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MARIN REAL ESTATE BLOG

 

Aug 12

Ross Valley Sanitary Continues to Work on Clarifying Admin Process for New Inspection Ordinance

By Marin Association of Realtors, Marin Real Estate News, Ross Valley Sanitary

Good day MAR members!

Here in the dog days of summer, not much to do except fret about the Ross Valley Sanitary District! For those of you more interested in “above ground” matters, enjoy the warm days and great weather. I’m trying not to get too bummed about the Giants’ latest struggles while I wait for the NFL and college football seasons to start. Those stories offer a simpler and inherently more pleasant subject matter.

Oh, but the sewers!! I promise at the end of this memo you will find some good news, so please read on.

Last Thursday morning, MAR CEO Andy Fegley, President-Elect Matt Hughes, and I were back at the Ross Valley Sanitary District offices at another “working group” meeting. District staff was happy to share with us their progress on creating a clear administrative process for the new ordinance. However, we quickly realized that the practical matter of how this ordinance will affect the sale of a home was still untouched.

It all comes down to the matter of items 10.1 and 10.2 of the ordinance, which state that the timeframe of repair is at the discretion of the district’s engineer. The district’s engineer was at the meeting, so Andy asked him what is going to trigger the need for an immediate repair. He couldn’t tell us. We asked if there was sewage flowing down a hillside, would an immediate repair be necessary, and he said yes. Beyond that, he couldn’t tell us when a repair would need to be completed. We spent the remainder of our meeting making a clear argument for removing the need for repair from the escrow process.

We were asked by one of the inspectors why everyone wouldn’t just get their sewer line replaced before going to market? I had to gently explain that everyone doesn’t have an extra $7-10k sitting around in addition to whatever money they were going to spend on painting, flooring, landscaping, staging, etc. The notion of a “liquidity event” at close of escrow had to get drilled in over and over. I explained that $7-10k…or $25k or more… on “above ground” improvements will offer a vast return on investment…tens of thousands…sometimes hundreds of thousands…of dollars in extra sales price if it’s spent in the right places on the house…money that can then be spent on paying for the sewer repair. Money that’s available at the liquidity event. At and after close of escrow. This finally clicked with the district.

The following email came from Greg Norby, the RVSD General Manager, on Friday afternoon – HERE. Net-net, they’re backing off for now. Though the RVSD Board will need to vote on it at their next meeting…on August 27th…Norby is going to propose a 30-60 day postponement of the implementation of the ordinance to either the beginning or end of October. I’m going to strongly advocate for the latter date, as that will take us into November and the holiday season is one of the slower times in the Marin real estate marketplace. That’s a much better time to roll out a new ordinance…rather than September, which is the start of Marin’s second busiest season for real estate.

Also, they’re starting to get it as it relates to the need to have a simple process, and it appears Norby is going to advocate for a 1-page form that buyer and seller will sign, acknowledging the need for a repair and promising to get it done as quickly after escrow as possible…without holding up escrow.

Hang in there MAR, we are hoping for a fully-baked process in the coming months, not a half-baked, figure-it-out-as-you-go process three weeks from now.

That’s it for now!

I wish you a safe and prosperous week.

Blaine Morris
2014 MAR President

Aug 04

Zillow Buys Trulia, But What Does that Mean for Realtors? MAR Monday Memo 08/04/14

By California Association of Realtors, Marin Association of Realtors, Marin Real Estate News

Good morning MAR members!

Another quick memo for this week, the dog days of summer give us the quiet season for real estate…and news in general.

I’m back from vacation, re-entry was painful, but I survived. I love the summer here in Marin, as many folks are also out on vacation and thus it’s easy to get around, easy to get a reservation for dinner, easy to find parking. Well, easy to get around as long as you don’t get caught in one of our endless road construction projects around the county…everywhere you look, some road is dug up with a flagman…I guess I can stop calling it the quiet season and call it the road construction season!

ZULIA
While I was away, the big news was Zillow buying Trulia for $3.5 BILLION. Say that again…$3.5 BILLION. For a website.

The whole thing has created an immense amount of chatter in our industry. When I was at the Inman SF Connect conference several weeks ago, everywhere I turned the term “Big 3” came up as it related to consumer-facing real estate websites. Conventional wisdom was the “Big 3” dominated and everyone else in the far distance as far as relevance (Big 3=Zillow, Trula and Move/Realtor.com). For a while, it was the possibility of Trulia buying Move. I guess that’s not happening…so now it’s the BIG 1 (Zulia?), the smaller 2 (Move/Realtor.com), and everyone else.

I find myself remarkably nonplussed by this development.

