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Real Estate

Dealing With Real Estate Agents And Other Real Estate Resources

My parents (Hi Mom and Dad!) are planning to buy a new house in the near future after living in their current house for 40 years.  Right now they are in the process of figuring out how to get a real estate agent.  Unfortunately I can’t be of much help to them since I don’t live in the same city but I did offer to share all my writings on real estate agents.  The following is a list of posts we’ve done on real estate and agents with a brief description of each.

The next series of posts were written by a first-time home buyer who explains all the various steps she went through:

That’s it!  Good luck with the house hunting!

Categories
Real Estate

Tenants over Dividends

The Moneygardener recently wrote an interesting post why he likes to invest in dividend paying stocks instead of investing in real estate (I’d link to the post, but I’ve been getting 404 errors from his site for the last 2 days). As someone who has invested in both, there’s truth to each point he makes (I agree with all of them), but there’s also another side to the issue.

Presented, for your consideration, some reasons why you might want to invest in real estate instead of equities (text in italics are the original points made by MoneyGardener):

No pesky rent cheques to cash. My dividends flow electronically into my brokerage account without hassle, fees, or paper (eco friendly too).

  • Pesky rent cheques to cash.  Dividends may trickle in (or be re-invested in your DRIP), but there’s nothing like walking to the bank with cold hard cash or a stack of cheques in hand

If given the choice I’d rather not receive phone calls at 4am from tenants with plumbing issues. To date I have not received one phone call from any of the companies that I own.

  • Given the choice, I’d like to have the opportunity to know about problems with my investment, have the chance to fix them, and to be able to plan to avoid them in the future.  With companies I buy common stock for, I don’t know about problems until the over-paid management team has already made short-sighted decisions to maximize the value of their stock options

Why chase people for rent cheques or listen to a hard luck story about why it’s late? Clorox (CLX) is never late with their quarterly dividend, and they don’t complain.
People break leases and decide to move out occasionally, taking your future monthly rent with them. Stocks never go away unless you want them to. They can also be acquired in which case their value spikes.

  • When a company cuts or suspends it dividend, there’s nothing I can do about it.  My entire investment can disappear, leaving me with no recourse, no future income AND the loss of my principal.  If a tenant doesn’t pay me, I have a wide range of options for collecting ranging from nagging him to evicting him.  Buildings rarely vanish, and even if its destroyed, the land its built on will still remain (along with a juicy insurance settlement).

I like the word ‘DIVIDEND’ better than the word ‘RENT’….it just sounds cooler and more profitable.

  • Rent sounds a lot cooler when you’re collecting it than when you’re paying it!

Owning stocks I can diversify across industries and geographies. Owning an 18 unit apartment building in Windsor, Ontario, I can not.

  • With real estate, I can learn the local market and exploit inefficiencies, buying property that no one else is interested in (and getting an appropriately good deal).  With the amount of information available to stock buyers, the market efficiently prices them, making it hard for me to get a good deal.  I will always have to bid against other people interested in buying.

My stocks do not require maintenance that involves getting my hands dirty or paying someone else to dirty theirs.

  • I can get my hands dirty, and increase the value of what I own by investing my labour in it.

Stocks are liquid. It would take me about 10 minutes to sell every stock that I own in an emergency. It could take years to sell real estate in a poor market.

  • Real estate is illiquid.  Because I’m not getting it appraised every 10 seconds of the day, I won’t get panicked when real estate prices go down.  I won’t even know about it unless I try to sell.  I can easily sit back and be a long term investor without distractions.

I don’t have to decide by what percentage to increase the rent, the companies that I own decide that for me.

  • I get to decide by what percentage to increase the rent, instead of companies deciding that for me.

Again, to reiterate, I’m a dividend investor (I don’t want the Dividend Addicts coming after me with pitchforks).  I like stable blue chips that regularly pay an increasing dividend.  I just don’t think that there’s an investment that’s absolutely better than others (or else everyone would just buy the better one).

