Imagine real estate without offices.  The entire real estate industry is in the midst of dramatic changes, from traditional methods and business models to advanced technology and Internet tools that consumers love.

Real Estate Without Offices is Like Books Without Borders

The changes we are seeing in the real estate industry (and the idea of real estate without offices or real estate with virtual offices) are the result of deeper changes that are reflected in many industries.  One of the industries that has seen huge changes is the book industry.  We’ve seen the eBook business grow in leaps and bounds, but hard cover and paperback books in traditional bricks-and-mortar bookstores have suffered.  Borders Bookstores’ national chain went into bankruptcy and has been dissolved.  Barnes and Noble just announced that they are having serious financial challenges with their business model.  Amazon’s online book store is where consumers have been going, and Amazon now sells more digital versions than paper versions.

Real Estate Without Offices is Like Newspapers Without Paper

Newspapers have been getting crushed in the past few years as people move from print to the Internet.  Consumers have been moving to the Internet for news and information in massive numbers, and they’re not looking back.  Consumers love using the Internet not only because of the convenience, but also because of the anonymity of being able to use the Internet to look up information without having to talk to a sales person.  This is part of the larger trend and helps explain why buyers like the idea of real estate without offices.

For businesses, it’s a matter of efficiency.  Print newspapers and print magazines charge a lot of money for advertising that business owners complain is not giving them a return like it used to.  The Internet is an extremely efficient and affordable way to reach much larger numbers of niche consumers with permission marketing, which is far more powerful than the generic broadcasting of print media.  Just a couple of months ago Brown Maloney sold the Sequim Gazette to a large newspaper company, but in the last three years the classifieds and other business advertising in the Sequim Gazette shrunk to a fraction of what it was.  Selling was a good idea, although it would have been even better three years ago, but buying a print newspaper today would be like trying to catch a falling knife.  Not such a good idea.  (That expression is commonly used by professional stock traders referring to buyers who buy a crashing stock thinking it has bottomed out.  They buy the stock thinking they are getting a bargain only to watch the stock fall much further.)

Real Estate Without Offices is Like Social Butterflies Without Wings

If T.V., print newspapers, and print magazines were tools for connecting with others in a community through information sharing and publishing coupons and sales, today’s social media of the Internet with Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, and others, has completely blitzed the old social media.  Today communities have formed geographically, around niche subjects, across state borders, and around the world to connect people intimately in ways that were never possible before.  You can be a social butterfly without wings today right from your own computer desk without ever leaving your home.  Real estate without offices fits right in this larger trend.

These dramatic changes have impacted the real estate business big time.  Buyers are using different research tools and methods to find their homes now, and they don’t select their Realtor as they once did (calling off a sign, walking into a bricks-and-mortar franchise, calling from a newspaper classified ad).  Everything has changed, and today Buyer’s Agents, including me, are in real estate offices without offices.

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A Sequim real estate broker who practiced as a real estate attorney in 1994, started the first Sequim real estate website dedicated to giving away free real estate information, law, forms, checklists, and guidance on buying and selling real estate.  In 1994 the world wide web had just begun to go public, and building a website back then was not as easy as it is today.  He also published a print newsletter letter to help Realtors.  Eighteen years later Chuck Marunde’s online websites, blogs, eBooks, videos, and photographs have grown into the largest source of real estate information for buyers and sellers in the Sequim and Port Angeles area.  Click on the image below to read the full 1994 article, the beginning of what has turned out to be something very big, especially for buyers from outside the Sequim area.

Sequim Real Estate Broker

Sequim Real Estate Broker

I’m Chuck Marunde, and I absolutely love helping buyers.  One way I’ve been doing that for my entire career, going back to the mid-’70s when I first became a Realtor, is to give everything away, including information on buying and selling real estate, checklists, legal issues in real estate, case law, guides to buying and selling real estate, forms, and lessons learned in the trenches on negotiating price, foreclosures, short sales, contingencies, and unique issues to Sequim and Port Angeles areas (septics, wells, water flow, water quality, drainage).  In 18 years I have not stopped writing and posting and giving away real estate information, and I can unequivocally share that buyers tell me they love having all this information available 24/7 from their home computers absolutely free and with no obligation to register their confidential information.

Sequim Real Estate Broker

I love being a Sequim real estate broker, and I’ll continue to post articles, information, and powerful tools for buyers, and many of these you will find directly on this site on the right side.  If there is anything that you would like to request, please email me, and if I can do it, I will.  Free of course.  By the way, once in a while someone will ask me what do I get in return?  Nothing up front, but I’ve learned that in the long run, buyers appreciate the work I do for them, and many retain me as their Sequim real estate broker and buyer’s agent.

