Home buyers in Silicon Valley are getting frustrated, discouraged and disheartened as they write offer after offer, only to lose out in multiple bid situations. It’s not just the poor FHA home buyer either – this is happening to those with 20% down and more too.

What can be done to improve the odds of success?

Sometimes the buyer’s agent either does or doesn’t do certain things which can impact how your real estate purchase offer is viewed by the listing agent and seller(s).  Here are 5 important things that the buyer’s Realtor or sales person can do which will help the odds of success:

1. The agent should read the MLS printout carefully to see if there are any instructions regarding offers.  This one may seem obvious. but too many buyer’s agents just draft the offer and send it in, ignoring information that will probably be useful (such as offer deadline, preferred form - CAR or PRDS contracts, availability of disclosures, the request to call before writing the contract etc.).
2. The buyer’s agent should call or email the listing agent before writing the offer (and after reading the MLS!).  Sometimes there are requirements or just preferences that won’t be known unless contact is made.  Additionally, though, the listing agent will simply want to know about the level of interest and not have any surprises – it’s a courtesy call.
3. The agent should ask if it is possible to present the offer in person…and be willing to do it, of course.  Many seller’s agents won’t want a live presentation (most would email), however the fact that your agent is willing to spend the time and make the effort to present in person usually speaks volumes about his or her professionalism. It’s also a hint that the agent is a cut above most.  In my real estate practice, several times I beat out other offers by asking if I could meet with the listing agent and sellers to discuss my clients’ offer, and then doing it.
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The Silicon Valley real estate market is so overheated in many segments (some areas, some pricepoints) that there’s a lot of exhaustion to be found among consumers, Realtors and others involved (inspectors, title company employees, etc.).  Why is that?

• Home buyers in the San Jose area are finding that most of the time, they have to write a few offers before one can get accepted. The rejection is both disappointing and exhausting, and every successive attempt is stressful since most buyers understand that with multiple offer situations, the odds are against them.
• Home sellers in Santa Clara County are finding it a challenge to work like crazy to make their property as close to ideal as possible, only to find that multiple offers either aren’t ideal (or still seem scary, if they are ideal) or perhaps they don’t come at all. Even in a hot market, not every home sells!  Some home owners work so hard at fixing up their house or condo to sell that they somewhat fall in love with it all over again…and that makes it hard to sell. Their pre-sale exhaustion also can make them prone to feeling overwhelmed.
• Real estate agents or licensees are exhausted because there is so much URGENCY that it’s hard to get any down time (let alone a day off). Most real estate licensees  I know are really burned out – or very close to it – due to working 24/7 for the last 2+ months.  (Buyers are very time consuming and may require many many attempts before being successful in getting into contract. Sellers may have worries and find themselves needing a lot of reassurance – even when it’s not really urgent at all.)

Together with the extra stress of the market which changed so fast are a LOT of emotions (as well as mistakes that might not be made if everyone were calmer and better rested).  Buyers grieve when they lose the house.  Sellers worry that they sold too fast, too low, too easily.  Buyers, when successful, worry that they have overpaid (“buyers remorse“).  Agents are burning the candle at both ends and can find themselves a little frazzled too.  Sometimes when our clients have a bad day, they can make it contagious by yelling at us or otherwise being overly difficult because they are stressed. Even agents dealing with other agents can be a headache if the other one is upset, burned out, sloppy or emotional.

Time out!  What most everyone needs (myself included) is a breather.  Everyone needs a little time, a little down time, to feel a bit more human.  Take a day off. Decide not to answer the phone or email before or after set hours.  As for me, I’m going to work on that.  I hate to see email accumulate in my inbox, I feel like I have to address it right away (as if it were a text message about a house burning down).  But being in reactive mode, no matter who we are, is not so good in the long run. When the going gets tough, it’s more important than ever to get enough sleep, exercise (esp time away from the computer) and diversions.  Too much intensity can make for more friction, and in the long run, that is bad for the transaction, bad for our relatinships and even bad for our own personal health.

So in this overheated, stressful market – let’s all try to step back enough so that we can clear our heads a little and keep a semblance of balance. It will make for better real estate transactions in the long run, no matter whether we are buying, selling, or assisting clients as realty professionals in the South Bay.

