Archive for the ‘Level Ten Realty’ Category

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about a potential change in our business model. I’ve always been a huge fan of the whole “Give Money Back to the Consumer” concept, and I even tried it for a short period of time a couple of years ago with great success. Well, here we go.

How Does it Work?

Simple. For any home over $100,000, I will provide 50% of Level 10 Realty’s total commission back to the consumer at closing. It can be used towards closing costs, upgrades, cash, or any other number of things as allowed by YOUR lender or mortgage company and Alabama Real Estate Law. For example, let’s say that you want to buy a $200,000 home. On most homes, 3% selling commission is very common. With that number in mind, $200K x 3% Commission = $6,000 total commission. You get $3,000. Who couldn’t use that kind of extra money on a purchase you were going to make anyway?

I don’t want to give you the impression that Level 10 Realty is becoming a “discount brokerage”. That term implies that you’ll get substandard service and that couldn’t be further from the truth. You will be getting second-to-none service and top-notch expertise.

Why is Level 10 Realty Doing This?

I’ve always been a fan of what Redfin is doing. Yeah, this is kind of biting their style, but it’s for a good cause. Think about it for a second. If I sell a $100,000 home at 3% commission, I’ll make $3,000. If I sell a $200,000 home at 3% commission, I’ll make $6,000. There is absolutely, positively NO DIFFERENCE in what is involved in selling the $100,000 home versus the $200,000 home. So, why do we get paid so much more?

That’s where I’m looking to make a change. In this economy, money is tight. You can’t walk in the door at WalMart without spending $100. Two people can’t eat fast food for under $10 anymore. Two people can’t go out and eat a good meal for under $30 anymore. Utility bills are higher than they’ve ever been. It’s time to get you more money, instead of taking it away. Real estate companies talk about how they’re different all the time. “We’re different that your normal Brokerage because we put the consumer first”, “We’re different because our agents are trained better and more often”, “We’re different because we’re different”, and so on and so forth. Bullshit. Here’s how I look at it. If a brokerage is not doing everything they can to put money back in your pocket, they are identical to every other brokerage on the planet.

With that said, do I hope that this plan of action will grow Level 10 Realty  and put more money in my pocket? Hell yes, but if I can grow Level 10 Realty while putting more money in your pocket than any other company will, doesn’t everyone win?

Ok, So What’s the Catch?

There is going to be an extended period of time to integrate this into our business model. So, until that transition is complete, there are a few things that you’ll need to do to get the money. The absolute, most important things that you HAVE TO DO to claim your money are as follows:

1. As you may think, you’ll need to purchase a home and Level 10 Realty will have to represent you in your purchase.

2. You MUST mention this special WHILE writing the offer to purchase your home. Real Estate Law prohibits any exchange of money between the purchaser and Realtor that is not written in the contract.

3. You must fill out a public customer satisfaction survey.

4. That’s it!

I look forward to working with each and every one of you!

First and foremost, we have a brand new subdivision search! I’ve never really liked the old one, so I decided to make it better. It works much like the Map Home Search. It will pull all of the available subdivisions that match your price criteria and are within the map area into the list on the right. There are a TON of new features with this search. You’ll just have to try it out and see!

*StreetView Controls have been added to both the subdivision map and the Home Search Map, so now you can view a much larger StreetView of a particular home or area.

*Within the next couple of days, I’ll be publishing a link to the “Old Map Search”. Most like the new version, but some like the old one better.

*The Flyer Details page has been redesigned.

*The Final improvement I’ll be making to the website, for the near future anyway, will be on the Search Homes Page to make it a little more user friendly. After that, I’m done for a while.

Depending on the events of the next two weeks, there could be a significant change in the business model for Level 10 Realty. We’ll see how things play out and I should be able to make a decision by the third week of this month. I’ll keep you posted!

We’ve all heard those three little words ad nauseum in the real estate world. The main reason is simply because it’s true. A great example is from when I was in San Francisco last year. I couldn’t resist picking up a few real estate magazines and looking at some houses on my iPhone just to see the differences in our worlds. It’s amazing to me that I could spend over $1,000,000 in San Francisco for something that I could spend $250,000 on in Huntsville. If that doesn’t get you wondering, the cost of living out there will. Of course, the same goes for any big city.

Anyway, back to the story I was telling before I was rudely interrupted by myself. Yesterday, I took a trip up to Nashville on business. The quickest way to get there is by taking I-65 and it normally takes about an hour and twenty minutes or so. Yesterday, I decided to take another route. I stayed away from the Interstate as much as possible because I wanted to enjoy the fantastic weather and change up the scenery a bit. I drove by some places that I haven’t been through in years and it was really refreshing. South Tennessee is full of absolutely beautiful land!