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In 2011 this Sequim Real Estate Blog covered the ups and downs of the real estate market, tips and tricks, insider secrets, tools for buyers not found anywhere else, negotiating keys, and Sequim photos and videos.  With this post there are 1,090 articles about Sequim real estate for buyers.  Here are the 20 posts readers loved the most.

Buying a Second Home in Sequim

Sequim Homes for Sale

Do You Know About Buyer’s Agency?

How to Get Wealthy in a Recession Like This

What is the difference between a listing agent and a buyer’s agent?

Sequim Homes Sold by Price Range

The Most Powerful Sequim Real Estate Internet Resources for Buyers

Sequim WA is a Lot of Things

How to Price a Home for Sale

Sequim WA is Beautiful

Sequim Real Estate Broker Writes Book to Help Realtors

Why Sequim Listings Do Not Sell – What Sellers Don’t Know

How to Buy a Home You Can Sell – and Why This is So Important

The Sequim Blue Hole – A Map of Rainfall

Sequim Washington Homes – Sales Chart

How to Buy a Sequim Home – The Exact Process Defined for Buyers

Hurricane Ridge

Sequim Washington Magazine – Something New and Exciting

Short Sale, Deed in Lieu, or Foreclosure

Sequim Real Estate Prices – Selling Price as Percentage of Listing Price

These Sequim Real Estate Articles have been brought to you by Chuck Marunde, your favorite Sequim Buyer’s Agent.

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Right now, today, if you were asked how you want to invest your retirement account and you only had two choices–gold or real estate, which would you choose?  Here’s a gold chart for 2011 up to December 20th.  We have been bombarded for months now with “buy gold” commercials.  The “buy gold” mantra has reached a feverish pitch in T.V. and print advertising, not to mention Internet ads.  Gold dealers have been preaching the safety of gold and what a great investment it is.  Even today, after gold has crashed as seen on this chart, many gold dealers want you to invest your money on the gold they are selling.  Obviously, they earn a commission for gold sales, and obviously that is their primary motivation.

Gold or Real Estate

Gold or Real Estate – That is the Question

A number of financial advisers and other talking heads boasted today that gold is a great buy now that it has crashed.  Their claim is that you can buy it now at a discount because it is going back up.  Fascinating, because they were saying the same thing before it crashed at about $200 to $400 more per ounce.  If you look at the two trend lines I drew on this gold chart, it is quite clear that the trend since September is downward.  One fundamental rule one learns about investing is not to trade against the trend.  One other thing investors learn is that by the time a stock or commodity is on the front page of all the financial magazines, it is too late to buy.  By then it is at a market top.  On November 9th I wrote an article suggesting that gold was headed downward.  I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the price of gold to go back up anytime soon.  It could, especially if Europe slides into the economic abyss, but why gamble?  If you ask me where I would put my money, in gold or real estate, it would be real estate now.

Gold or Real Estate – Chose Real Estate

I’m selling homes to retirees and investors in Sequim at prices that are incredibly low and not speculative.  Many of these homes are selling at far less than the actual cost to replace the home today.  In other words, many homes are selling for less than the cost of cheap property plus the cost of excavation, the installation of utilities, the cost of permits and building the home itself.  The price of homes has no where to go but up.  Unlike gold that has a lot of room to drop . . . and drop . . . and drop.  I hope it doesn’t, but the point is real estate is a much safer investment today in my humble opinion.

What would you do?  Invest in gold or real estate?

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There’s been a lot of real estate news lately, and there’s been a lot of other news that in ordinary times would be considered extraordinary.  The tip of the news iceburg is more news than most of us can handle.  The NBA is in shambles, and yet the season is supposed to start in a couple of weeks.  You may not be into professional basketball, but there has never been more chaos in the NBA than there has been this year.  The European financial news is bigger than any financial news to come out of Europe in our lifetimes.  The political news in the U.S. is a gift that keeps on giving, and then there’s Lindsay Lohan.  As my mother used to say, “Oh my!”  Enough said.

Then there’s a humorous (and educational) news item about misconceptions of what would happen if a person fell into a volcano.  In all the movies where people fall into lava, they sink in the lava.  Even in the Lord of the Rings, Gollum sinks in molten lava.  Alas, now we find out that the density of lava is at least three times that of water, and the viscosity of lava is about one million times as much as water.  Almost anything you could throw on lava would float, including people.  [Indirectly, this is real estate news since molten lava becomes real estate after it cools off.]  The one movie that may have gotten this right is the Terminator in which the super heavy and extremely dense Robotic Arnold Schwarzenegger sinks in lava.  The author who wrote about this lava misconception entitled his article, The Right and Wrong Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava.