More reading:

Qualify The Advice You’ll Accept When Buying or Selling a Home in Silicon Valley

Impulsivity and caution in home buying

A Silicon Valley home seller’s joy and buyer’s nightmare, multiple offers are back and exceedingly common in San Jose and nearby areas right now.  It has been true for many months that the most affordable houses in Santa Clara County, especially those under $450,000, are often selling with several purchase contracts on them (about 25% of which are investors, and many of those are “all cash“).  One Sereno Group real estate agent shared that their client was up against a whopping 37 other offers last week for a house in the entry level pricing tier!

What’s new, then? The price points.  Today we are experiencing the same situation in homes between $1 million and $2 million (though fewer offers) and sometimes higher still.  A few days ago I was involved with bids on a Saratoga house priced a little under $2,000,000 and it ended up getting 5 offers.  This wasn’t a turnkey property with a Section 1 pest clearance, but rather a nice house with “good bones” that needed work.

Why are we seeing so many multiple offers, and in such a broad range of pricing, in Silicon Valley?

Feeding the frenzy are the low, rock bottom interest rates (for most real estate consumers in lower or mid range pricing), lower home prices than a year ago – resulting in increased demand – combined with a dire shortage of inventory, or lack of supply. (Some sellers are waiting until later this year, when they think that they can make more from the sale of their home, too.)  If that weren’t enough, we have money pouring into the valley due to the initial public offerings of companies like Zynga in Los Gatos and LinkedIn and Google in Mountain View plus Facebook in Menlo Park.  And don’t forget Apple, in Cupertino, which is now trading at over $500 per share!  Even for companies which are either not yet public or there’s a waiting period for selling stock, there are means of cashing out some value via private exchanges or borrowing on options.  Some tell me that this has been the case for a year! (more…)

If you live near a creek, pond or lake, you may have more trouble with wild life

Recently I was in a Silicon Valley neighborhood forum where someone asked what to do about a mouse (“or something”) in the wall of a house.  For better or worse, I have a fair amount of experience with this both personally and professionally: birds in chimneys, mice and rats in homes (inside plus in the attics, walls, crawlspaces, and heating ducts) and even a bat that got into first an attic and then into the living area itself – that last story goes with the photo from a backyard in Campbell of a townhouse I sold some years ago.

Sometimes this can be a do-it-yourself project but often it’s better if you leave it to the professionals: a good termite & pest control company is normally going to be your best bet for removing rodents and other unwanted visitors and keeping them out.

What happens if you hire someone to get rid of your mouse, rat, bat, bird or other invading animal?

Usually it’s a 3-4 visit process over 3-4 weeks to catch the house guest, then do “exclusion work”, which means finding how it got in and making sure that or any other access points are cut off, then rechecking another time or two to make sure that the problem is taken care of.  (What you do not want to do is get a dead rat or mouse stuck in your wall, so the pros will usually use traps where they can retrieve them rather than poison in the house’s attic or crawl space.)  The cost is often a few hundred dollars for this multi-visit process. (more…)

Some first time home buyers in the San Jose or Silicon Valley area get confused by the “assessed property value” of houses, condos, or townhouses: they mistakenly think that this number has some bearing on the real estate market value.  It doesn’t.  The assessed value is used only for determining the amount of property tax being paid.

Residential real estate in California is reassessed upon transfer of title, or change of ownership, in most cases (there are some exemptions). From there, the assessed value can only go up 2% per year at most (thanks to the passage of Proposition 13 in the 1970s).  When property values decline, as they have recently, owners of properties with higher than market value assessments can appeal and get a temporary rollback in valuation for the purposes of having property taxes lowered.  This is very very common (and even so, the assessed value is usually still off as it’s based loosely on the January values of that year – the values are often higher than market value for these petitioned properties).  The tax assessor’s office has a lot of latitude in determining the assessed values; it is nothing at all like an appraisal, which should use strict comparisons.

Let’s look at a few hypothetical examples, taking tract housing with the same square footage, layout etc:

1 – If a couple purchased a Cambrian Park house in 1960 to 1970 and paid $20,000 for that property, but today’s value is approximately $500,000, the property tax being paid will reflect the long term ownership and won’t be based on the current market value.  That couple might be paying $600 to $800 per year in property taxes with a corresponding “assessed value” of about $52,000. (more…)