Archive for the ‘Feature’ Category

Today, I got up out of bed and got ready to go to a final walk-through, which is, you know, the thing you generally do right before a closing. The walk-through was set for 10AM. Closing has been scheduled for 12PM today for well over a week. Per my usual routine, after getting ready, I call the closing office at around 9:30. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: “Is everything ready for 12 today?”

Them: “I don’t have a closing set up for today anymore.”

Me: “Um, why not?”

Them: “I was called by the lender yesterday and told to reschedule it for the 16th. I asked if I needed to let everyone know and they said they already have.”

Me: “Shit. It would have been nice if Wells Fargo would have informed the most important people in the transaction, my buyers, that they didn’t need to take the day off of work anymore because they’re not closing.”

That conversation led to a little reflection on past lender experiences, so I figured I would share a little of what I’ve learned.

Never, ever, Ever, EVER, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever choose and out-of-state or online lender. They rarely turn out well. Let’s get this out of the way: You will not save money. If you do, it will be a negligible amount. Don’t let the “no closing costs options” and the “3.99% interest rates” and such fool you. You ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT in one form or another. Here’s what they don’t say on those advertisements:

-> No Closing Costs Option – Most lenders can offer this if you simply ask. Want to know why most people don’t choose this option? They jack up your interest rate to MORE THAN cover what closing costs you would have normally paid. You’ll end up paying those closing costs several times over in higher interest over the life of the loan.

-> 3.99% Interest Rate (or whatever low amount you’re offered) – Most lenders can offer deeply discounted interest rates, but again, somebody’s going to pay for it. It’s called a rate buy-down, or buying points. Don’t want to pay 5%? Sure, buy that sucker down to 4%. It’s going to cost you more cash up front, but it can definitely be done.

Out-of-state and online lenders are always hard to work with. Think about it for a second. If you’re looking at a home in Huntsville, AL, are you going to call a Realtor from San Francisco to come down here and show you houses? Of course not. Out-of-area people don’t know or understand our market. They don’t have contacts in our market. Hell, it almost takes an act of Congress to get them to get an appraisal ordered. It’s just much harder to get things accomplished when you don’t know the people you’re working with.

The average time from contact to closing, locally, is around 3-4 weeks. I’ve NEVER had an out-of-area lender close one in under 5 weeks. I’ve NEVER seen a buyer save money by using an out-of-area lender. On the contrary, most tend to get hit with lots of bogus and higher-than-average fees. The biggest and best reason to never use an out-of-area lender is simple. If/When something screws up, you can’t march down to their office and get things done. You get the runaround. Think about calling a credit card company trying to get an issue resolved. You have to talk to 30 different people to find out what the hell’s going on. Who want’s to do that with the biggest purchases of their lives? Not me.

That’s not to say that EVERY experience is like that. Just the ones I’ve had. Like:

-> Purchaser was pre-approved to purchase a home. Two months later, and three mortgage officers later, my purchaser was no longer approved to purchase the home of their dreams due to a “lender oversight”.

-> Purchaser was pre-approved (used lendingtree to find a lender) by an out-of-area lender. Two months later, after multiple calls to numerous supervisors, we close. Purchaser ended up paying over $1,500 more in closing costs than they would have with a local lender.

-> Purchaser was pre-approved with an out-of-area lender. After 45 days of no progress, the lender then decided the purchaser could no longer obtain financing. The purchaser went to a local lender, was approved, and closed on their home in under 3 weeks.

Don’t get me wrong, choosing a local lender isn’t always a guarantee of a fairytale ending. You can choose a local screw-up, too. They’re just less common. It’s all about the numbers. An extremely high percentage of out-of-area lenders tend to have trouble closing a loan smoothly here, while a low percentage of locally originated loans tend to end badly. I don’t think it has so much to do with the Huntsville area as much as it has to do with the fact that these lenders don’t close enough volume in this area.

Choosing a Lender

Most importantly, choose the mortgage OFFICER first, then the company. Follow your instincts. Never choose the “full of shit” guy/gal. You know who I’m talking about. There’s one in every family. If you’re talking to a lender, and you say to your husband/wife, “He kind of reminds me of Uncle John”, and Uncle John is one of the most “full of shit” people you’ve ever known…..run. Don’t just walk, get the hell out of there. I promise you, it’s the right decision. They’ll only tell you what you want to hear and they suck all of the air out of the conversation and will never get anything done. If you have to fight to get a word in….the next word you should say is “NEXT”.

