It’s that time of year again! Don’t forget to move your clocks back 1 hour on Saturday night for the autumn time change (fall back, spring forward) to daylight savings time. And, while you are at it, change the batteries in your smoke detectors (and carbon monoxide detectors, if they rely on batteries).

As always, if I can be of service to you in any way, please do not hesitate to let me know. It would be my privilege to assist with any of your real estate needs.

How long does it take to buy a home in Silicon Valley?  There are really two questions within that one: first, how much time will be required before you’re ready to choose a home to purchase (or how many homes will you need to see), and then how much time is involved in getting the transaction closed.

Prior to this housing crisis, the national average used to be seeing fewer than 10 homes in order to make a decision.  The number of homes now visited (and the time) has been rising, though.  According to the California Association of Realtors, “On average, home buyers spent 8.4 weeks considering buying a home in 2009, compared with 7.2 weeks in 2008. Buyers spent an average of 10.3 weeks searching for a home with their REALTOR®, compared with 8.7 weeks in 2008.”

Often my clients need to see between 10 and 20 homes before they feel like they know the market and the choices well enough to select a home they want to write an offer on.  Depending on how broad of an area they’re considering, and how much of a hurry they’re in, this varies from couple of weeks or less – or a couple of years!  Clients relocating to the San Jose area often want to settle in.  If they’ve owned homes before, they may have a perfect idea of what will and won’t work for them.  Once I sold a Los Gatos house to a couple before the wife ever saw the property!  They moved every couple of years, the husband knew his wife’s requirements perfectly and they had no trouble being expedient. 
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If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably know a lot of real estate agents (most of whom are Realtors).   Some of them may have left the industry in the last few years since it’s gotten a lot harder to earn a living in this business. 

For those like me who are still successful and committed to selling Silicon Valley homes, work weeks tend to be long (usually at least 6 days), busy and hard.  The general public sometimes thinks that real estate agents just hold open homes on the weekend and do nothing more.  That’s not the case, at least not for successful agents!    Today I wanted to share with my readers how my time is typically spent.  Each day, week and month is unique, but this will give you the general idea of how my work usually breaks down by time committment per month (the numbers reflect estimated hours per month).

By far the biggest identifiable part of my time is emailing with my current clients: answering emails, researching or answering their questions, looking homes up on the MLS for them, providing insights on pricing or comps, commenting on inspections, etc. Most days it’s much more than 2 hours if a buyer or seller is about to write or receive an offer.  By the end of an escrow, it’s not uncommon for me to have several hundred emails going back and forth in the file.
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