Yes, there are a lot of competing views on the acquisition. Given that it’s summer vacation, people need to talk about something. The best summation of the news, for me, came from Cameron Platt. Cameron is a recent past-president of the Oakland Association of REALTORS® and was last year’s CAR Chairman of the statewide YPN (Young Professionals Network). This year, he sits on the CAR Executive Committee. Last week Cameron posted on Facebook what he described as the best summation he’d heard about the Zillow/Trulia deal: “Let me get this straight, one website just acquired another website, and that means that I can’t sell real estate anymore?”

EXACTLY.

Yes, there is much industry chatter out there. Brad Inman, Publisher of Inman News, described the move as “checkmate” in his article about the merger. Click here to read. Brad Inman proclaimed that Zillow was going to become the next Amazon, with everyone else as a rounding error. There are lots of competing views on Inman’s website, summarized here.

Some think this is huge news, others think it’s not news at all. Steve Tobak of Valleybeat, who writes on technology business, was decidedly uninspired by the deal. Click here to read.

I think our very own MAR member Mark McLaughlin summed it up best in his piece on the acquisition. Click here.

His analysis of the comparisons of Zillow to Amazon clarify one thing: Zillow isn’t becoming Amazon anytime soon, and to do so they would need to take over all the revenue of the entire real estate industry. Not likely.

Now, I agree that Zillow and Trulia are incredibly attractive websites that our customers visit with great regularity. But when you look at the numbers…$3.5 billion!…for a one-third of a combined company with $340M in annual sales…and neither of which currently makes any money yet…you wonder how the numbers will add up. Is it really a $10B company?

At the Inman SF Connect conference a few weeks ago, I heard Trulia CEO Pete Flint tell the audience that they were going to do for agents what they had done for consumers…he was going to provide us with the same fantastic level of tools and features that consumers enjoy. Really? It seems to me that to find a return on that $3.5 billion investment, Zulia is going to need to find new and creative ways to squeeze more money out of the agent community. Don’t forget, we are the largest source of revenue for these companies…for their increasingly marginal-quality leads. Those marginal-quality leads are about to get more expensive, most likely. Zulia’s shareholders will demand it.

OK, enough on that. Let’s focus on selling some houses.

Aug 04

Zillow Buys Trulia, But What Does that Mean for Realtors? MAR Monday Memo 08/04/14

By California Association of Realtors, Marin Association of Realtors, Marin Real Estate News

Good morning MAR members!

Another quick memo for this week, the dog days of summer give us the quiet season for real estate…and news in general.

I’m back from vacation, re-entry was painful, but I survived. I love the summer here in Marin, as many folks are also out on vacation and thus it’s easy to get around, easy to get a reservation for dinner, easy to find parking. Well, easy to get around as long as you don’t get caught in one of our endless road construction projects around the county…everywhere you look, some road is dug up with a flagman…I guess I can stop calling it the quiet season and call it the road construction season!

ZULIA
While I was away, the big news was Zillow buying Trulia for $3.5 BILLION. Say that again…$3.5 BILLION. For a website.

The whole thing has created an immense amount of chatter in our industry. When I was at the Inman SF Connect conference several weeks ago, everywhere I turned the term “Big 3” came up as it related to consumer-facing real estate websites. Conventional wisdom was the “Big 3” dominated and everyone else in the far distance as far as relevance (Big 3=Zillow, Trula and Move/Realtor.com). For a while, it was the possibility of Trulia buying Move. I guess that’s not happening…so now it’s the BIG 1 (Zulia?), the smaller 2 (Move/Realtor.com), and everyone else.

I find myself remarkably nonplussed by this development.

Yes, there are a lot of competing views on the acquisition. Given that it’s summer vacation, people need to talk about something. The best summation of the news, for me, came from Cameron Platt. Cameron is a recent past-president of the Oakland Association of REALTORS® and was last year’s CAR Chairman of the statewide YPN (Young Professionals Network). This year, he sits on the CAR Executive Committee. Last week Cameron posted on Facebook what he described as the best summation he’d heard about the Zillow/Trulia deal: “Let me get this straight, one website just acquired another website, and that means that I can’t sell real estate anymore?”

EXACTLY.

Yes, there is much industry chatter out there. Brad Inman, Publisher of Inman News, described the move as “checkmate” in his article about the merger. Click here to read. Brad Inman proclaimed that Zillow was going to become the next Amazon, with everyone else as a rounding error. There are lots of competing views on Inman’s website, summarized here.

Some think this is huge news, others think it’s not news at all. Steve Tobak of Valleybeat, who writes on technology business, was decidedly uninspired by the deal. Click here to read.

I think our very own MAR member Mark McLaughlin summed it up best in his piece on the acquisition. Click here.

His analysis of the comparisons of Zillow to Amazon clarify one thing: Zillow isn’t becoming Amazon anytime soon, and to do so they would need to take over all the revenue of the entire real estate industry. Not likely.

Now, I agree that Zillow and Trulia are incredibly attractive websites that our customers visit with great regularity. But when you look at the numbers…$3.5 billion!…for a one-third of a combined company with $340M in annual sales…and neither of which currently makes any money yet…you wonder how the numbers will add up. Is it really a $10B company?

