Today I saw on the state's website that my real estate company is finally registered.

It is GEEK REALTY LLC

To see my website click here

School is out here in Polk and Hillsborough counties.

It is now the holiday weekend.  For the last two years, this weekend has been a slow real estate week for me.  But the next week has been VERY BUSY!

We shall see!!!

On my recent property searching trip to North Carolina, the first place I looked was Realtor.com

Where is the first place you look when searching for real estate?

This weekend we took a couple of days off from real estate and went away.  Today we went to a gemstone mine and my wife and I found a few sapphires and garnets.  We looked at a lot of worthless rocks too.

If you have never panned for gemstones, it is a simple process.  You dump a bunch of what looks like sand, clay and rocks into a pan that is made out of wooden sides and a metal perforated bottom.  You set this in a moving stream and rub the rocks around and wash as much of the silt away as you can.  Then when you have i pretty clean, you place all of the rocks and stones in a little pile and rub them all around.  This forces them to rub against each other and rubs away more sand and silt.  Eventually, every thing that is soft enough to break away gets washed away and if you are lucky, there will be a speck of something shiny or red or rose colored.  Or something transparent or hex shaped.  And if you are really lucky, it will be bigger than a speck.  But, when you see it, you know it is different than all of the junk you have been looking at.

Then you take your "gems" and you put them in a little pill bottle and take them inside for a professional eye to see if you have found anything.  Between my wife and I, we probably took 10 - 20 gems in with us.  Of those, we only had 6 real gemstones.  The rest had names I don't remember and were totally worthless.

Why am I telling this?  The whole experience reminded me of searching for a home.  Sometimes, I will take a buyer to look at quite a few homes.  Naturally I am trying to show homes that I know matches their criteria.  But, many times after seeing a couple of houses and getting my customer's feedback I find out that the criteria I am using needs to be adjusted.  Now the first couple of houses may appear to be worthless rocks, but at least they helped me wash some of the silt away and now I can see the criteria more carefully.  And my customers can see more clearly too.  Now, we just keep looking and washing away more silt, until we have narrowed our criteria to the point that the homes I am showing are now the equivalent of the gemstones in the pill bottle.  My customers then see one that "sparkles" and catches their eyes and their fancy.  Or maybe more than one.  Once I have helped them to decide how much to offer for the house, the offer is made with a contingency for a home inspection by a professional inspector, a contingency for financing and most likely a few others.  My professional help with determining a fair price to offer and all of the hundreds of other details that are involved with an offer along with the help of inspectors, appraisers, mortgage companies, etc... are like the gemologist that looked at the gems we had in our pill bottles and told us which ones were flawed and how.

This analogy may be a contrived a bit, but this is what I was thinking about while rubbing my fingers around in the silt, mud, clay, rocks, stones and gems.  So, if I spent my vacation thinking about real estate, did I really get a vacation?

Currently the market is a little flat in Plant City.  Sellers have finally begun to drop their prices a meaningful amount or taking their houses off the market entirely.

Those that are dropping the price are typically those that have already moved out of the area and are feeling the pain of two mortgages.  Those that are removing their home from the market are those that did not have to sell, just wanted to.

Then there are those with dollar signs in their eyes.  Many of these people still have their home listed at last years prices and if they sell, it will be a miracle.  But, if they keep them listed long enough, maybe the market will catch back up with them.  History indicates that this will happen, the question is "When?".

But with this full blown buyer's market, there are still exceptions.  There was a house I was working with a buyer on and we were thinking he could get it for something less than list, when out of the blue another buyer stepped in and bought it for $182,000 and the house was only listed for $175,000.

One problem with buyers now are that they are afraid that prices are going to go down more and they don't want to buy until they can convince hemselves the deal they are getting is the best they can get.  This is causing them to want to look at more homes and sometimes, like the situation above, by the time they decide to act it is too late.  And maybe too little.

Call volume has been sporadic lately with some weekends going by without a single call.  This is unusual, but is allowing me to catch up on a lot of things I have been putting off. :)

Yesterday, I received a sign call on one of my listings.  The buyer wanted to see a home I have listed in Lakeland.

I asked her if she had been pre-qualified for a mortgage and for how much.  She said yes, for $250,000, but the pre-qualification letter had expired.  I think, great, somebody who can qualify.  So I schedule the showing for this evening and hook her up with a mortgage guy.

Twenty minutes later I receive a phone call from the mortgage company and my buyer has a very low credit score.  They tell me that they don't know who would have pre-qualified her for $250,000.  Her credit problems are long term and deep.

Was she lying?  Did she think I would not check or that the mortgage company would not check?  Why would she want to waste her time, my time and the seller's time?

Do buyers lie?

If you are a buyer, make sure you are honest with your Realtor.  If you tell me up front that you have credit issues, I can counsel you and refer you to a lender who may be able to help.  Or maybe to a credit repair specialist.  But if you start out lying to me, I probably will tell you to find another Realtor, I don't have time to waste.

I had jury duty today and after sitting there all day, I am glad I am not an attorney.

I was on a jury panel, but was not chosen for the trial.

