The Scottsdale Real Estate Files

There are dragons lurking in the dark recesses of your property listing.  Mean dragons. Mean, scaly, green dragons that might rise up out of their fiery lairs and go all Godzilla on your potential showings if left unchecked.

And by what name, pray tell, are these marauding reptiles known?

“REALTOR Remarks”

Ah yes, that hobgoblin of good intentions in the multiple listing service that provides for private communication amongst local Realtors.  It gives me a good shudder just to type the name of the foul beast.  Suburban legend has it that if you say it three times in front of the bathroom mirror with the lights off, you will doom yourself to a lonely stint on the market.  Why?  Because the private portion of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service which is intended to impart “eyes only” information to the Real Estate sales force is home to some of the most spectacular lapses in judgment this side of New Coke.

“Do not approach cage, monkey will bite!”

“Disregard water damage in hall bathroom shower.”

“Bring me an offer, seller needs to sell NOW!!!”

From the laughable (“House is better than pictures make it look”) to the horrific breaching of client confidentiality (“Divorce situation: husband not cooperative”), one little notation in the private remarks of the listing can torpedo the price you command for your home, if not endanger the sale altogether.  Alarm codes, additional showing instructions, agent to agent disclosures – all are intended fodder for the REALTOR Remarks section.  The mistake that is often made, however, is that anything goes so long as it remains hidden from the prying eyes of the public.

The moral of the story?  Read the full property listing before your agent inputs it into the MLS. While you will most likely view a PUBLIC copy of the completed listing once it hits the system, you will not be able to see what is privately disclosed to other agents.  You will want to see a copy of the FULL listing to ensure that your best interests have not been compromised by a few careless words.

You priced the home well, staged it to look its best, had it professionally photographed, toured and dispersed to the far reaches of the Internet.  Don’t blow it now, kid.

Of course, if you want me to avoid your home like the plague, make sure your agent denotes that it “smells kind of funky, but no known presence of mold.”

In the mood to receive offers that are 50% below your list price?  Instruct your agent to notify fellow Realtors to “Bring me any offer and I’ll get it accepted!”

Unless the Stargate in the study presents a clear and present danger to those who would tour your home, best not to mention the possible credit for intergalactic species remediation.

Originally posted at the Scottsdale Property Shop

Oh, but that little house was turned out the day it landed on the multiple listing service! The hardwood floors all scrubbed and polished. The smell of freshly cut lawn and bougainvillea greeting new arrivals as they stepped out of Mazda Miatas and Chevy Tahoes and Ford Fusions.  The windows so crystal clear that the rogue speck of dirt eventually capitulated and moseyed along to a less lonesome locale.  Everything was just so as you wooed prospective new owners.

You sold your home that very first weekend.  Enchanted the buyers through your concerted efforts to distinguish a well-loved home from the abandoned dreams that haunt the competing bank-owned and short sale properties, you did.  Bent on purchasing the best bargain on the block when their plane touched down at Sky Harbor, the nice relocating couple from South Dakota instead rationalized the higher price tag of your owner-occupied home against the great unknowns that plagued the lower cost, distressed property options.  After several celebratory glasses of wine, they mentally recast the entire episode with your home starring as the greatest value proposition on the market.

It is now day 14 of the escrow period.  The home inspection, a week in the rearview, couldn’t have gone any better.  You were never all that concerned about it.  You change the A/C filters regularly and have the units serviced semi-annually.  You resealed the foam roof with elastomeric last May.  You even placed a home warranty policy on the property prior to hitting the market to fend off any unexpected eventualities, you clever fella, you.  Now, having agreed to correct the double tab at the main breaker box (damn landscapers), replace the faulty GFCI outlet at the pool equipment and fix the malfunctioning shower diverter valve in the hall bathroom, you let out a well-deserved sigh of relief.  Knowing that you have an honest to goodness sale firmly in place, you turn your attention to other pressing matters that had been relegated to the back burner.

