Real estate General topic

[paulsharvey]

On my way to work, stopped and checked mail. Got a mailed notice of oweing $800 of misfigured taxes on the old house. Was pissed, not so much about the money, which does annoy me, but the fact that I had called 5 times, and left 3 messages, and also sent 2 emails; asking closing company to clarify how they wanted it handled. So, I emailed them Again, and explained that.

After about 30 minutes, they responded, with first, please provide details on dates of those messages because we need to handle an internal problem, and 2nd, now all of the sudden, they would be happy to assist in getting the money to buyer, with receipts and all, if I would deliver a check to their office, payable to the buyer.

So, thats what I did.

 

[ultrarunner]

I’m becoming a little soured on Title Companies…

I am retiring a mortgage and Title Company is Trustee…

In the past these things were all handled at any branch office…

New policy is reconveyence is now only done by reconveyence department and all original documents must be sent… no in person drop off…

 

[ericm979]

Wow the California paperwork for selling a home has become insane. The disclosure documents are huge. About 50 pages of stuff. Lots of boilerplate that's probably good background info for first time buyers but not really needed for us. The state checklist for wildfire related home features was written so poorly that we had to ask the realtor for clarification. A bunch of docs had both state and county versions that we had to read and sign. Of course being nerds who take everything literally we had to read and understand it all.

The worst thing is the offer/counter offer process. I'm used to counters being single page documents that just say what you want changed in the initial contract. Now it's the complete initial contract which you sign and initial again, plus that single page.

 

[ultrarunner]

Yep… buried in paper in the digital age.

My residential rental agreements were a single page with a second page inventory and condition…

Now over 30 pages with all the mandatory disclosures and city and state mandates…

I’m trying to retire a mortgage and the lender can’t come up with the original Note…

Always something…

 

[LouNY]

Ridiculous bureaucratic over reach at it's finest.

 

[WinterDeere]

Ridiculous bureaucratic over reach at it's finest.

... says the guy from NY to the guy from CA.

 

[Mi-Troll]

Generally, all agents are going to get roughly the same % of the sale price, and the difference is speed of sale, both for them making money, and for your decision of who to use.

That's what I considered, dump the house for a quick sale for their commission and bragging rights on the number of homes they sold.

 

[Mi-Troll]

We had issues getting comps, because as our mortage company pointed out, crossing a county line totally changes things. Different taxes, schools, stigmas, ect. Our northern property line Is the county line. They really had to go like 30 mile radius, and like 6 month sales history to gather what we're at best, so-so comps. As in, one home was like 18 years old, some where 5 acres, some 12 acres, one had a perm carport, non had pools, ect. The closer, time, distance, and residence the more reliable the comp is.

With that, any mortage is going to want to see they arent loaning above value, so comps are needed regardless.

Edit: 30 mile radius isnt really accurate; upto 30 miles east, south, and south east, as im in the far north west corner; if it wasnt for that, they likely could have gotten more, and easier comps

A lender will not loan above the value, but where does the value of the property come from when it's time to list the house, from what an agent that thinks your property is worth, from the state's assessed value or would one be best off by paying for an appraisal before contacting an agent?

 

[Mi-Troll]

Have you ever tried looking at your house at Zillow.com

I'm not promoting their assessment tool but it might just give another perspective as I believe it is really only based upon the type of house you have, # of SqFt, age, # of bed/bathrooms,.... Its comparing all this data to other houses in your nearby area that have sold recently.

Now if your house is a post and beam style and there are no other post/beam style houses, Zillow isn't going to work for you. If however you live in a development and generally the houses are similar in age and construction, what's really going to matter is the square footage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, garage size. The next thing that's going to come into play is your interior finishes, did you just spend $80 to renovate your kitchen, your primary bathroom, did you just finish your basement... A realtor is going to be able to customize your house price for those things.

I have looked at Zillow many times and compared the houses on my street which were all built within a year of each other and of similar size with the exception of mine. My house is about 1000 sqft to 1500 sqft larger and is the second largest house on the street, Zillow's listing of the price per square foot is drastically different, about a $70 per square foot delta.

