searching for the perfect wedding present.
This One Thing I Know
Grossly over-pricing a house snuffs out bids more effectively than anything else an owner can do. And there are a lot of such houses suddenly coming on the market. We’re on the brink of war, the Dow is busy diving to new lows and yet some people think that they’ll look like chumps six months from now if they let their house go at today’s prices. So they’ve jacked them up to an in-their-dreams level and there, I predict, the houses will sit. The owners will look like chumps, alright, but only because they’ll still be owners. There is nothing wrong with the Greenwich market; houses are selling quickly, when the price is right. But there is no sense of urgency among the buyers I represent, no fear that the market is going to take off and leave them behind. So they aren’t interested in your over-priced house—sorry.
posted by Chris Fountain at 12:56 PM
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