You can tell when someone knows what they’re talking about. Choose them. Just try to start locally and go from there.

I’ve always debated the pros/cons of user registration. Originally, the pros of user registration focused on the content. Now, with addresses available to the public, that takes a big bite out of the need for it. Favorite Homes were another big reason. Not anymore. Favorites can be handled via cookies with no registration (But you’d be SOL if your browser security settings didn’t accept cookies). The only real benefit of user registration, AS IT STANDS TODAY, is access to Sqft, list date, and approximate age. That’s about it. Anything else I can think of can be accomplished without forcing registration.

The Supposed Quandry

If you ask any Realtor….anywhere….that utilizes user registration, they’ll live and die by it. Some will even force you to register to see the exact same information you can get for free in other places. Why? Sales. Every registration is a potential sale. Every user is someone actively looking at homes, and has now provided a means to be contacted by. I HATE that. I really do. I have NEVER sold a house to someone because they registered on my site. NEVER. Could I have? Definitely. If I wanted to push hard, sure I could convert some of those users into sales, but that’s not how I roll. I don’t like to be pressured to do anything, and I sure as hell won’t do the same to someone else.

Obviously, that puts me in an interesting position. I still have to make a living, but I also have to do what’s right. Like I’ve said many times, Don’t Sell, Don’t Eat. Take the address issue for example. I fought for quite a while to get addresses displayed. We finally got them. Want to know the irony? I think it hurt my business some, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t expected. Why call me when you can drive by the house to see where it’s at and call the number on the sign if you need anything else? Why the hell would you call ME over someone else? (Obviously, I’d say “Because I’m a great buyer’s agent, etc., etc.) But if you’ve never met me, how do you KNOW that? Granted, some people think they’ll get a better deal by working with only the listing agent (which is false because the listing agent is bound to get the best price for the SELLER, not them), or they’ll save money (which is also false. Either the listing agent gets 100% of the commission, or they split it with the buyer’s agent 50/50).

That all leads to the reason why the Level 10 Realty website is as successful as it is. My goal HAS to be to push innovation. My goal HAS to be to give you a reason to stay on my site. My goal HAS to be to prove that I’m a great buyer’s agent. Otherwise, my site will simply fall into obscurity and Level 10 Realty will be just another interesting idea that never panned out. You guys are the ones that keep Level 10 going. If it weren’t for all of you, I’d be designing websites in a dark room all day. It’s all about YOU.

OK, I’m all for trying anything to sell a house. I mean, it’s what we do. Don’t sell? Don’t eat. Simple as that. That’s why you’ll see a wide variety of advertising in this business. Anything from creative to great to bad to stupid to just plain shitty. Some people know how to market themselves and their listings, some don’t. I’m not quite sure what to think about this one. I’ll let you decide. Below is the main photo for this home:

The positives of using a photo like this as the main photo of the home (as best as I can tell) are as follows: It’s definitely different. It stands out from all of the other photos of homes as you pass by them and it provokes some interest. Hell, I’m doing a blog post about it because I thought it was interesting. The agent has excelled in that facet of their job to market the home. Unfortunately, there’s a big gap between getting interest in a home and selling it. There’s that whole deal about actually getting people to come look at it.

Edit: Since writing this post last night, it appears that the agent has included more 2010 photos of the house instead of 1800’s. I could nit-pick some of the interior photos, but overall, they’re pretty decent. I can’t really fault anything else about it. So, if you need 40 acres and a mule in Tennessee (and $750K laying around) this home COULD BE YOURS (in my best Billy Mays voice)!

First off, I’ve been working on getting an ACTUAL native iPhone App finished. Maybe it will be in the next couple of days, then on to the Apple Approval Process.

Second, I’m concerned about the speed and performance of the website. I’ve made a couple of minor improvements with the photos, but the flyer page still takes too long to load for my liking. The reasons are a combination of the slideshow, google map, the analytics program, and tabbed interface. I’ve went ahead and removed the slideshow from the main tab and moved it to its own tab while leaving the main photo on the main tab.

