realestate Archives - Page 8 of 12

Preaching to the Choir

Written by Elise Loan Tucson on October 22, 2018. Posted in Home Loan. Leave a Comment

Whatever you like to do in your spare time (keep it legal), I would like to recommend that you carve out a little time to read a book called All Marketers Tell Stories by Seth Godin. You’ll enjoy it, I promise, but if you don’t, send a letter to Mr. Godin instead of sending one to me.

From the book jacket, we read, “All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, even if it is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better – and look cooler – than $20 no names . . . and believing it makes it true.”

No major “aha” moment in that piece, right, but it did make me think of our industry. As real estate and mortgage professionals, we do this to some extent all the time – and there’s nothing wrong with that. For example, an agent is showing a home that has breathtaking views to her client and notices that he has that same look in his eye that a young man gets when he’s fallen in love (or lust). The agent knows it’s time to seal the deal on the house, but the client asks one last question in something akin to a hormone-infused stupor: “How are the schools in the area?”

If the local schools were notorious for churning out criminals, meth heads, and homicidal maniacs all the while breaking records for the lowest graduation rates in the state four years in a row, an ethical agent wouldn’t evade the truth and just tell a fluffy story. However, if the schools were just average, she’s not going to say, “Meh, they’re average.” She’s going to tell a wonderful (true) story about how three of her friends graduated from the local high school and went on to have very productive lives,and the client’s going to believe her because he WANTS it to be true. He really couldn’t care less that the agent’s friends, alumni of the local high school, are productive members of society.

Mr. Godin goes on to say that to be a successful marketer, confine your efforts to those people who share your world view (his words) rather than trying to convert people over to your way of thinking. The moment I read that little piece of advice, the words “preaching to the choir” immediately popped into my head, but it made sense. In our industry, many of us spend time, energy, and money on trying to convince people living in apartments that they’ll be better off if they gave notice to their landlords and bought a house. We have the numbers to PROVE how wise a move that would be, right? However, Seth (I feel I’m on a first-name basis with him now) tells us that we should leave the converting up to our customers and keep marketing to the people who are already singing our tune. He adds that when someone is already converted to our world view (usually through the efforts of a friend), they’ll embrace our stories and buy what we have to sell; buyer’s remorse doesn’t exist.

Whether you’re reading this while sipping wine from a $20 glass or a $1 mug, this much is true: this one little tweak to our marketing can make a huge difference. We may not save enough money to trade in our Touaregfor a Cayenne (or buy a Touaregfor that matter), but we’ll look and feel cooler regardless of the shoes we’re wearing.

Happily Ever After

Written by Elise Loan Tucson on October 15, 2018. Posted in Home Loan. Leave a Comment

Most weeks, I try to share an insight or a tip I recently came across or an epiphany I had that I believe might help you in your business. This week’s edition is about something I already knew (and I would hope you did, too), but I believe it’s worth mentioning again.

A few weeks back, I was attending one of my closings with a very nice married couple (I attend all my closings, not just the ones with nice married couples) when we got through about half the mile-high stack of paperwork for the buyers to sign when the husband asked if he could take a quick break to use the restroom. Upon his return, he picked up his pen to continue with the signing, and just as the escrow officer was about to hand him and his wife the next document to sign, he apologized for the break and went on to explain that he had gone to the bathroom to compose himself.

He had become overcome with emotion and wept tears of joy because this is the first house he and his wife of 30 years had been able to purchase. A little over a year ago, they quit their jobs in California without any prospect of jobs here in Arizona, packed up everything they owned into a U-Haul truck, and made the move. “We lived in California for almost 30 years, and we could never afford to buy a house,” he explained, “but in just fourteen months of living here, and we’re moving into a house WE OWN!” Before the escrow officer and I started to get misty eyed, the wife hit us with another shot right in the feels.

About twelve years ago, they had gone to a new development to look at houses, and she had fallen in love with one design that had a turret like one found on a castle. She told her husband that when they are able to buy their first house, she wanted it to look like a castle. Fast forward to 2018: when they were working with their agent to find them a home here in Arizona, they never mentioned this to him as one of the criteria for their ideal home. They had made a full-price offer on one house that had been on the market for about four months, but the seller was . . . strange, to say the least, and ultimately refused their offer. A few days after resuming their search, their agent called and told them he found a house that he thought they would really like. When they pulled up to the property to meet with the agent, the house had a turret. It was her castle!

There are many reasons we all got into the real estate/mortgage business, but they all have a common thread: money. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. Unless you’re independently wealthy because you bought Apple stock back in 1985 or you have an enormous trust fund, you have to have a means to get money to pay your bills and support yourself. That’s a cold, hard fact.

