5 Signs It’s Time to Break Up With Your Real Estate Agent

If your agent goes MIA, it's on to the next one.

Working with a real estate agent is similar to a romantic relationship: the introduction, a whirlwind courtship, followed by a commitment. My dear agent, “I do” promise to work with you to search for and buy my beloved new home.

That initial flurry of activity turns into hanging out on the weekends, exploring home after home. The rush of a new project as you work together toward a common goal can bond your partnership even further.

But what happens if the rosy glow disappears from your cheeks and there’s no longer a real estate skip in your step? How do you know when it’s time to think about changing real estate agents? Here are five signs that it might be time to say “it’s not you, it’s me” to your real estate agent.

Missing in action

Whether it’s a personal or business relationship, we all know when we’re getting the brushoff. Text messages aren’t returned quickly. Phone calls get sent to voicemail — and then returned by your agent’s assistant. Your emails seem to disappear down a dark hole, and your request to see a new home on the market is begrudgingly met three days later.

In a cold market, this behavior is simply unacceptable. But when it’s a scorching hot market? Forget it. You’re never going to land your dream home with an agent who treats your business relationship this way. You’ve been sidelined, and it’s time to move on.

High-pressure sales tactics

Rather than a new home, you begin to feel as though you’re shopping for a used car on a discount lot. Each conversation leaves you shaky with anxiety, fearing that every other decent house in the city (and in your price range) is currently under contract and this is your only shot to lock one down.

Regardless of how hot the market is, interactions with your agent should not leave you feeling anxious. Sure, it’s their job to convey accurate market information, but in an honest and straightforward manner.

They’re not listening

You’ve communicated your deal-breaker list to your agent and they consistently show you homes without several of your coveted features. You’re tired of explaining that a second bathroom is not a luxury — it’s essential for your sanity.

When you feel as if you’re wasting time spending Saturday and Sunday afternoons touring homes with an agent who is so clearly missing the mark, it might be time to move on. But before you break the news to your agent, consider asking if there aren’t any homes with your required features in your price range — a problem with an entirely different fix.

They stand you up

After leaving work early and rushing to your agent’s office to sign paperwork, you find their assistant armed with a calendar for an appointment reschedule. Having other clients and commitments is perfectly acceptable, but failing to communicate in advance is not. Their time is not more important than yours.

With that said, life does sometimes get in the way of a carefully planned schedule. If this is an isolated incident, treat it accordingly — if not, you may need to make some changes.

They make decisions for you

You’ve submitted an offer and your agent neglects to ask if you would agree to a longer closing date. Instead, they take it upon themselves to reply for you — and the sellers went with another offer. Regardless of previous conversations, your agent should discuss all contracts and offer details with you in a timely fashion. Full representation does not mean making decisions on your behalf.

As in a romantic relationship, it can be easy to convince yourself you’re overreacting to circumstances by sweeping things under the carpet. Remember, this is an important business relationship and should be given priority. If you’ve communicated openly with your agent and you’re not 100% satisfied, then move on and find an agent who not only meets your needs but also exceeds them.

Source: Time.com,
http://time.com/money/4017994/break-up-with-real-estate-agent/?xid=gonewsedit

Why You Need to Learn More About Feng Shui

The ancient design philosophy of feng shui is gaining more traction in real estate as the number of Chinese home buyers are taking a bigger liking to U.S. real estate.

Eighty-six percent of Chinese Americans believe feng shui will play a role in a future home buying decision, according to a newly released survey of 500 Chinese-American home buyers, conducted by Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, in conjunction with the Asian Real Estate Association of America. What’s more, 79 percent of respondents said they’d pay more for a home that follows feng shui principles — an average of 16 percent more to boot.

Seventy-five percent of respondents said deal breakers for them, which follow feng shui principles, would be a home being located at the end of a dead-end street, having the stairs directly facing the front door, and if the front and back doors are aligned.

Chinese buyers spent a whopping $28.6 billion on U.S. residential real estate from April 2014 to March 2015, according to the National Association of REALTORS®. That is prompting more real estate professionals to take notice of what feng shui is all about and what could be driving some of this growing number of buyers’ interests.

Peruse this infographic from Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate to learn more about feng shui.

