THE END OF JULY

I was tempted to add "but not life as we know it" to the title but held back. The news has seemingly been uniformly bad for all things real estate but maybe if we burrow around a bit there may be a bright spot. First the local statistics. Chico MLS reported single family homes sold for July; 54, down from 83 year ago, or 65% of year ago. Not good at all, and especially measured against the 563 homes listed for sale. Paradise/Magalia had 37 sales, same as year ago figures, from an inventory of 417 homes. Glenn County, 10 sales this year, 11 last year, but inventory a whopping 183 for that small population area. So much for local. Nationally home sales are down, inventories are up, and prices are dropping in most markets, not precipitously, but dropping. The stock market was thrashed last week, based on the inability of some major corporate players to place some large/huge bond issues at favorable rates. Or at any rates in some cases. This is a reaction of the money markets to the beatings being taken in the high risk hedge funds, related to the mortgage debacle, which is continuing and not likely to soon go away. Once again let me offer the link which is a pretty good window into the mortgage scene.
http://ml-implode.com/ . Pay some attention to the American Home Mortgage Investment Corp., number 10 lender in the country, and not a sub-prime lender. We used them from time to time, locally they were doing business as American Brokers Conduit, and were OK to deal with. The tragedy of these collapses is not written in headlines anywhere, but picture if you can the number of individuals who were expecting their loans to fund and their purchases to be completed in the approximately $700 million in reneged deals in the last two days. Sellers who may have already moved, buyers who maybe have no place to go. Tragic.
The bright spot. Both of our offices are seeing great phone traffic, writing listings, writing offers, busy, busy agents. Our web site traffic is up and pretty consistent. I hope this is true for other offices as well, but I frankly don't concern myself much with the other guys. We're happy.
A note about our trade that may be amusing. As a group we're commission people, generally gullible and a little naive as sales people can be, so we get a lot of advice from self ordained gurus trying to sell us ways of improving our performance and incomes, and etc. One such email that comes to me regularly from the Broker Agent News had an article written by someone who was offering advice on how an agent could sell more of the agent's listings. It was advised that this guru had come up with a technique for "triangulating" the prospective home listing for value, determining the fair market value, and then listing the property for ten percent below that value. He reports that he was successful in generating many offers with this technique. Wonders will never cease. Selling ten dollar bills for nine bucks should work pretty well in any kind of market. These publications also carry lots of advice on how agents should justify their high commissions to prospective clients. I've heard a lot of the justifications, never one that was satisfying, but the salesman who can sell a 6% fee should have no trouble persuading a client to take a 10% bath on his house.
As usual,
Thanks for visiting.