However, if money is the ONLY reason you began and remain in the real estate world, that can only sustain you for so long. It’s experiences like the one I just shared that give meaning to the reason we take phone calls at 11:45 pm on a Thursday and drive all over creation to get documents signed. Of course, the paycheck is a means to an end, but unless you enjoy the journey, it’s not going to be a very happy ending.

The Kids Are Alright

Written by Elise Loan Tucson on October 8, 2018. Posted in Home Loan. Leave a Comment

Someone much wiser than I – which, let’s be honest, is a fairly large group that might have trouble finding a meeting space big enough to get together – once shared this little nugget with me: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” As mortgage and real estate professionals, we’re required to take a gajillion hours of classes and then take a crazy confusing test JUST to get our licenses, so it’s natural to think we know a lot right out of the gate and that the world is just waiting for us to share it with them – and that feeling of being omniscient only grows over time. (I’ll pause here if that last sentence made you laugh and caused you to shoot milk or another beverage through your nose and onto your keyboard.)

The cold hard truth, really, is that someone with absolutely no experience in our industry could run circles around a 20-year veteran if she follows my friend’s advice and the veteran relies solely on his expertise. Paperwork, forms, negotiation, the art of the deal: all of these things can be learned along the way (and fine tuned and improved, of course, over time), but understanding the client, her needs, her goals, and her viewpoint HAS TO take place BEFORE anything moves forward. Failing to do so or expecting to learn it along the way will only lengthen the process far more than necessary and waste a lot of time.

With that said, I have to make a confession: until I read a recent article from NerdWallet, an online financial consulting company, I thought Millennials (as a homebuyinggroup) were just a bunch of whiners living in their parents basement waiting for an inheritance. Obviously, I didn’t seek to understand; I just thought everyone understood and shared my viewpoint.

For the sake of reference, Millennials are those folks who were born between 1981 and 1997: 21-37 year olds. Here are some of the items the smart ones over at NerdWalletshared in their article that caused me to look at this group of 66 million people a little differently:

•Median age for first-time homebuyers in 2015 was 31 years old as compared to 30.6 in 1970-74

•Two-thirds of these folks haven’t even reached that homebuyingage of 31, and 22% are under 25

•Millennials are renting for a median of six years before buying as compared to five years in 1980

•Millennials are expected to form 20 million new households by 2025

Also, to add further to my understanding, Fannie Mae conducted a survey among Millennials and found that more than a majority had a positive outlook about purchasing a home; two-thirds of the respondents felt it was a good time to buy even after the housing market collapse. Looks like these young folks DO want to purchase a home!

Lastly, Fannie Mae’s survey found that one of the biggest factors keeping Millennials from buying a home is perception, not reality. When the surveyors dug into the answers of “renting is a more affordable option” and “cannot obtain a mortgage”, they found that these answers were largely based on the belief that a 20% down payment is required and a 750+ credit score is the low bar. (Some of you may be shooting milk through your nose again. I’ll wait.) Reality is more like 3-5% and a credit score of 600+, generally speaking.

There’s a giant wave of Millennials coming, and they obviously need to be educated. Are you ready? If you want to make yourself even more invaluable to this huge bloc of future homebuyers, offer to teach them how to drive a car with a clutch.

A Case for Condos

Written by Elise Loan Tucson on October 1, 2018. Posted in Home Loan. Leave a Comment

Condos with Priority Lending LLC

In one of my high school English classes, I was taught the difference between “denotative” and “connotative” definitions of words. Let’s use the word “pig” as our example. The denotative definition of pig is its actual definition: a four-legged creature from which we obtain, among other things, that food of the gods we know as bacon. The connotative definition is broader and relates to what the word evokes by way of feeling or image. For example, “pig” could evoke an image of someone who eats too much or has horrible housekeeping habits (two people with whom you might be reticent to share your bacon). In other words, it’s sort of like fact (denotative) versus feeling (connotative).

The word “condo” evokes all sorts of different images and opinions depending on the person and her/his walk of life. To some, the word calls to mind a place where a single guy with a cheesy mustache lives with sports memorabilia and questionable art on the walls where he holds weekend parties for similarly minded cheesy mustache guys and women who like that sort of thing. To others, a condo evokes memories of a beach side retreat where your neighbors go and have invited you for a weekend where your son got stung by a jellyfish and your daughter got a raging sunburn. And to many of us in the real estate/mortgage world, “condo” means a lot of not-so-pleasant things that are less preferable than walking on broken glass, drinking bleach, or pouring lemon juice into an open wound. We’ll come back to this.