I thought to myself on numerous occasions, “Man, I would love to buy that spot of land and build a house at the very top of that hill. It would be great! It would be quiet and very peaceful. My nearest neighbor would be half a mile away. What’s not to love about it?” Then, reality would set in almost immediately. “Seth, there isn’t anything in South Tennessee. At all. You’d still have to drive to Huntsville to sell real estate. You’d still have to drive to Huntsville for shopping and dining. Have you bought gas recently? And you want to ADD drive time? Oh yeah, good luck getting those building materials to the top of that hill! So, Seth. why would you want to move up here again?” Damn. There goes that.

This type of scenario plays out in a lot of people’s minds on a regular basis. A real life example is the difference between buying a home in Madison and buying a home just outside of Madison in Limestone County. Four Score and seven years…..oh, sorry. Four years ago, selling a new home 4-5 miles West of Madison was easy. Why? A purchaser could buy a home with all the amenities of a Madison home (and more in most cases), on nearly twice the lot size, for $40-$50K or so less than the Madison home. Easy decision, especially considering how cheap gas prices were at the time. Hell, I was actually able to afford driving a big truck at the time!

That’s not the case anymore. Due to the growth, lot price increases, lot size decreases, building material increases, home price increases, a purchaser may only save $10K-$20K, if that. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a lot of money, but it’s not the “no-brainer” decision it was a few years ago. Is an extra 10-15 minute total drive time per day worth the extra $10k? What about the increased drive time to shopping and eating? For an increasing number of people, they would rather pay the extra $$$ and be closer to the action.

So, what does all of this mean?

I don’t know. Not much, something, who knows? It was an awesome day and I figured I should, at least, write something about it. If it means anything, great! If not, consider it an extremely long and pointless Tweet!

I have some “old school” buddies in the real estate business that don’t really do the “whole blog thing”, as they call it, but they always ask me about it. One thing that they’ve always asked me about is housing statistics. “Why don’t you do charts and provide statistics on the blog?”

Well, I do provide some statistics throughout the website with the neighborhood breakdowns and the combined area statistics, but when it comes down to year-over-year or quarter-to-quarter or month-to-month stats, I’ve simply chosen not to do them.

Why in the world not?

They Suck. That’s why.

I’m concerned with what happens from today forward. Statistics have absolutely no bearing on the future. While it’s true that they can indicate a particular direction, they’re absolutely worthless to me. Hell, statistics helped get us into the housing crisis. Why would someone pay $50,000 more than a house is really worth? Statistics. “Well, Mr. Parker, statistics show that homes in this neighborhood have been increasing in value for the past 12 years at an astounding rate. You’ll make a boatload of money in five years. Sign here and don’t forget to date it.” BOOM. A year later people start to get foreclosed on because they overpaid for the “perfect” house and the lender was all too happy to give them more than they could afford. Mortgage insured bonds start flopping because of the increase in foreclosures. Investors start to shy away from investing in the housing market, mortgages aren’t being bought and packaged into major funds at the rate they’re used to, lending gets tight because they can’t sell the loans so easily any more, fewer buyers are willing and able to buy, and we get a full blown mortgage/housing crisis.

Not to mention, like the saying goes, 87% of statistics can be made to say whatever you want them to. Anyone can manipulate statistics to promote their agenda. That’s why you have 1/2 of the financial analysts on TV saying that the economy is recovering, and the other 1/2 saying that it’s not over. No one knows because statistics are worthless as a whole. If they had any merit, everyone would be right about when the economy will recover.

Another problem with statistics is that we have to take them into context. If we were to look up sales data of November of 2009, we’d see an increase in sales from the same time last year. That’s great! Is that a sign of market recovery? Not necessarily. Why not? Oh, that’s right, we have to take into account the ton of people that bought homes to get in before the initial tax credit deadline. Of course, the deadline was later extended, but the homes were already under contract.

Let’s move on to December, January, and February. If we pulled sales data from these months, we would probably notice a drop in sales from a year ago. That sucks! Is that a sign of us falling deeper into an economic meltdown? Not necessarily. A lot of first time home buyers that probably would have waited to buy a home until the first of the year simply bought before the tax credit deadline to get their $8,000. It would take some type of adjustment to sales numbers to figure out what the “real” statistics were when you take out the volatility of the first-time buyers and other external factors. If we do that, though, now guess what? We’ve manipulated data to come up with more “accurate” numbers, and how accurate is manipulated data?