But I digress.  As an attorney you have to sit, cooped up all day in a stuffy court room, where one guy is so special that everytime he enters or leaves the room, everyone stands up.  And if the case is in criminal court, there is another guy who is legally being presumed innocent, but you know in the back of your mind that the police and the state's attorney's office is convinced of his guilt, or no one would be there.  Then there is the family of the accused sitting in the back, with an eye always on the door and the bailiffs.  Makes you wonder if they are afraid of getting arrested too.  You wonder what they have done.

Well, my one day break from real estate is over, since I was not one of the chosen ones!  Tomorrow, BACK TO REAL ESTATE!!!

As a Tampa native (3rd generation Floridian), I have tried almost every sandwich in town.  By far, the best sandwich in Tampa is the Italian Sub at Brocato's Sandwich Shop at 5021 Columbus Drive.

Add a devil crab to your order and you will not be disappointed.  Or if you prefer something sweet, my grandmother (nanny ma) recommends the guava pie.

If you drop in, let Joe and Michael know I sent you.

Many home buyers ask if they should get a home inspection.  Sometimes the buyer (or an uncle or other relative) is a handyman and they feel like it would be a waste to pay someone else to do the inspection.

My advice is that they should always hire a professional, licensed and insured home inspector.  The cost of the inspection will be minimal, in my area less than $300 for an average size home, including a wood boring insect inspection.

I have taken the following points from a National Association of Realtors handout from consumers titled "What Your Home Inspection Should Cover".  After following home inspectors around and watching them crawl under houses, into attics, behind water heaters and other scary places to check the items on this list and others, I think they are well worth their fee.

Siding: Look for dents or buckling

Foundations: Look for cracks or water seepage

Exterior Brick: Look for cracked bricks or mortar pulling away from bricks

Insulation: Look for condition, adequate rating for climate (the higher the R value, the more effective the insulation is)

Doors and Windows: Look for loose or tight fits, condition of locks, condition of weatherstripping

Roof: Look for age, conditions of flashing, pooling water, buckled shingles, or loose gutters and downspouts

Ceilings, walls, and moldings: Look for loose pieces, dry wall that is pulling away.

Porch/Deck: Loose railings or step, rot

Electrical: Look for condition of fuse box/circuit breakers, number of outlets in each room

Plumbing: Look for poor water pressure, banging pipes, rust spots or corrosion that indicate leaks, sufficient insulation

Water Heater: Look for age, size adequate for house, speed of recovery, energy rating.

Furnace/Air Conditioning: Look for age, energy rating. Furnaces are rated by annual fuel utilization efficiency; the higher the rating, the lower your fuel costs. However, other factors such as payback period and other operating costs, such as electricity to operate motors.

Garage: Look for exterior in good repair; condition of floor—cracks, stains, etc.; condition of door mechanism.

Basement: Look for water leakage, musty smell.

Attic: Look for adequate ventilation, water leaks from roof.

Septic Tanks (if applicable): Adequate absorption field capacity for the percolation rate in your area and the size of your family.

Driveways/Sidewalks: Look for cracks, heaving pavement, crumbling near edges, stains.

I read all of the polls from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the Florida Association of Realtors (FAR) and they tell me how I should be finding my customers and how my customers should be finding me.  The problem is that my numbers aren't even close to theirs.  My customers are mostly referrals and sign calls.

If you recently bought or sold, or intend to buy or sell real estate in the near future, please leave me a comment and let me know how you chose your Realtor.  If you are local (Tampa area), I would love to be your Realtor, but I promise I will not contact you if you reply to this post unless you explicitly ask me to.

Is the market finally turning up?

After weeks of the phone being relatively dead, today has brought several calls.  Nothing like the levels of two years ago, but a definite increase.

Then, a couple of hours ago, I was working with a buyer showing a house that has been listed for nearly seven months when I received a phone call from the listing agent telling me that the house we were in is no longer available.  The owner had just accepted a contract.

Maybe we have reached a pivot point.  We'll see what happens this weekend.

We are still in a buyer's market, meaning there are more sellers than there are buyers.

If you are a buyer, there are plenty of good deals out there.

If you are a seller, there are buyers that are buying.  You just need to do something to make your house the one they want.  Unless your house has some outstanding and unique features, the only other item you can change is the price or some form of financing.  This market is tough for sellers and this appears to be the outlook for at least a few more months.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you want to sell your house, you have to be realistic.

You or your realtor can do all of the advertising in the world, but if there is another house just down the street with the same features and it is priced less, it will be hard to sell yours.  Just look at how many people flock to Wal-Mart everyday to save a few pennies.  They will definitely go down the street to save $10,000!

If you are a seller who wants to sell or a buyer who is ready and able to buy, deals are being made everyday.  Are you ready to make a deal?

What are the top three things that make your house special?

I like to ask home owners this question before listing their home.

First of all, it will help me to maybe see things I did not originally see.  After all, if it is special to them, it might be special to others.  This would give me ideas for marketing.

Second, it might give me ideas as to why the current owners seem to have expectations about market value that are unrealistic.  They could be missing some feature that makes their house worth more than they think.  Or, they could be emphasizing items that do not have mass market appeal and in this case they would be pricing their home too high.  Or, worse case scenario, the items may actually detract from the marketability of the home and in this case their expectations are even higher than what the true market price should be.

Third, it helps me help them to find their next home.