My house is $40 per square floor less than my next-door neighbor's house for near identical looking houses, my garage is larger as well as the number of bedrooms, etc.

I noticed that all of the houses were similar in size but with a delta in price and without Zillow knowing the detailed differences between them, Zillow is using some sort of Min-Max pricing with a mean value for houses on this one street, regardless of the size. I noticed that the one house that is larger than mine, is priced per square foot lower than any other house on the street, putting it at the max value for the street, not by much and twice the size.

Using the average per sq ft value of the other houses would put the one large house at nearly double the price of every house on the street, except mine. In the end, it means that if this person sold their house, the buyer would be getting a great deal, a much larger house with the price based on smaller homes on the street.

 

[WinterDeere]

...where does the value of the property come from when it's time to list the house, from what an agent that thinks your property is worth, from the state's assessed value or would one be best off by paying for an appraisal before contacting an agent?

The value comes from the offer you're willing to accept. You'll see all sorts of asking prices, both too high and too low. But when a buyer comes along with an offer, and the seller accepts the offer, that's the value of the property!

... and because I just know someone is going to ask: When asking price is too low, there are often multiple offers, from which the highest or most attractive becomes the accepted value.

 

[paulsharvey]

The value comes from the offer you're willing to accept. You'll see all sorts of asking prices, both too high and too low. But when a buyer comes along with an offer, and the seller accepts the offer, that's the value of the property!

... and because I just know someone is going to ask: When asking price is too low, there are often multiple offers, from which the highest or most attractive becomes the accepted value.

With that, the method of payment affects which offer is "better" too. I took a $4k hair cut for a cash offer, waiving inspections over a FHA. VA is probably the least attractive from a sellers side. They almost always give a laundry list of "too do" down to screens in windows, touch up paint, and even mismatched outlet covers.

 

[Mi-Troll]

The value comes from the offer you're willing to accept. You'll see all sorts of asking prices, both too high and too low. But when a buyer comes along with an offer, and the seller accepts the offer, that's the value of the property!

... and because I just know someone is going to ask: When asking price is too low, there are often multiple offers, from which the highest or most attractive becomes the accepted value.

That's true, but you didn't mention anything about where to start and that's what I'm trying to understand.

 

[WinterDeere]

That's true, but you didn't mention anything about where to start and that's what I'm trying to understand.

Got it. I've learned from being through the process a few times, that there are realtors at both ends of the spectrum. Some will suggest a starting price that's much higher than any reasonable offer will ever be, either because they just don't know the local market, or because they're willing to wait a long time and adjust the price many times before finally selling the property. Some other realtors will under-price the property, either because their whole business model relies on moving a lot of property very fast, or because they aim to receive multiple offers and generate a bidding war.

Last time I sold a house, I had realtors recommending starting prices over a nearly 2:1 range, so decided to spend an evening or two doing my own comp's using recently sold listings on Zillow and Realtor.com. With just a few hours of work, I came up with a pretty high-confidence price that was in the middle of what all these realtors were recommending, and we listed there. Our final settlement price was pretty much right where my own comp's predicted it would be.

 

[paulsharvey]

So, real estate agents can be fantastic in certain niches and terrible in others. You dont want the guy that sells $750,000 4500 sq ft homes in an HOA, selling your double wide on 2 acres. You also dont want the reverse.

One guy I knew pretty well, (no longer in the business, retired), specialized in cheaper, near town, homes. He basically could tell you, the husband works a semi skilled trade in construction, the wife is in health care, their kids are 6 and 3; just from the house.

So, too a high end specialist, a 3/2 manufactered, they just might low ball as a crappy low end home, and not realize that very well might be a $450k home.

Land... thats the worst; its hard to find people who understand land. Yeah, folks who specialize in Ag can tell you the CSR score on that field, but not the ATV trails, or the buck scores. That guy that can rattle off average buck harvests, likely doesnt know a soy bean from a peanut.

 

[kenmbz]

We have lots in my town sell from 50K/acre to over $300K an acre, land is way too complex.
For houses, we got as many recent sales as we could and tried to pick some that could be compared.
It wasn't easy, but doing your homework is required.
Also what time of year the house goes on the market can have a big impact.
Spring in an areas that sells to families is one that helped us twice.
We had to work well into the night for weeks to prep the house so we did not miss this timeframe. Houses that came on the market a few months after ours sat for quite a while.