Third, I’ve added a new feature to the flyer page called “tweets”. One question that people have when buying a home, especially from out of area, is “What’s it like to live there?” The Tweets tab may help a little. Its purpose is to poll Twitter for all status updates within 5 miles of the home you’re looking at. It’s there to give you an idea of what’s going on locally. I”ll add this functionality to the Level 10 Mobile Version soon.

Fourth, look for more upcoming video posts. I have an idea that I want to try out. We’ll see how that goes.

That’s it for the moment!

Ok, here’s another edition of MLS Photos Gone Wrong. During my search for photos, I actually found a fantastic photo. No, really, I did. Professional Quality. No shit. I got excited, clicked to view more, and boom. Polished Turd. There’s no way that photo was taken by that agent. To be honest, I’m not even sure if it was with the same house All of the others had NO resemblance to the great looking one. Oh well, there went that. Anyway, back to the project at hand. Photos for your pleasure:

I’ve recently come across a great residential land development opportunity for you investors and developers out there. I have 158 acres of prime development land for sale in East Limestone. The sellers will also divide the land into smaller 40 or 80 acre tracts if the situation dictates. Although the land is in East Limestone, it is directly across the street from Huntsville City Limits and annexation should go off without a hitch if the owner decided to do so.

Pricing is as follows:

40 Acres: $1,160,000

80 Acres: $2,160,000

158 Acres: $3,950,000

Below is a little more information from the site.

This development site is 158 acres with 1,250 linear feet of road frontage on Huntsville Brownsferry Road, as well as an additional 1,000 linear feet of road frontage on Newby Road. This property just had a million dollar sewer line ran through the middle of the property from Huntsville Brownsferry to Newby Road.

This property is located in the center of two major growth regions: Eastern Limestone County and Madison City. Housing values have continued to increase throughout this credit crunch and mortgage crisis, and jobs are coming to the area at a rate not seen since the mid 60’s.

This is a great opportunity to obtain land in one of the best cities in America and in the heart of strong economic growth. This property sits 4 miles from the heart of Madison and approximately 5 miles from direct access to I-65. Commercial and residential developments surround this property from nearly every direction.

For more information, along with maps and layouts, please visit the Huntsville land development site I’ve set up.

Level 10 Realty is pleased to announce a partnership with Brentwood Village in Madison, Alabama. With upscale homes starting in the $200’s, Brentwood is located along Huntsville Brownsferry Road only 4 Miles to the Madison Publix Shopping Center. I will personally handle all information and requests that you may have. The Brentwood Village website will give you some more insight into our community.

A little bit of a side project that I’ve been working on is an update to the User Interface for HomeScene. I’m going to sort of open up the development of the project to you guys so that I can get some feedback along the way. The updated version is at level10realty.com/beta. Now, keep in mind, this will be the actual testing site, so at any time, you could go there and it could be totally hosed if I’m doing any work on it. This is far from a finished product, but I’d love to get everyone’s input along the way. Here’s a screenshot of where it’s at:

As if it wasn’t hard enough getting you guys accurate home information before, it just got a little harder. Apparently, and coincidentally a month after addresses are able to be displayed, the MLS will no longer provide latitude and longitudes in the data feed. What does this mean? Without latitude and longitude, you can’t have markers on a search map (well, you could, but it would be slow as hell because every single address would have to be manually geocoded on the fly….VERY slow). Basically, this means that it’s up to the data feed subscribers (read: me and about the 2 or 3 other people this really matters to) to find their own damn way to get them. It took a little bit of time, but I’ve come up with something that appears to work, so, problem averted for now. From what I can tell, the latitudes and longitudes appear to be pretty accurate, but we’ll keep a close eye on them.

iPhone Map Bug

Fortunately, it looks like this one is solved. There should be absolutely no map issues on the iPhone app any longer. If there is, please let me know.

Twitter Search

I updated the user interface on the Twitter Search just a bit to match the rest of the site.

News & Updates

I’ve removed the link to my blog (which was dummy for the time being anyway) and added a news and updates link. I’m not exactly sure how I want to utilize this yet, but I’ll figure out something soon.

