The Scottsdale Real Estate Files

Everyone wants a piranha.

Whether a professional athlete intent on a signing bonus the size of Madagascar, a victim of a vicious fender bender fixated on the 2.8 million dollar legal prescription for a tender neck or a home buyer/seller whose sole purpose on this earth at the immediate moment is to grind as many Ben Franklins as possible out of the guy on the other side of a negotiation, aggressiveness is typically the hallmark virtue in the professional representation that is sought.

The sports super agent, who we are 95% certain has a life-sized portrait of his bare chested self wearing a boa constrictor around suspiciously well tanned shoulders hanging in his posh downtown office, is universally loathed by all.  Secretly, however, we all know he’d be the only guy we’d call if we needed to make a cash withdrawal from the abundant posterior of a team owner.

The weaselly ambulance chaser with the slicked back, Grecian Formula enhanced locks is similarly unlikely to find himself on the guest lists of many Bat Mitzvahs and baby showers.  That narcissistic predator might eat the baby.  When we spill the drive-thru coffee in our laps or stumble over the “Watch Your Step!” sign at a public establishment, though, he’s the guy we call.

Amicable folks are great to have around, but when the conversation turns to business, we don’t want Mary Poppins going into battle on our behalf armed only with a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.  We’d rather employ the services of Dr. Jekyll to go all Mr. Hyde on the opposition and cram that spoon straight down their throats.

Easy, tiger.

There is a time to kill, and there is a time to frolic.  The problem with the constant grinder is that he often grinds himself right out of a transaction.  It is critical that you leave the other guy with some dignity at the end of a tough negotiation, lest all of your efforts collapse under the weight of the other party’s exhaustion.  After you’ve knocked the poor bloke to the ground and bloodied his nose, do the smart thing.  Extend your hand and help him up.

In practical terms, this is akin to finally saying “yes” after repeated “no’s.”  When you win on the key points, you are often in a position to make a small concession on some trivial tangential issue.  Too many times, I see lost opportunities for a clear victor to score easy diplomatic points at these junctures in the waning moments of a deal.  Want the inspection and other critical aspects of the transaction yet to come to go smoothly?  Give up something that isn’t really necessary.  Offer something minor, but unexpected.

You’ve bitten his neck on price, drank his blood on terms … time to give him a transfusion unless you want to carry his Doppelganger the rest of the way to closing.  For the record, undead weight is quite heavy.

Of course, because you are reading my blog, this advice assumes you were on the dispensing end of said treatment throughout the course of the initial negotiation.  If you were unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end, go ahead and drive a wooden stake through the SOB’s black heart.

*Originally posted at the Scottsdale Property Shop.

There is always opportunity in the margins.  Unfortunately, margins tend to attract the marginal.

The latest water cooler rumbling to emerge from a recent tour group meeting centered on a purported professional short sale negotiation company.  Here in the Valley, short sale negotiation has become its own cottage industry in the past year and a half, and for good reason.  Most Realtors had never encountered a short sale before the recent woes in the market.  You can include me among those ranks.  As such, there has been great demand recently for third party professionals who know the drill and have contacts within the various institutions for expediting the process.  While the skill-set required to negotiate with the bank is really little more than gumption, persistence and know-how, the learning curve can be steep, and the time commitment impractical.  Many agents would rather enlist the help of a specialist to handle this critical portion of the transaction than practice on their first few short sale clients.  The stakes are too high for an erstwhile, but bumbling rube to fumble it all away.  For many of us, it just makes good, practical sense for all parties involved.

Now comes the “but.”

Back to the recent tour meeting of which I mentioned, the latest scuttlebutt is that at least one major short sale negotiation company is the focus of an open investigation.  It seems there is some question as to whether this outfit was utilizing fraudulent measures to cash in on a much grander scale than the stated fee of their services.  Nothing has been proven, and no charges have been filed to my knowledge (hence the glaring omission of the company name here), but the concern is that this company might have engaged in the “double escrowing” of the short sales they were hired to negotiate.  Plainly stated, upon receiving an offer that both buyer and seller had executed and forwarded to the negotiator to submit to the bank for review/approval, this company is thought to have tabled said offer and worked to negotiate an even lower sale of their own with the bank.  Once accepted, they would orchestrate the virtual simultaneous closings in which they bought the property from the bank and turned around and sold it to the buyers at the higher price.  Neither the buyer nor seller would ever know that there were actually two transactions taking place concurrently.