And the lawn grows a little taller as the mower doesn’t make it out of the shed this week.  The carpet in the hall gets a little matted down from the higher than normal traffic and a missed date with the vacuum cleaner.  Aside from little Johnny’s peanut butter fingerprints on the lower third of the living room picture window and the fogged up corner of the breakfast nook window by the doggy door, the glass is still pretty passable.  The contents of your cabinets and drawers are strewn about the den and family room, but you have to break a few eggs to make a moving omelet, right?  Besides, you already found your buyer.  No more agents calling to pop in for a showing with ten minutes notice.

Thus begins the great unraveling of your sale.  You see, in 2010, you do not just stage your home for potential buyers.  Matter of fact, buyers don’t even possess the most discerning eyes that will take in your abode during the sale process.  Nope, those hawkish peepers belong to a black-hatted professional who holds the fate of your transaction in his number-crunching hands.

Once you strike a deal, you better keep the joint gussied up for the appraisal, Jack.

Besieged by stringent regulations and menaced by fire-breathing underwriters, appraisers are no longer encouraged to hunt for validation of the accord reached on the open market by a willing buyer and seller.  That’s so 2006.  These days, the poor SOBs have more incentive to impugn a home’s value than defend it.  This is not a knock on their collective competence, but an indictment of the constraints by which appraisers are currently bound.  You counter this institutional bias with the same measures you employed to overcome the price objections of your buyer.

You have to resell the house.

Do not discount the human element in a supposedly objective endeavor.  Consider the properties that most Real Estate appraisers spelunk on a daily basis.  Bank repo after bank repo, the job should come with a snorkel and a mobile decontamination unit.  Given the wide disparity in property condition in the market, the silver lining to cloudy times is an ability to add value to your home though no greater expense than meticulous housekeeping.  It’s your agent’s job the sell the objective proof (most viable comparable sales, list of upgrades / features, comparisons between the subject property and comps, etc), and it’s your job to sell the mom, baseball and apple pie.

Clean and “not-jacked-up” is the new granite counter tops and travertine floors.

There may not be an input column in a uniform residential appraisal report for “not infested with hobos,” but latitude is given for affixing additional value based on conditional comparisons to the properties selected for the analysis.  The dialed-in condition of your home will stand out in full bas relief against the tired housing din.  It is especially critical if you don’t have all of the snazzy upgrades.  You are relying on the impression of value for lack of more readily quantifiable measures.

Don’t give in to inertia prior to what has become the penultimate part of the escrow process.  Treat the appraisal as a showing appointment instead of the contractual procedure that it is and you give yourself considerably better odds at a soft landing at the closing table with the same purchase price with which you began.

Scented candles, they aren’t just for buyers and third dates anymore.

Originally posted at the Scottsdale Property Shop

The current market does not favor buyers.  I repeat, the current market does not favor buyers.

Allow me to explain.  For months, if not years, you have been told that the glut of housing inventory makes for a buyer’s market of epic proportions. Why, the ancient Greeks themselves would write songs about the opportunities that abound for any would-be hero with a hankering for a house.  The only problem with this suggestion?  It’s just not true.

What is a buyer’s market?  Most would define it as a preponderance of available supply and an accompanying dearth of demand.  Let’s take a look at both aspects of that equation.

In a perfect financial world, a buyer waits for the market stars to align in just such a manner before swooping in to claim a nest at a fraction of the “normal” cost.  It all works great in theory, but real world application necessitates that the prospective buyer be subjected to the same set of variables that has drawn down the pool of demand at large. It’s a buyer’s market when few have the wherewithal to actually buy.

Appraisal difficulties and tightened lending regulations are contributing to a somewhat artificial suppression of demand. The “want” is present in the market. Consumers want to buy houses. They want to take advantage of the greatly reduced pricing and sublimely low interest rates. Homeowners want to refinance their houses so that they can stay in them, thus contributing to the lowering of the overall supply.

Want has nothing to do with it. Without ability, all of the consumer confidence and desire does not translate to actionable demand.