As of now, the official “Beta” version is live and ready to be tested. Simply go to http://www.mobilehsv.com in your iPhone. Will it work on Android or WebOS? Who the hell knows? I don’t have the hardware to test those out. This is definitely a work in progress and has some strides to make before I have it officially converted into a native iPhone Application.

So, what can the Mobile Version Do?

Realistically? Almost everything my website can….and a little more. Search by subdivision, MLS Number, Address (which I actually don’t have on the “standard” website yet), and new listings as they come on the market. I’ve also added a favorites section. On the Level 10 website, you have to be logged in to save favorites (really the only way to keep track of them). The mobile version utilizes what’s called local storage, so you save your favorites without ever having to log in. It’s all updated in real time.

I’ve added a Twitter search to the app. Clicking on Huntsville Tweets will open the default Twitter search for the word “Huntsville”. You can do your own searches from the app if you’re looking for something in particular.

The best way to experience this app is to go to mobilehsv.com and bookmark it to your home screen. You’ll be able to view the app in full screen mode and most of the animations work better and faster.

Lastly, what would any mobile real estate application be without a location based map search? Find out what’s around you anywhere you go.

What are the Known Bugs/Problems?

Well, there’s a few of them right now. The biggest one, that I’m having the worst time trying to fix is with the map. If you do a search that is not map based, then go back to the map, it acts really screwy.

I’ve spent two days trying to keep this from happening. I have no clue. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a simple fix any time you run into this. Simply rotate the phone, and rotate it back and Viola!

Next, the Add to Favorites button is not very cooperative. When a listing is added to your favorites, the application will let you know, but you still have to be careful and make sure that you hit the “+” button. The first time seems to be a little buggier than each time after that.

This is not a blazing fast application. It’s great over wi-fi, pretty good over 3G, but it’s pretty bad over EDGE…but then again, just about everything is.

This application is meant to be viewed in Portrait Mode 99% of the time. The only time I would recommend viewing in landscape mode is when you look at the home photos. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll work fine in landscape, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on it that way.

When you add the app to your home screen and then start it up, it can stay on the loading screen for up to 15 seconds. That may not seem like a lot of time, but it kind of is. I’m still seeing what I can do to improve the speed.

What does the future of the App Have in store?

Continued support and bug fixes are at the top of my list. ANY time any of you run into a bug, PLEASE let me know. Feel free to send me an email or comment below. If I get enough support from you guys, I could start a Google Group or something to continue to work on it.

Compatibility with different mobile browsers will follow if you guys make the iPhone version a success.

Notifications – How many homes have come on the market since you last looked, etc. – is a future addition that I’m looking forward to, but not going to happen within the next month or two.

ScreenShots

Alright, there was your overview of the main issues. The app is really simple to figure out. Below are some screenshots of what is now online. Good Luck!

In the midst of everything else I’m working on right now (iPhone App….still about a week out), I’m going to give HomeScene a large user interface upgrade. This will clean up things, and hopefully make it a much better, and more useable product.

For some reason, it looks as if the MLS has stopped publishing the Latitudes and Longitudes for the newest listings. This could cause some problems while I look into the issue.

Thursday or Friday, I’m going to start the process of moving the server that level10realty.com is on to a new server. During that process (up to 48 hours) you may experience some strange issues, or may not be able to find the site. If you do have issues, please try again later.

Thanks!

I thought this was an interesting front porch:

Vampires are pretty popular right now. Maybe this agent is taking a different marketing approach to the night owls?

The new website is up and running! There may still be some problems, so if you see anything, let me know and I’ll get them fixed. The most noticeable change to the site is the completely overhauled map based search. We’ve now included color-coded markers that display approximately how long the home has been on the market, the “ignore” feature, and several other great new features. The best part is that it’s all self-contained. No more clicking back and forth and opening new windows.

One thing to note: If you are running a resolution of 1024 x 768 or less, some of the new features are gonna suck for you. They’re simply not made to be displayed at such a low resolution. Anything over 1024 should be fantastic.

Also, as you will notice, with the hard work of some great Realtors, addresses are now able to be displayed on Internet searches. Kudos to everyone that played a part in helping get our MLS into the 21st century.

I have several other things to write about, but I’ll get to those soon!