And as a little bonus (so there’s no hard feelings from the Gardener), I’ll switch sides and gives three more points in favour of dividend investing:

  • When I invest in stocks my transaction costs are tiny (a fraction of a percent for a large buy).  With real estate, about 7% is paid in fees (legal + agents) every time it changes hands.  These expenses scale with the size of the purchase, whereas they are proportionately lower for stock transactions.
  • With real estate you have to check on your investments periodically, even for the best run properties with property management in place.  With stock, I can go and sail around the world, content that they’ll operate as well with me absent as they would if I was checking them every day.
  • Discount stock brokers rarely cheat clients, property management companies are notorious for underhanded behaviour.

What are your reasons for investing in real estate or dividend paying stock?

Categories
Real Estate

Even More Reasons Not To Trust Your Real Estate Agent

That’s right – after completing two posts on why you should not trust your real estate agent when you are buying a house and when you are selling a house, several more reasons have surfaced from various sources and I felt it was worth another post on the topic.

Underestimate potential costs for renovations and repairs

This is pretty common – a buyer looks at a house but is concerned with the potential costs of renovations and maintenance items like a new furnace. Most real estate agents are only too happy to give the buyer an idea of what the items will cost. The problem is that it’s in the best interest of the agent to downplay the costs since that will encourage the buyer to make the purchase and the commission will be paid. This happened to both Mr. Cheap and myself on previous real estate deals so we’ve learned this lesson the hard way.

The fact is that estimating renovation costs (not an simple skill) doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with buying and selling real estate. Your real estate agent might be a former contractor or might have a lot of experience with renovations…or they might have absolutely zero experience with renovations and are just taking numbers from something they might have read in the past.

Push for maximum purchase

In the case where someone is looking to buy a house but isn’t using anywhere near their maximum available credit, it’s possible for the agent to push the buyer to raise their price level which will increase the potential commission for the agent. For a price difference of $10k or $20k it’s not going to make a big difference to the agent but if they can get the buyer to increase their limit by $100,000 or more then it will significantly increase their payday.

Pinyo from Moolanomy left a comment indicating how his agent told him that he could afford $4,000 per month in payments when in actual fact he finds that a $1400 mortgage payment is more than enough.

The lesson here if you are a buyer is to know your own budget and don’t let anyone else tell you what you can or can’t afford.

Agent is probably getting paid for referrals

Most agents make extra money by referring their clients to various people who will give them referral fees. Mortgage brokers, contractors, tradesmen, home stagers, lawyers – you name it and your agent can probably give you a name.

This isn’t to say that a person referred to you buy your real estate agent isn’t going to be competent – it’s just important to know that they might be getting a fee for doing the referral.

Round number – odd number trick

As mentioned in the comments of the previous post, agents will often try to get you to lower your selling price or raise your bid by telling you to “make it a round number” or “make it an odd” number depending on the situation. If your bid is an odd number ie $250,500 they might suggest that $251,000 is a better bid because it’s an even number. As the Financial Blogger suggested – in this case $250,000 is also a round number which might work better for the buyer.

Over estimating the value of your house

Typically if you are selling a house then an agent wants to you to list with them. They are often very tempted to exaggerate the value of your house so that you will hire them as your agent. Once you sign with them and the house doesn’t sell, then they will start working on you to lower the house.

The inflated value doesn’t always originate from the agent, most sellers have an inflated estimation of their house worth so an agent might ‘go along’ to get the listing.

“Free” real estate evaluation

Most home owners have received material in their mail box offering a “free” house evaluation by a real estate agent. These are just marketing, plain and simple. If the home owner has no idea what the house is worth then it might not hurt to find out what the rough estimated value is but keep in mind the previous point about agents giving exaggerated house estimations.

Take a look at another perspective on real estate agents that Mr. Cheap wrote.

Categories
Real Estate

Why You Can’t Trust Real Estate Agents When Selling A House

Check out the first part of this series “Why You Can’t Trust Real Estate Agents When Buying A House“.

Yesterday, we discussed how your agent and you will have similar goals when starting a house search but your interests will diverge the closer you get to a deal. When selling a house, the same phenomenon happens but usually a lot quicker.

In the beginning: buddies

Usually when you agree to list your house with an agent they will make you sign a contract with them which ensures that you don’t turn around and sell the house with another agent after they have done some work. In my experience, the agent will pull various comparable houses in the area and together you will figure out an asking price. Another step that normally takes place is for the agent to do a walk through and advise the client of possible improvements they can do to the house to make it sell easier.