Of course, if the negotiation with the bank failed, the buyer and seller would simply be informed that the offer had been rejected … eventually.  Even though the bank never saw it.  The buyer wouldn’t be overly thrilled to learn of this, of course, but the seller is the one who really stands to lose in such a scenario.  He is the one with the imminent foreclosure and interminable credit limbo on the line while the entity hired to negotiate on his behalf plays Russian roulette with his financial well being.

So while nothing is proven in this instance as of yet, it serves as a consumer alert.  While I was careful in the selection of the professional I have enlisted to negotiate with the various banks on my sellers’ behalf, some might mistakenly believe that any fly-by-night company that has branded itself as a “short sale negotiation specialist” is reputable.  Just as you would exercise diligence and perform your own investigations in the selection of your Realtor, don’t let your guard down when settling upon the service enlisted to actually talk to the bank.  Find out how long they have been in operation.  Are there any complaints lodged with the Better Business Bureau (though some may be such neophytes that they haven’t been around long enough to incur complaints)?  How long has your specific negotiator been involved in either the Real Estate or banking industry prior to their current position?

Maybe I’m just jumping at shadows, but I can’t help but wonder if this is a niche that won’t prove to be populated by failed Realtors, loan officers, car salesmen, financial advisers, taxidermists, Maytag men and arthritic slow-pitch softball umpires in hindsight.  There are some good ones out there who are absolutely invaluable to the busy Realtor and desperate seller alike, but I am under no illusion that there aren’t more than a few soulless chasms of dollars and teeth hiding behind the polished veneer of a snappy tagline as well.

When dealing with a property that you are trying desperately to sell before the bank forecloses, the stakes are elevated to financial Thunderdome proportions.  If your short sale survives the fight, you will walk away with a limp (credit damage, possible tax ramification, etc), but at least you walk away.  A foreclosure will effectively kill your aspirations of future home ownership for the next 5 years.

Choose your weapon wisely.

*Visit the Scottsdale Property Shop for the latest news in Scottsdale Real Estate*

It's been a little while since I've written a Real Estate specific post, or even a non-industry related piece that has consisted of more than a caption under someone else's drawing.  There are two primary reasons for my absence.  One, fortunately, has everything to do with a dramatic rise in business.  It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry who has been waiting for the market to fully capitulate before wading back into the fray for a purchase has declared, "All clear!"  The only thing burning faster than a gallon of gasoline in my protesting vehicle are the minutes on my angry cell phone. 

Can you hear me now? 

You bet.

Secondly, I have taken all of the time that I don't have and shaved off an hour or so of it every day for the last few weeks to work on my latest project.  A project I never really expected to undertake. 

I have been more than satisfied with my blogging experience here on the ActiveRain network.  In addition to verifiable lead generation that has accounted for approximately 50% of my business to date in 2009, I have made real friends in this imaginary community.  I have also built a stable of referral partners here to whom I would send business without so much as a second thought (as well as expunge a few select nasties to whom I wouldn't send a client if they had the only bomb shelter in a post-Apocalyptic world.)  In short, ActiveRain has been berry, berry good to me.

But you can't stop Paul Slaybaugh, you can only hope to contain him. 

I'm ready to try my hand at creating my own little space in the cyberworld where I am beholden to me and my whims alone.  I wanted to craft a blogsite which fully integrates everything I want and nothing I don't.  It's that simple.  Oddly enough, I don't expect to go nuts creatively on the new one, as it will be specifically tailored to be a functional tool for my current and future clients.  I'll keep the more adventurous stuff here at ActiveRain, where my catchall little blog has made its niche. 

Unlike some wayward blogging souls who follow Carol Anne into the light and never return to their old stomping grounds, I am not abandoning AR for greener pastures.  Rather, I am engaging in internet sharecropping.  I till the more consumer specific Real Estate soils on one field while the other awaits the next crop of ... well ... whatever seeds I happen to find in the glove box.

So you can continue to catch my act live here on the evenings and weekends, while a different audience may be more inclined to trade in my AR cocktail party blog for the ongoing business casual soiree being thrown over at the new digs.

It's a work in progress that I suspect may never finish progressing, but without further ado, I present to you:

The Scottsdale Property Shop Blog

Choose Your Own Adventure

A)  "T.A.R.P. ... it's what's for dinner."

B)  "Hey, that's not Mama ... Holy God, it's Timothy Geithner!"

