Be the one who is truly the first to know about new listings

All the good deals include foreclosure transactions were/are closely related to the right timing. Learn from portals + informed by agent + build your confidence on market will lead you to buy the best home successfully. First is first, be the one who is truly the first to know about new listings.

I inform clients about new listings before portals post about the new listings. Portals show new listings later than agent’s MLS system posting: you need agent who inform you better. Inform means not only give the address or pictures or neighborhood profile or approximate mortgage payment for the house but also disclose the true facts and all the insider’s information and action plan for the transaction.  We agreed that we are in the real estate era of Zillow+ real estate portals. Over 75% of my past clients used Zillow and a few percent of clients liked to use Trulia or realtor.com. Almost of all clients have made questions regarding the portals at some point while they were in the home buying process. Those questions were including accuracy of information such as sales history, sell by owner listings on the sites and zestimate on Zillow. The answer was and is, data on portals can’t be 100% accurate.  

Today I’d like to share some of the examples to help you to understand why you should be the one who is the first to know. Additionally, I will explain miscellaneous and also will tell you how important your confidence is in your process for your successful buying.

1] Timing

Getting to know about new listings fast is very important regardless market conditions. In a depressed market, you want to win your bidding before other buyers make offers for the foreclosure or the depressed house you were interested in. In a hot market, you also want to win a nice home before other buyer’s offers.

If you’ve never been in any housing markets, you may don’t get this idea clearly. But, please keep in mind that time and timing is a key to make your home buying successful. In reality, we sometimes are waiting and waiting and finally can find a house worth buying. Then we don’t want to let the house go to another buyer. (Even if you don’t want to buy a home at a competitive market, the timing is still an important element to buy a competitive home.)   

Timing episode) In a hot market, home prices are normally soaring. In that hot market, my buyer family was looking for a house with Finished basement. We narrowed down things for a laundry list of home features they wanted and was waiting for the perfect home about a month. During the time the buyer could visit many houses on market and got informed properly. Of course I was delivering information of new listings in real-time. Finally, one house hit the market with fairly low price, yes priced too right. Not only the price but also features were decent. We viewed the house on the first day of the listing and wrote an offer at the same day. It’s possible because the buyer understood the market fully. But, the house was extremely popular and the seller announced ‘multiple offer’ situation and wanted to stop receiving offers by the very next day of the listing date. Really? yes, it happens. We changed the offer price $5,000 higher and closed the deal. I know some of you are wondering, is that a successful buying? Yes. The price was about $20,000 below the market price and the house value is continuously getting higher.

Once you view house in an early manner , you can have enough time to consider things before writing an offer: If the buyer in above situation visited the house on the second day of the listing, the buyer had not enough time to think about price. Or what If the buyer wanted to visit the house on the third day of the listing, the buyer could not get into the house to look at because the time limit for the offer was already ended. Do you think is it an unique situation? No, every transaction is different, but all transactions were/are ruled by timing. To meet a right timing, utilize portals plus viewing actual houses with me enough hours.

2] Confidence

Confidence for your offer price? confidence for areas? confidence for a specific neighborhood? confidence for your gut feeling? Yes, confidence (and relationship) is everything in this game.

Knowing data is helpful for your confidence but, data can’t be 100% accurate. People input data like characteristics of home on systems. People make mistakes. Portals suggest price based on MLS data + each of the counties records. If any of the source data was wrong, the estimation can’t be correct. Which means zestimate can’t be always right. Reviewing data from agent and looking up the data on portals at the same time is helpful  for studying market. Try to stay away from the wrong information that leads you to get false perceptions. Then try to build your confidence more and trust your own judgement. I can help you to be confident on house values and the buying processes.

Confidence episode) Many of my buyers made good decisions with their full of confidence. Below is one of those episodes of my past client. We found two of the houses fit for her criteria. Before we visited the houses she preferred to buy one house which has higher zestimate. When we finished the viewing, she was confused. Because the house at lower zestimate was way better than the higher one. Every details were considered and she knew the lower zestimated home was the right home for her. how about that higher rated home? wrong data made the house’s number higher (You will be surprised by too many wrong data on market). She bought the house she actually liked. Was that a right decision? Yes, the house she chose was indeed a better house. It has larger space, open layout, spacious bathrooms and has more upgrades.

3] Miscellaneous

Famous portals such as Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com provide free data to consumers but earn money from agents. That is their way of making money. Sometimes the mechanism creates wrong postings on those portals. Some other portals sell only foreclosure or fix-upper. One of those is outstanding in sales volume. The firm marked top sales volume in consecutive years. During about 4,5 years they make big money from buyers or sellers. Their strategy is not providing full service to buyer(or seller) , so buyer(or seller)'s agent do more job when doing a transaction with the firm. Literally they don't have their own traditional agents. They invest money to create more online brands and heavily put advertisements for the brands rather than providing improved services. ( I closed deals with the company So I know why the company gets complaints a lot.) You may not be pleased by their poor customer service, but they sell lower priced fix-upper. So, if you are interested in foreclosures or fix-upper, you may consider to try buying those fix-upper houses on portals.

Again, all the good deals include foreclosure transactions were/are closely related to the right timing. Like I described above, learn from portals + informed by agent + build your confidence on market will lead you to buy the best home successfully. First is first, be the one who is truly the first to know about new listings.

If you have any questions about local market conditions, financing or anything that can help you with in your search for real estate, feel free to contact me at 404-519-6611