Source: Realtor Magazine, Melissa Dittmann Tracey
http://styledstagedsold.blogs.realtor.org/2015/08/31/why-you-need-to-learn-more-about-feng-shui/?om_rid=AAFmZk&om_mid=_BV51HCB9FL7BXz&om_ntype=RMODaily

Five home improvement projects to give you the most return on investments

Not all home improvement projects will give you the best return on investment. Here are 5 that will give you the most money.

New home for Bay 101: Demolition to start by end of year on future cardroom site

The Bay 101 Club is an iconic Silicon Valley casino that is clearly visible from the 101 freeway. Local residences have been going there for years to satisfy their gambling addiction and now the City of San Jose gave approval for the owners to relocate the business across the freeway to an area where a hotel now sits. The new card club will be a casino and hotel and in the site of the old Bay 101, it will get torn down and new housing will get put up in its place.

With city planning approvals in hand, owners of San Jose’s Bay 101 card club aren’t wasting any time prepping for construction of a new casino and hotel complex valued at up to $100 million.

Sometime in November, wrecking balls will make make short work of the sprawling, 512-room San Jose Airport Garden Hotel — a 56-year-old landmark on North First Street that Bay 101’s owners bought in 2013. In its place: a roughly 70,000-square-foot card room and seven story, 174-room hotel.

“I think it will do that corner proud,” said Brian Bumb, whose family owns Bay 101. “The first two things that are going there will really enhance the area.”

The new project comes as Bay 101 faces a 2017 lease expiration at its current home at 1801 Bering Drive, a short distance from the new development site. That location is destined to be redeveloped as part of a planned office campus from development firm Peery Arrillaga. The city granted planning permits for the new Bay 101 project earlier this month, said Erik Schoennauer, a development consultant who is working with Bay 101. I first reported on the project two years ago.

The new Bay 101, slated for completion in the fall of 2017, will still have the same number of card tables as the old one (49), but Bumb said: “It’ll be a little different layout and a little more spread out. We are going to try to do a high-end restaurant and capitalize on everything that’s happening on in the North First Street area.”

Bumb said no agreement with a hotel brand has been reached, but said that a deal should be finalized by next May, when construction begins to go vertical. A second approved hotel, which would rise 10 stories and include 150 rooms, would come later. He estimated the total price tag for the first phase at $90 million to $100 million.

The project could eventually also include an office building of up to 250,000 square feet and 12 stories, which would also be built in a later phase, Bumb said.

First things first, though. The San Jose Airport Garden Hotel will close Nov. 7, and then Bumb said he has about 10 days “to get everything out of there: 500 beds, 500 refrigerators, headboards, end tables. There’s just a lot of stuff.” Bumb is working with Habitat for Humanity to try to donate some of the furniture. Demolition should start in earnest in December.

Barry Swenson Builder is the general contractor for the project and Kenneth Rodrigues & Partners Inc. is doing the design.

Bay 101 is one of two major cardrooms in San Jose. The other is Casino M8trix, which opened a glitzy new facility down the street from the new Bay 101 site in 2012.

The cardrooms have not always been popular with San Jose politicians, and attempts to increase the number of card tables have failed. Bay 101 was looking at moving to Milpitas last year, but that plan died when when a Milpitas citizens' group successfully campaigned against a Milpitas ballot measure that would have helped pave the way.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Nathan Donato-Weinstein
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/09/09/new-home-for-bay-101-demolition-to-start-by-end-of.html

What are Investors Purchasing?

Anti California Sentiment popping up in Portland area real estate

California has one of the highest real estate markets in the country and because of that, some home owners here are selling their homes and taking that money to buy a much lower cost home out of state with still some money left over. In Portland Oregon, locals there have grown resentful of outsiders, particularly people from California, with more money than common sense who are using their money to outbid other buyers and effectively pricing them out of the market. In fact they have even gone so far as to slap a No California sticker on housing For Sale signs in the area.

I guess they don't want us California folks to do to them what was done to us by foreign buyers from India and China.



'No California' stickers appear on real estate signs across Portland

As Stocks Fall, Real Estate May Be the Best Defense

Pencils ready? Here’s today’s investment pop quiz.