Therein lies the entire statistical problem. There are, and will always be, external factors that dictate sales. How about this new Health Care Bill? New President? New majority in Congress? Scandals? Grants? Budget Cuts? Taxes? Credits? Wars? Terrorist attacks? New housing laws? New lending laws? The list goes on and on. No statistics will ever be able to predict those factors and their effects on sales. The cynic will say, “Seth, that’s why statistics DO work, because there are always external factors and they all average out.” I can see their point, I just don’t agree with it because an external factor like war supersedes something like a government grant.

OK, we get it already.

I don’t mean this to be a hate fest on housing statistics. They can be useful for determining lots of things like “What offer should I start with?” or “How much should I take off what I’ll pay because it doesn’t have a garage” or things of that nature for a particular home. I just really don’t like “overall” or “area” statistics because they can be very misleading.

So, I said all of that to say this: The reasons above are why I haven’t posted statistics previously. I’ve been running this website for a little over two years and during that time, with over 100,000 total visits, I’ve never been asked by anyone to publish housing statistics. I’ve never really brought it up before, so this is my open letter to all of you. If you want me to publish them, email me at seth@level10realty.com or comment on the blog with your preference. If I get at least 3 or 4 requests, I’ll publish them because this site is here for all of your benefit. If I haven’t maximized its worth to you guys, I haven’t been doing my job.

(steps off the soapbox…)

Let me preface this by saying, I don’t have a marketing degree and I don’t own a retail store, so my thoughts here could be way off base. I do, though, own a real estate company and deal with lots of people on a regular basis, so I feel like I know a little bit about sales.

WHNT is a local news station here in the Tennessee Valley (my favorite, by the way) and below is an article that was published on their website yesterday:

David WoodWHNT Reporter/Videojournalist

March 19, 2010 – (Decatur, AL)- Spring break is a time when folks tend to let loose, often hitting the open road poised for whatever adventure comes down the pike. But traversing interstate 65 this week has been anything but a party. Most drivers need a vacation from their sink hole detour woes.

Some motorists are just plain angry. Empress Wood made the trip from Atlanta to visit family in the River City. She’s not impressed at all with the detour.

“It took me awhile to get through”, says Empress, “and this is just bazaar–ya’ll need to get it together down here.”

Just down highway 31 at the intersection of highway 67, Ronnie Tyler, an employee at Railroad Bazaar, says traffic has been so heavy through the area that customers aren’t even bothering to stop by.

“Fridays are usually really good for business”, Tyler says, “But with all this traffic, our customers can’t even get in!”

Ronnie also expressed his displeasure with vehicles that cut through the business’ parking lot, trying to save just a couple of seconds.

“Nothing but trucks, nothing but traffic”, he says. “It’s kind of like that Stephen King Movie ‘Maximum Overdrive’, just truck, after truck, after truck.”

“Fix the sink hole please!” Tyler pleaded. And that’s exactly what crews worked all night Friday to accomplish. They have to dig enough to find the source of the limestone cavity causing the sink hole. Until they find the source, they won’t know how to plug the hole.

So as the investigating and excavating continues, the now chasm of a sink hole grows deeper and wider. But with every scoop of dirt, crews are getting closer to solving the riddle of the Interstate 65 sink hole.

Though it might not be any consolation to folks making their way back from spring break bliss on Saturday, Johnny Harris with the Alabama Department of Transportation says, “Progress is definitely being made.”

Here’s the link if you want to see the original: http://www.whnt.com/news/whnt-sink-hole-sinks-business,0,2965483.story

Some of you may not get why I think this article is hilarious….others will. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. I will say this, though, I love Railroad Bazaar. I think they’re a great company and I still do business with them pretty regularly. I’m waiting to get a guitar back from them as we speak. Hell, I even worked at the Athens location one summer many years ago.

Ok, I promise I’ll stop messing with the site for a while! The basic structure of the site is still in tact. All of the pages are the same, they’re just designed a little differently. With that in mind, the site MAY be a little buggy until I get some of the kinks worked out. Please report any bugs you find!

So, what’s different?

The only major addition is the Live Feed Box in the navigation bar. Clicking on the link will drop down a box that shows brand new listings as they come available. You can check it from any page without interrupting what you’re doing. Personally, I think it’s pretty cool. Other than that, I’ve added some useful links at the bottom of each page, popped in a featured section, and added a Yelp! tab to the flyer page. The Yelp! tab will show all businesses and restaurants around the home that you’re looking at (as long as they’ve been reviewed by a user).

You’ll also notice a Twitter Search for Huntsville on the home page. Any time Huntsville is mentioned on Twitter, you’ll see it. Well, the last 50 times it was mentioned, anyway.

On Another note:

There’s a few more additions coming down the pipeline, but it looks like I’ll have to start playing my cards a little closer to the vest…but that’s a long story.

My, how times have changed. I thought this was pretty good, though. A picture is worth a thousand words.

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.

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.