The asking price is usually the first potential source of conflict – the seller wants a high price and is often unrealistic about what their house is worth. The agent knows that if the house is listed too high that it will sit for a while and any effort the agent makes to sell the house will be a waste of time. Agents make more money by selling more houses rather than getting a high price for each house so they want to make sure that the house is listed at a reasonable market value or lower. This is why pricing a house low for auction is so popular because it’s the best situation for the agent. Another situation is if a client wants to price the house high – then the agent has to bide their time and work on the client to lower their price so it will move.

Thinking about accepting an offer – Trust no one!

Things that your agent might say (and you should ignore) when you are selling a house:

  • “Since I get paid on commission – the more you get for your house, the more I get paid so we both want the same thing”. This is one of the biggest lies in real estate. Yes, mathematically an agent will get more commission if your house is sold for a higher price but the problem is the amount of time it might take to get that higher price is not worth the extra commission. For example if your house has a market value of $400,000 then your agent’s cut might be 2.5% or $10,000. If you are patient and wait for someone to come along who will pay $410,000 then the agent will make $10,250 for an extra $250. To get this $250 they might have to do several open houses and wait quite a while. Clearly they are better off just selling the house for $400k (or even less) and taking their $10,000. The problem is that the difference in selling price to the agent is pocket change but the difference to the homeowner is huge since we are talking about a $10k difference.

Negotiation – don’t listen to a word your agent has to say.

At this point you are potentially pretty close to selling your house. You want to sell the house at the highest price, the buyer wants to buy the house at the lowest price and your agent just wants you to sell the house and doesn’t care at all what price you sell it for because they just want the deal done right now. Since selling at a lower price will get the deal done quicker a lot of agents will encourage you to counter lower which basically means that you are negotiating against them as well as the seller.

Things that your agent might say (and you should ignore) when you are negotiating are:

  • “Don’t counter offer too high or the buyer might walk”. If the buyer has put in an offer then it’s up to the seller to accept the offer or reject it with a counter offer. It’s true that a high counter offer might scare off the buyer but isn’t that part of the negotiation?
  • “Your first offer is often the best offer”. Another way an agent might phrase this one is “We have an offer which means if I can get you to accept it by any means possible then I get paid very soon”.
  • “Dual-agency means there is no conflict of interest even though I represent both parties”. The “dual-agency” scam is where a selling party has a real estate agent and a buyer comes along who doesn’t have their own agent. The selling agent will offer to “act” as both the selling agent and buying agent and of course collect double the commission. Even though this is such an obvious scam, I actually don’t think this one is a big deal since real estate agents are basically working against you anyways at negotiation time so adding more conflicts probably doesn’t really matter.
  • “Are you willing to lose this deal for $2,000?” (or $5k, $8k) This is a tough one – on the one hand it seems silly to not close the deal and be only a half of a percent away from a deal but on the other hand shouldn’t your agent be asking this question to the buyer? Ie – “we are going to walk, do you really want to lose this deal for $2k?”
  • “Are you willing to lose this deal for $12 a month?” This is part two of the previous point which is applied if you don’t bite on the first attempt. It’s also a more useful gambit if the “separation” is a bit greater. If you and the buyer are $12,000 apart then that sounds pretty significant but what if you are only $75 a month apart (for 25 years) or even better what if you are only $63/month apart (over 40 years).

Conclusion (pretty much the same as yesterday)

The more you educate yourself about the real estate market you are looking in and how real estate agents operate then the better off you will be when selling a house. Real estate agents are quite useful when selling a house because most people won’t buy from a private seller and because they have access to MLS.

Whatever you do, never forget that they get paid when the deal gets done and only then. They don’t get paid for having extra open houses or walking away from close deals.

Do you have any good “lines” that you were told when selling a house?

Check out another perspective on real estate agents.

Categories
Real Estate

Why You Can’t Trust Real Estate Agents When Buying A House

Most prospective house hunters or sellers think they have a “good” agent. Either it’s someone who they previously worked with or perhaps a referral from a friend or a co-worker. One of the big reasons for having confidence in their agent is a belief that the agent is “on their side” and “honest” etc etc. I would suggest however that by a certain point in the process, your agent is your enemy and you are negotiating against them more than the other party. This post deals with the buy side of the house buying game. The next post will deal with the sell side.