Real Estate News

In the real estate news world there is more published every day than you and I can read.  There is a lot of information to digest, but who can digest it all?  Buying a home with all the real estate news out there is no small challenge.  There is so much to know, and as I like to say, “there are many traps for the unwary.”  Discerning the “right and wrong” when buying a home today can be like reading too much news and trying to filter out the irrelevant.  

Real Estate News Made Easy

As a Sequim Buyer’s Agent I feel very privileged to work with the most incredible people in the world.  My clients are almost all retired professionals who are eminently qualified to buy a nice home in Sequim.  Sometimes I like to joke, except I am largely serious, that “my clients are all smarter than me.”  My clients are smart.  They are well educated, professors, authors, CEOs, financial advisers, teachers, engineers, wildlife officers, military officers, artists, and high government officials.

All of my clients have a lifetime of knowledge and experience in their chosen profession.  But one thing they don’t necessarily possess–a lifetime of education, knowledge, and experience in real estate.  There are many things I do not have, but a lifetime of knowledge and experience in real estate I do have.  I started in real estate sales 37 years ago, went to law school and specialized in real estate law and transactions for 20 years before coming back to my first love–real estate brokerage and representing buyers.  I’ve built the largest Internet real estate resources for buyers in the Sequim area, all absolutely free.  There are over 1,000 articles written for buyers on this blog.  Who does that?

Real Estate News Filtered for Buyers

Every day of the week I filter through the real estate news so that my clients get relevant and informed real estate news.  My goal is to give my clients real estate news and information that is true and helpful in their search for their retirement home in Sequim.  My clients deserve the best and latest information to help them make wise decisions in how they proceed, whether that is to buy a home or not.

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A Low ball offer.  What is a low ball offer and how should buyers and their agents decide how much to offer?  Imagine that you are a buyer, and before you make an offer or discuss price with your buyer’s agent, the listing agent warns your agent not to make a low ball offer.  What?  Where did that come from?  As a buyer, you might be thinking what makes the listing agent (who represents the seller) think he can tell my agent how much I will offer?  The reason I want to write about this is because listing agents are regularly warning buyer’s agents that their clients will not entertain low ball offers.  Let’s dig into this a little and find out what is going on.

Why The Warning About a Low Ball Offer

If a listing agent has a valid reason to expect that a buyer’s agent may submit a “low ball” offer, it would not be unreasonable to drop a subtle hint to that effect, but the warning is annoying when it comes out of the blue and is communicated to an experienced professional.  Why?   There are several reasons.

1. A buyer is the master of the offer, and that means the buyer and the buyer’s agent decide how much to offer.  The seller has no contractual or ethical right to tell the buyer how to draft the offer.  Indirectly telling the buyer’s agent is the same thing.
2. The buyer’s agent represents the buyer, and the listing agent represents the seller.  Each has legal and fiduciary duties to their clients.  One should not try to infringe on the other agent’s relationship.
3. A buyer has the right to make any offer they want, no matter how much it is, even if the seller thinks it is a “low ball” offer.
4. The seller has the right to accept, reject, or counter.  This is America, and that’s how it works.  Buyers and sellers are free to negotiate the best price and terms.
5. Many listing agents do not actually know what a “low ball” offer would be.  That makes warning against making a low ball offer especially unreasonable.

What is a Low Ball Offer

I know there are Realtors who will write any offer without regard to fair market value, market conditions, and professional appraisal considerations.  I’ve turned a couple of buyers away because they literally wanted me to draft low ball offers on houses until they got one accepted.  Their concept of a low ball offer was to find a reasonably priced home and offer 30% below that.  I won’t do that.  But I also wrote an offer on a house two years ago that was a reasonable offer, but the seller rejected the offer and her agent called it a “low ball” offer.  It was not, but the seller and the listing agent had an unreasonable definition of what “low ball” was.  That house never sold, and has been on the market for two years now.  They have dropped the price several times by huge amounts.  I doubt the seller and listing agent would admit that the offer my client made was not a “low ball” offer at the time.  I remember that Realtor actually laughing on the phone and calling the offer a “low ball” offer.  I had solid proof at the time that the offering price was reasonable with other comparables and appraised values.  After two years, the proof has clearly demonstrated that the offer was definitely not a low ball offer.

This is a Low Ball Offer

My point is that what is often called a low ball offer is not a low ball offer at all.  On the other hand, there is such as thing as a low ball offer.  If the true FMV of a home in this market is $325,000, and a buyer makes an unreasonably low offer of $245,000, that is a low ball offer.  But as I’ve written above, the buyer has the right to make any offer he wants.  The seller can accept, reject, or counter.  What you don’t need is a seller’s agent telling a buyer’s agent what to offer, directly or indirectly.  That is inappropriate.

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