Perfect Time To Look At Condos

Available inventory is already at low levels, which is making it very hard for people to buy a home, especially their first one. Add to that the fact building materials are more scarce (read: getting more expensive) because of the recent hurricanes and their devastation, you’re facing a reality that a traditional single-family residence is becoming harder to obtain. Now is a very good time to look at condos. For those of you who are already well versed in how to navigate a condo sale, you can either stop reading here with the new-found knowledge of the difference between a denotative and connotative definition (you’re welcome) or stick around because I have good news for you. For those of you who just felt physically ill at my pronouncement, I promise the same good news for you, too. And for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about concerning the pitfalls of condo sales, stick with me here and continue your life of ignorance and bliss.

As I mentioned earlier, many find the selling and financing of a condo to be below a tonsillectomy on the fun scale, and there’s good reason for that: there seems to be an endless number of boxes that have to be checked and certifications cleared to close the transaction. While that’s still true for some condos, what would you do if your lender could provide you with a list of properties that are already approved and don’t have to go through that long and laborious box-checking process? Suddenly, in my opinion, it would make selling a $230,000 condo just as attractive as selling a $230,000 single-family residence (which may or may not exist in an area where your client would want to live). And in case you missed my less-than-subtle hint, we CAN provide such a list and package. One more point in the case for condos: the fastest-growing demographic in home sales is single women – they’re outpacing single men by almost 2 to 1 in home purchases – and these same women are showing a preference for a condo over a single-family residence. That will definitely improve those mustache-heavy parties, right?

If you need anymore help get in contact with us today at Priority Lending Mortgage.

Wait is a Four-Letter Word

Written by Elise Loan Tucson on September 24, 2018. Posted in Home Loan. Leave a Comment

Over 88 years ago, on April 18, 1930 for the 8:45 p.m. news broadcast, the BBC’s news reader came on the radio and had nothing to communicate. He had been handed a script that he was to read – “There is no news” – so he read exactly that. Following those four brief words, piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment before returning to broadcasting from Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed. Simpler times!

Whether you view it like the kid who learned how to make crude sounds with his hand and armpit that you found funny in third grade for three or four days before it got old or like the latest flu that will pass in less than a week, the news comes in cycles that burn out after a while and we turn our attention to something else. One of those news cycles near and dear to our hearts in the real estate/mortgage world, of course, concerns millennials and why they’re holding off on buying their first homes. I realize that news cycle has run its course, and it was more than a few cycles back, but this is my newsletter, so I’ve decided to bring it back. Humor me. I promise it’ll be better than armpit sounds and far easier to take than a flu.

After a lot of virtual and literal hand wringing, the pundits told us that there were many reasons millennials were holding off on making their first home purchase. One of the chart toppers was student loan debt. Another one that ranked right up there with student loan debt was an unsure job market. Without a doubt, those are two major considerations/reasons that will affect ANY home purchase, especially a first one, so please don’t think I’m making fun of them, because I’m not. My particular favorite, though, is sort of a catch-all reason that is both declarative and ethereal at the same time: the Baby Boomers ruined the economy! Now, with this one, I am gonna make a little fun of it – just a little. Using “the Baby Boomers ruined the economy” as the reason for not buying a home is like Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, saying ticket sales have fallen because the paper companies are gouging him on paper prices. In other words, it’s a general answer that doesn’t REALLY answer the question.

As that particular news cycle about millennials and home sales began to burn out, nothing too definitive was ever revealed –much like most episodes of the evening news – so our attention was drawn elsewhere. When this happened, the smarter agents and mortgage professionals put some lotion on their hands (for the wringing, not the armpit thing) and decided to focus on other ways to find prospective home buyers. One of the most effective focuses I’ve seen lately is down-payment-assistance programs. Hear me out!

Yes, past issues of this newsletter have centered around the reasons DPA programs aren’t the best thing for your clients, and all of those reasons still hold true. The reason, though, that I say it’s been wise for agents/LOs to focus on DPA programs is that they catch buyers’ attention. This is sort of like the weight-loss commercials that show an obese man with a 28” neck and a 48” waist in the before picture and the same man with a 28” waist and a 48” chest in the after picture with tiny writing that reads “results not typical”. No, I’m not suggesting a bait-and-switch scenario. I’m merely saying that talking about a DPA program gets the phone ringing because it causes people to wonder if a DPA program is right for them. Once the agents and LOs can get the people reaching out to them, they can start a conversation and get them what they REALLY need. Such an approach makes far more sense than waiting around to learn why someone is waiting around, wouldn’t you agree?

Tag: realestate