Which asset class has performed as well as bonds during U.S. equity bear markets of the past 60 years?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is residential real estate. During the Great Recession, of course, the real estate market collapsed along with stocks. But residential real estate’s performance during the 2007-2009 bear market was anomalous, according to data from Yale University’s Robert Shiller, winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in economics and the co-creator of the Case-Shiller Home-Price Index.

In 14 of the 15 previous U.S. equity bear markets, going back to 1956, the home-price index rose. And in that lone bear market prior to 2007 in which home prices did fall, they did so by just 0.4%.

Besides bonds, no other asset class comes close to this good a track record during bear markets.

Residential real estate’s ability to hedge equity bear markets is of more than just historical curiosity, of course. The stock market recently experienced a full-scale correction, and it’s possible that we are already in a new bear market. And even if we’re not, a 20% or greater decline will happen sooner or later.

Residential real estate might even be a superior hedge than bonds in the next equity bear market. While real estate historically has risen along with inflation (positive correlation), bonds have been inversely correlated, tending to fall when inflation rises. If inflation were to heat up during the next bear market — as it did during the stagflation era of the 1970s, for example — bonds would be battling stiff headwinds.

The $64,000 question for investors seeking a hedge: Was residential real estate’s crash during the 2007-2009 equity bear market an anomalous event?

Professor Shiller’s response, when I put that question to him, was “To some extent, it must be… Overall there just isn’t much correlation of home prices with the stock market. So it [what happened in 2007-2009] looks like just chance.”

He added that residential real estate’s terrible performance during the Great Recession was in no small part caused by idiosyncratic developments such as “subprime mortgages, securitized in tranches, and dubious innovations, [as well as] liars loans.” Those developments are unlikely to play as big a role in the future, due to the greater “vigilance” that regulators now exercise over the real estate market — such as the Dodd-Frank act, which became law in 2010.

All of this suggests that investors should consider the possibility of hedging their equity portfolios with an allocation to residential real estate. Unfortunately, however, as Professor Shiller hastens to point out, that’s easier said than done. Many of the obvious investment vehicles don’t actually provide genuine exposure to home prices.

Take your home, for example, or investments in any other individual properties, for that matter. Idiosyncratic factors that are unique to each property will cause its investment return to diverge widely from that of the residential asset class as a whole. In addition, the market for physical real estate is relatively illiquid and transaction costs are high.

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have a different set of drawbacks as a hedge. Though the market for them is quite liquid, they tend to “pretty much track the stock market” rather than the average price of residential real estate, according to Professor Schiller.

The same goes for stocks of home construction companies. Over the past two decades, for example, there has been a statistically insignificant correlation between the S&P 1500 Homebuilding index and the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. In contrast, those home building company stocks have been highly correlated with the overall stock market.

It is difficult to construct an exchange-traded fund pegged to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index – in fact the one ETF that attempted to do shut down just a year after it was established.

That leaves the futures market. Investors can bet on the performance of residential real estate via futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that are tied to the Case Shiller Home Price Indices. But the market for these contracts is relatively illiquid, so even this alternative is not ideal. If you do invest in these futures contracts, be sure to use limit orders rather than market orders to buy and sell.

If you were convinced that a bear market in stocks had begun, you could hedge your equity holdings with an investment in residential real estate by allocating a small portion of your portfolio to these futures. You would pick a contract with a long-enough maturity to encompass the likely length of the bear market.

According Ned Davis Research, the average bear market of the past century lasted 13 months — and no bear market since the Great Depression has lasted two years.

Many individual investors have an aversion to playing the futures market on the grounds that they are too risky or hard to trade. But what makes futures risky is the leverage that traders employ, not the contracts themselves. The standard deviation of the Case-Shiller index’s annual returns, for example, is less than half that of the S&P 500 — and even more than a third less than that of long-term U.S. Treasuries.

Furthermore, most of the largest discount brokerage firms now allow you to trade futures as easily as you would an individual stock or ETF. So the aversion to futures may be a legacy of days of old when you had to jump through a lot of hoops to trade.

Investors with no experience trading futures would be advised to consult a financial advisor before doing so. If residential real estate performs as well in the next equity bear market as it has in most declines over the past half century, you will be glad you included it in your portfolio.

Source: Barron's, Mark Hulbert
http://www.barrons.com/articles/as-stocks-fall-real-estate-may-be-the-best-defense-1441104699