In the beginning: happy friends

When a house buyer first signs up with an agent, things are usually pretty rosy, the agent assures the person that they can find an appropriate house for a price you can afford and everything will be great. The agent has “lots” of experience and knows the area inside out. At this stage of the game, you and your agent are mostly on the same page. You want to buy a house and they want you to buy a house. Your agent will most certainly want to get the process over with sooner rather than later, but that’s usually the case with the buyer as well.

During the search: uneasy allies

Agents know that they need to spend a fair bit of time with a buyer, especially ones who want to look at a lot of houses. After a while however it’s not worth it for an agent to continue a long search especially if their contract is running out. This is the time when the agent will start trying to convince the buyer to lower their standards and raise their prices. Sometimes this is educational if the buyer has unrealistic expectation, but mainly this is to speed up the process so the agent can get paid. I should point out however that real agents are normally quite useful during the search since they often know more than you do about the general real estate and can get you access to private showings. The other big benefit is their access to sale price information for similar houses.

Related – How to win a house bidding war

Thinking about putting in an offer?  Trust no one!

The point when the buyer submits a offer on a house is a time when a lot of house buyers, particularly first timers feel out of their element and defer to their agent for advice. This is the worst thing you can do. Your agent gets paid when the deal gets done and only when it gets done.

This is a time when knowledge of the real estate market should be a big help in determining how much negotiation should be done. As well, if the buyer is not in a hurry to buy then that sets up a great negotiation opportunity. However if there is one thing that real estate agents don’t like it’s clients who negotiate hard – why? Because the only way to negotiate properly in a deal is to be able to walk away if the price you want isn’t met. The way an agent sees this type of situation is that if a deal falls through, they have to spend a lot more time looking at houses with you before they get paid.

Things that your agent might say (and you should ignore) when you are about to put in a bid are:

  • “Don’t bid too low or you will offend the sellers”. This is garbage – if the sellers can’t handle a low ball bid then they are unrealistic. And what exactly is a bid that is “too low”? I’m not saying put in an unrealistic bid, but don’t be afraid to start low and work your way up.  It’s important to know the market so that you don’t have to rely on the asking price or your agent to tell you the proper market value of the house.
  • “Don’t bid too low or you might offend the selling agent and might I have to work with them in the future”. This stunning example of gall and self-interest was actually told to Mr. Cheap. I don’t think this one needs any further comments. 🙂
  • “You should get a bid in quickly before someone else puts a bid in”. This is a favourite of my agent – create a sense of false urgency, get the deal in motion and get it done ASAP. Sometimes this is good advice, but other times – such as when the house has been sitting on the market for a month or longer then it’s just not appropriate.
  • “Someone else is looking at the house later today and they are really interested”. This lie usually originates with the selling agent, but smart buying agents are usually more than willing to play along because it will increase the chances of their buyer putting in an offer in that day.

Negotiation – don’t listen to a word your agent has to say.

At this point you are potentially pretty close to buying a house. You want to buy the house at the lowest price, the seller wants to sell the house to you at the highest price and your agent wants you to buy the house and doesn’t care at all what price you pay because they just want the deal done right now. Since paying a higher price will get the deal done quicker, a lot of agents will encourage you to bid higher which basically means that you are negotiating against them as well as the seller.

Things that your agent might say (and you should ignore) when you are negotiating are:

  • “Meet them halfway or in the middle”. This sounds quite reasonable at first- if the asking price of a house is $500,000 and you bid $460,000 and they come back with $490,000 then isn’t splitting the difference at $475,000 quite reasonable? Not if you can get the house for $470,000 or $465k,000 The fact is that the asking price of the house and your first bid are very arbitrary numbers and splitting the difference between the two might end up in a price that is not market value.
  • “Are you willing to lose this house for $2,000?” (or $5,000, $8,000) This is a tough one – on the one hand it seems silly to not buy a house and be only a half of a percent away from a deal, but on the other hand shouldn’t your agent be asking this question to the seller? Ie – “We are going to walk, do you really want to lose this deal for $2,000?”
  • “Are you willing to lose this house for $12 a month?”  This is part two of the previous point which is applied if you don’t bite on the first attempt. It’s also a more useful gambit if the “separation” is a bit greater. If you and the seller are $12,000 apart, that sounds pretty significant, but what if you are only $75 a month apart (for 25 years) or even better what if you are only $63/month apart (over 40 years). That doesn’t sound like much (even if it is).