So to clarify the lead-in to this post, the current Scottsdale Real Estate market does not favor ALL prospective buyers, as the “buyer’s market” connotation suggests.

Further, the favorable conditions for those who are in positions to purchase do not necessarily translate to negotiable strength. Well-heeled cash buyers, W2 employees with verifiable income, solid credit history/scores, etc will find that they do not call the shots to the extent that they were led to believe. The bargain bin of bank-owned foreclosures is incredibly crowded. You are elbow to elbow with competing consumers when a new shipment arrives. The mom & pop resellers, by and large, do not have the equitable flexibility to negotiate the 30-50% off of list price that many buyers envision. The short sale properties with the absurdly low price tags are, more often than not, pie-in-the-sky figments of the listing agent’s imagination. You submit an offer 10% off list price to the bank, which in turn proves to be 40% off the BPO (Broker’s Price Opinion) that is performed three months later. The bank tells you they will gladly approve the sale – for 75k more than you offered.

While the inflated inventory levels in the housing sector are cited often enough, it is not widely reported that the number of unencumbered properties available for purchase is far less.  In a market that is most assuredly not of the “see house, buy house” variety, the redaction of readily purchasable properties (due to competition in the low end, and lien encumbrances across the full pricing spectrum) tilts the negotiation playing field back towards center.  Neither party has a clear cut advantage when facing each other at the negotiating table.

The truth of the matter is that most of the savings that you can expect to uncover have already been factored into the asking price by the time a listing is brought to market. Sure, there will be those that require substantial negotiation, and plenty others still that simply fail to sell. Never underestimate one’s ability to overprice a house. These aren’t the homes you are most likely looking at, though. The ones that buyers are flocking to in droves are those that present the best value opportunities. And why not? Just be prepared for the competition that you did not think existed for said properties in this ballyhooed “buyer’s market.”

Trying to cobble “x” percent off the list price in circumstances in which others are offering “x” above the list price will only lead to frustration.  Don’t get greedy.  Do what it takes to lock up the lowest pricing the Valley has seen for seven to eight years (longer in some areas) while interest rates continue to hover around 5%, and you are well ahead of the game.

And lastly … smile.  You are the guy that so many lament not being right now.  You know, the hypothetical guy who spurs such proclamations at office parties and cocktail hours across the Valley:

“If I had two nickels to rub together right now, I’d buy every house on the block for less than I paid for my albatross back in ‘05.”

Originally posted at the Scottsdale Property Shop

Just about anyone who has spent any time at all in Scottsdale is familiar with the planned community of McCormick Ranch.  A community which includes some 23,000+ residents, many are less familiar with the approximately 50 individual subdivisions that fall under its umbrella.  With radical differences in architecture, amenities, pricing, etc from one subdivision to the next, a prospective home buyer will need to drill down further than general awareness of the McCormick Ranch community at large to find the specific pocket that best suits his/her needs.  With this in mind, we launched our McCormick Ranch Subdivision Series.

Featuring individual spotlights for the various subdivisions that compose McCormick Ranch, you now have a one-stop resource shop for everything you want to know about Scottsdale's first master planned community.  Builder overviews, subdivision statistics, editorial opinion, neighborhood values, homes for sale, amenities, school info, new listing feeds, photos, maps, street views, floor plans ... this is as comprehensive as McCormick Ranch Real Estate gets.

This page serves as an overview to the subdivision spotlights.  Peruse the subdivision map of McCormick Ranch, or choose a subdivision link by name from the tables below.

For a detailed review of the community on a macro level, visit our McCormick Ranch in Scottsdale AZ page.

You can also skip directly to our McCormick Ranch Home Floor Plans page if you know the subdivision/builder you seek.

North McCormick Ranch (Chaparral High School District)

South McCormick Ranch (Saguaro High School District)

Ready to buy, sell or rent in McCormick Ranch?  Give Ray & Paul a call.  We're the agents that other agents Google for McCormick Ranch Real Estate information.

(480) 220-2337 | paul@scottsdalepropertyshop.com