At the Inman SF Connect conference a few weeks ago, I heard Trulia CEO Pete Flint tell the audience that they were going to do for agents what they had done for consumers…he was going to provide us with the same fantastic level of tools and features that consumers enjoy. Really? It seems to me that to find a return on that $3.5 billion investment, Zulia is going to need to find new and creative ways to squeeze more money out of the agent community. Don’t forget, we are the largest source of revenue for these companies…for their increasingly marginal-quality leads. Those marginal-quality leads are about to get more expensive, most likely. Zulia’s shareholders will demand it.

OK, enough on that. Let’s focus on selling some houses.

Jul 30

BAREIS Coming Soon Postings and the SEL Form – MAR Monday Memo, 07/28/14

By Marin Association of Realtors, Marin Real Estate News

Good day MAR members!

A little late on the Monday Memo today.  And a short memo this week, vacation style.

Greetings from a secret location at 10,000 feet.  Well, not that secret.  But this is the first campground in the past week that is dark on the grid.  No cell service, no 3G, no email, no text.  So I’ve got to go find a signal somewhere to beam this back to MAR.

We’ve been everywhere this week, it seems!  We left straight from the MAR board meeting last Tuesday, headed out to a family reunion.  We did Highway 50 across Nevada, the Loneliest Road in America.  We camped at 10,000 feet at Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park.  We camped in the canyon at Zion National Park.  We came back across Nevada via the Extraterrestrial Highway, which is even lonelier than the Loneliest Road in America.  Now we’re on the fringes of Yosemite up near the treeline.  A great week!

BAREIS NEWS

Before I left, we had a great board meeting.  The highlight came early, when MAR Member and BAREIS Class B Director David Egan gave his report from BAREIS to the MAR Board of Directors.  Dave has been terrific in his role this year, bringing a spirited common sense perspective as an active member of MAR.

Dave was a leader in the effort to get many of the fines at BAREIS reduced earlier this year.  The last time we met with him, in May, both he and the MAR Board agreed that offering a “coming soon” feature to the MLS would resolve a great deal of the off-market sales activity.  They have this feature in San Francisco, using the exact same Rappatoni system.  During conversations I had with many of you, the majority agreed that this would be a good thing.  MAR President-elect Matt Hughes wrote a compelling rationale for the concept and shared it with Dave to share with BAREIS.

Dave took this back to BAREIS and told us the matter was discussed at length during the last BAREIS Board of Directors meeting.  It appears they are giving it some serious consideration.

Last week, BAREIS sent all of us an email asking for our input on the subject of Coming Soon listings.  I encourage all of you to HERE and let BAREIS know what you think about that concept.

The other thing that Dave reported back was BAREIS’ ever-evolving position on the much-beloved “Authorization to Exclude” (SEL) form.  If there is anything that will get a MAR member’s blood boiling, it’s a discussion over BAREIS’ “Authorization to Exclude” form.  I myself got fined by BAREIS earlier this year for mis-, mal-, or non-feasance in my use of that form.  For the record, I still have that fine under appeal (my first fine ever!), but the BAREIS appeal process is a byzantine process…to put it politely.   But I digress, and that’s for another memo.

Back to the Authorization to Exclude form.  It’s an enormously cumbersome bit of overhead.  Over the past couple of months, BAREIS has chosen to step it up a notch further, with the plan to require Brokers to sign every single SEL, a document that BAREIS requires to be in its hands within 3 days.

Dave told us that there is a discussion to do away with the “return-to-BAREIS-within-3-days” rule.  Or evolve it.  You’d still have to get the form signed, but with it being the brokers’ responsibility to collect that form.

That certainly makes sense to me.  It’s up to the brokers to police all the other forms in a transaction…most of which carry legal and risk management consequences.  I don’t see why brokers can’t police the SEL form as well.

Also, just think of the productivity boost to the entire North Bay Real Estate ecosystem, with all the agents and brokers and staff and BAREIS staff not be collectively worried about one little form getting from point-A to point-B within three days.  Maybe go sell some more real estate?  Or spend time servicing our clients?

This all certainly sounds like a good idea to me.

What do you think?  You can let me know…or better-yet, you can let Dave Egan, our BAREIS Director, know by clicking HERE.  Just think of all the things we could all do with the “found time” we’d get back from the universe if the SEL process were streamlined?

WELCOME SHARON LUCE

In another bit of business at MAR, it is with great pleasure that I get to report that the MAR Board of Directors voted unanimously to appoint MAR member Sharon Luce to fill an open board seat for the remainder of 2014.  Sharon has previously served on the board, and we are excited to have her smart voice back in the room.

That’s it for this week, now back to my vacation

I wish you a safe and prosperous week.

Blaine Morris

2014 MAR President