Conclusion

The more you educate yourself about the real estate market you are looking in and how real estate agents operate, the better off you will be when buying a house. Real estate agents are quite useful because they can get you access to houses for sale and will often drive you around to look at them plus they have access to the sale price of other houses. Whatever you do, never forget that they get paid when the deal gets done and only then. They don’t get paid for showing you more houses or walking away from close deals.

Tune in tomorrow when we take a look at the trustworthiness of real estate agents when selling a house.

Take a look at another perspective on real estate agents that Mr. Cheap wrote.

Do you have any good “lines” that you were told when buying a house?

Categories
Real Estate

For Sale By Owner – The Wrong Way

sign.jpgAs everyone who has sold a house knows, real estate commissions are a rip-off. Real estate agents charge a commission for their services so it doesn’t matter what value the house is or how easy it is to sell, they get their 5% (approximately).

To counter this fee, the for-sale-by-owner movement has been gathering momentum. Larry MacDonald wrote some interesting posts on his successful efforts to sell his house and CNN had a post about an innovative strategy to not only sell your house without an agent, but sell it in five days.

If you are going to sell your house on your own to save money, don’t expect to save the entire amount that would have gone to an agent. You still have to spend money on marketing and that marketing budget should include some professional signs. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen FSBO signs that looked like they were made by three year olds. I was in fact inspired to write this post by a FSBO house on a nearby street which had quite possibly the worst signs I’ve ever seen. Your typical kid’s “Lemonade 5 cents” sign would put these FSBO signs to shame.

Unfortunately by the time I went to take a photo they had taken their open house sign off the porch and I couldn’t get a good picture of the sign in the window. But to describe – in the window they had a piece of cardboard (normal box colour) with ripped edges – that’s right – no time to cut properly, gotta sell that house! Written with black marker in letters too small to see from the street, was presumably the details of the house sale – I could only read the “For Sale” portion of the sign. Attached to their front porch was an “Open House” sign – this was made out of very unevenly ripped cardboard (they must have been quite angry at this point), written in marker, possibly with the hand of a seven year old and had the news that they were having an open house on Sunday, 2-5 pm.

The thing that amazes me the most is that this house is probably selling for around $400,000, so we’re not talking about an abandoned grow house. How on earth could that homeowner possibly expect that a reasonable buyer is going to enter into a legal transaction worth $400k with a owner that looks like they went out of their way to have the most unprofessional signs possible?

Categories
Investing

My New Asset Allocation (Part XIV)

Yes, that’s right – after reading countless books and posts about asset allocation and writing several convoluted and contradictory posts on the topic myself, I’ve finally decided on an asset allocation model for our investments. The problem with asset allocation is that there is a lot of theory behind various models and the more you know about the subject then the more confused you will probably get. I’ve concluded recently that maybe just picking a simpler asset allocation is probably the best approach since I’m not sure how much it really matters what your exact asset allocation is, as long as you pick one and stick with it.

And now (drum roll please..) on with the allocation!

Equities vs Bonds

The split will be 75% equities and 25% bonds. I like to have a fairly aggressive portfolio but at the same time the bonds will steady the returns and will also allow for more equity purchases in case the equity markets go off a cliff. According to Mr. Bernstein, 75% equity gives you the maximum benefit from owning equities.

Equities 75%

These percentages are of the equity portion (not percentage of the total portfolio).

Canadian equity – 25%

US equity – 37.5%

International equity – 37.5%

Bonds – 25%

20% is a short term Canadian bond ETF (iShares XSB) and some GICs.

5% is a real return bond ETF (iShares XRB). Real return bonds are a hedge against inflation and are supposed to be negatively correlated with regular bonds.

Other asset classes?

What about real estate and emerging markets? I’ve decided not to invest in those right now because both of these classes have done so well in the past several years that it’s hard for me to justify buying them. I’m also not convinced that emerging markets are all that great an investment. When you consider the exposure that a lot of North American companies have to developing markets, I already have enough emerging market in my portfolio.

Anybody want to share their asset allocation philosophies?

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