C)  "Unbeknownst to Carl, the beleaguered systems analyst was about to be downsized for the second time in as many days."

D)  "Worms again?  What does a brother have to do to get an omelet up in here?"

Let's tally scores on this one.  Select A, B, C or D in the comment stream and we'll run with the winner.  Where we'll run with it, I haven't the foggiest idea, but run like the wind we shall.

We are ruining the internet.

It started out nobly enough, the bombastic notion of connecting people and ideas from the world over through a universal medium.  Free exchange of knowledge and collective experience from the privacy of one's own ... whatever.  Who needs a card catalog?  No Dewey Decimal System is required to type a few words into a search bar.  Better yet, why read the revolutionary book about animal platelet mapping by Dr. Luther Von Udderstein when you can instant message the good doctor directly?

In the past decade, I have visited foreign lands without once boarding a plane or getting painful vaccinations to ward against African Weeping Sickness.  I have talked smack to semi-literate Muay Thai boxers in Bangkok and pledged my undying love to USER546798 on a Mickey Rourke For President message board forum.  If life is a carnival, the Web is a 24/7 pie-eating contest featuring FATLADYXXL, SADCLOWN68, TINYDANCER and, of course, you.

As with any freakshow, there are freaks.  Urchins, dungeon masters, trolls ... all have crashed the virtual masquerade ball.  Emboldened by the anonymity they have always craved IRL (in real life), they refuse to be sequestered any longer.  Though the troll's IP Address may, in actuality, be assigned as "Under The Bridge," he/she is free to mingle with the invited guests when online.  The ankle bracelet doesn't register trespasses of the ethereal variety.

Therein lies the beauty of the online world.  All are not inherently equal, but are afforded equal voice.  Crazy Uncle Carl who shows up drunk to family reunions when he shows up at all.  The otolaryngologist currently doing missionary work in South America for indigent children with cleft palates.  The high school kid with a 2.7 GPA and high score on World of Warcraft.  The prince.  The pauper.

All are given the same mask at the door.  It is humanity at its very essence.  Crazy reveals itself just as quickly as beauty.  Stunning intellect and brutal stupidity can only remain hidden for so long.  A natural sort of selection theoretically imposes itself upon these binary Galapagos Islands.  The crazies eventually slink away to snipe from their water towers, leaving those more deserving of attention alone in its phosphorescent glow.  It's not Utopia, but it's real.

All went along imperfectly perfect.  And then the spammers came.  Those entrepreneurial types who learned that faceless and nameless was the perfect level of identification for peddling their snake oil to the masses.  Much like the meat product by the same name was designed to fill bellies at a budget price, servers have become clogged with artery choking transsaturated, mental fats.  Sure, we push away from the table full, but what have we really given our bodies to grow?  What nourishment is derived from the E.D. banner ads that clutter our sidebars?  What building blocks are found within the email come-ons to collect our winnings from the Nigerian lotto by simply supplying a social security number and the pancreas of our first-born?

We all hate fluff.  We hate clutter.  We hate reading 500 pages to find the 500 words that we want.  We hate being informed that we might already be winners when all we really want is to find real contact from a real human.

Enter the Realtor.

Much as we loathe the garbage that is heaped upon us, we stuff forums and social media sites with enough of our own to choke a standard poodle (something there is undoubtedly 2478 sites already devoted to).  Know the quickest way to kill a revolutionary new network for connecting family and friends?  Tell a Realtor.  We'll hit you upside the avatar with link after groan inducing link to our "Brand New Listing," or "Joke of the Day!" We'll blast you with proclamations that we are the greatest practitioners in all the land, and then we'll blast you with the hyperbolic data to semi-prove it.  Ignored it the first time? No worries, we'll re-Tweet it. Foolish enough to list your place of residence in your profile?  We'll find you via reverse searches and other such Jedi mind tricks.  We'll friend you.  We'll follow you.  We'll subscribe to you.  We are the Borg, and we want to sell you a house.  Truth be told, we'll settle for your fawning attention.

And we'll waste your time with damn fool content like this here.

Somewhere, there is that article you were searching for about "Scottsdale otolaryngologists," but the  groundbreaking doctor with more alphabet soup designations next to his name than consonants in the Polish dictionary doesn't have the Google juice that I do.  

I'll gladly refer you and your jacked up cranium to a reputable specialist for a minimal finder's fee, however.