We found Zillow to be fine in areas where the houses were all similar, but it varied too widely for us to consider it useful in the sale of our last two houses.
It's good when buying a house to look at history and taxes though.

 

[paulsharvey]

So, our old neighborhood, paved roads, formerly an HOA (dissolved), had a paved air strip, fly in community; and it was a mix of $1.5m homes, some single wide manufactered, many many double wides, 2-5 acre lots; and was always hard to put a finger on the "average". You get something like a 800 sq ft single wide, with a 16,000 sq ft hanger, paved taxi-way to the run way; its hard to price.

Edit: I guess my point is, you would get a agent that knows about airplane people to sell that. Let horse people sell "equestrian" properties, ect. They just understand it more than the average agent.

 

[thclimer]

I have looked at Zillow many times and compared the houses on my street which were all built within a year of each other and of similar size with the exception of mine. My house is about 1000 sqft to 1500 sqft larger and is the second largest house on the street, Zillow's listing of the price per square foot is drastically different, about a $70 per square foot delta.

My house is $40 per square floor less than my next-door neighbor's house for near identical looking houses, my garage is larger as well as the number of bedrooms, etc.

I noticed that all of the houses were similar in size but with a delta in price and without Zillow knowing the detailed differences between them, Zillow is using some sort of Min-Max pricing with a mean value for houses on this one street, regardless of the size. I noticed that the one house that is larger than mine, is priced per square foot lower than any other house on the street, putting it at the max value for the street, not by much and twice the size.

Using the average per sq ft value of the other houses would put the one large house at nearly double the price of every house on the street, except mine. In the end, it means that if this person sold their house, the buyer would be getting a great deal, a much larger house with the price based on smaller homes on the street.

That is really strange.

Have the houses with a higher price/Sq-Ft ever been sold and yours has not? Just wondering if they factor in people doing upgrades just before a sale????

 

[WinterDeere]

Zillow has a great algorithm, I have no doubt it's going to be the most accurate calculation method, but it's limited by the bad data going into it.

I tend to always own older homes that have seen many upgrades, so maybe what I see is worse than most, but the data from which Zillow is pulling on each of my houses is always wildly wrong. I'm talking square footage numbers that are off by almost 2x, wrong number of bathrooms, wrong number of bedrooms, year of construction off by 150+ years...

But this is all the fault of the owners and townships feeding data into the algorithm, not the algorithm itself. I always hope the data listed in comparables listings is better, and at least for new homes I'd bet it is.

 

[riptides]

Zillow has a great algorithm, I have no doubt it's going to be the most accurate calculation method, but it's limited by the bad data going into it.

I tend to always own older homes that have seen many upgrades, so maybe what I see is worse than most, but the data from which Zillow is pulling on each of my houses is always wildly wrong. I'm talking square footage numbers that are off by almost 2x, wrong number of bathrooms, wrong number of bedrooms, year of construction off by 150+ years...

But this is all the fault of the owners and townships feeding data into the algorithm, not the algorithm itself. I always hope the data listed in comparables listings is better, and at least for new homes I'd bet it is.

Agree, same issues with Zillow and data. Even our local tax representatives have issues with our properties in their databases. That data seems to float to Zillow and other applications.

Until, if ever sale time comes, I am not interested in getting it corrected. There is enough data out there to get a good idea of what you are looking at. IMHO, it does not need to be 100 percent accurate on the details. One wonders if people go into deals sight/inspection/look over, unseen.

 

[WinterDeere]

Until, if ever sale time comes, I am not interested in getting it corrected. There is enough data out there to get a good idea of what you are looking at. IMHO, it does not need to be 100 percent accurate on the details. One wonders if people go into deals sight/inspection/look over, unseen.

I went thru the correction process once. Trouble was, it takes so long that by the time all a new "Zestimate" had been calculated, I had already sold the house and moved! If you're thinking about selling, I'd probably start entering corrections at least 6 - 12 months in advance.