Pat Kennedy - Your Washington, DC Real Estate Connection

The little old lady who owned my house until the mid-1970's loved wall paper.  She loved it so much that she papered virtually every surface in the house, including the ceilings!  After many years, it started to pull away, and the ceilings in the second floor bedrooms started to look like a wrinkled shirt.

Last month, a talented carpenter and painter repaired them, painted the rooms beautifully, and put in crown moulding.  And I was really happy with everything except - yes, there is sometimes and except!

They took down the three electronic smoke detectors and have only reinstalled one of them.  And now that it's been a month, I'm making myself crazy!

This got me to thinking about other projects.  I fondly remember my kitchen renovation contractor, not by the great job he did with the cabinetry, countertops and floors!  Not by the money he saved me!  It was the microwave installation that got screwed up took him weeks to come back and fix it - the repair itself took ten minutes.  And my new bathrooms?  I still have $2000 in an escrow account waiting for the contractor to do something about the marble vanity top that they chipped accidentally and have little interest in fixing (although I'm sure they'd like their money).

So where is this going? 

Well, it's about those calls we from a buyer or seller after settlement.  Often, they involve pretty minor stuff, and rather than jump in and continue with the great service we provided throughout the transaction, have we already moved onto the next deal?

Often these types of calls involved petty, pain in the foot stuff.  Where's my money from the water escrow?  When is the plumber coming to snake the drain in the bathroom shower? 

I think one of the ways we can make ourselves referable is by continuing to show our clients that we value them and their good will, not just during the transaction, but after settlement. 

Look at the way you choose who you send business to.  The guy who installed my central air was just wonderful.  So was the electrician who did the electrical upgrade that made it possible.  I recommend these people every chance I get. 

But the guy who did such a lovely job on my ceilings may have blown it!  And I'm hoping it will be easier for me to learn from his mistake than making a similar one myself!

Most of my first time buyers are the kids I forgot to have.  They are my cousin Kirk’s son, Adam, a handsome young Secret Service agent who makes me proud.  They are rookie Washington Post reporters or they have their first political job working on Capitol Hill.

But tomorrow I have a settlement with a first time buyer who doesn’t fit this picture.  This is a friend since the seventies.  He’s old.  He’s two months older than I am, he’s never been married, and he’s never owned a piece of real estate – until tomorrow! 

About ten years ago, I fixed him up with a friend with whom he had a long-term relationship, but there were some little complications and they didn’t make it to the altar. 

Drat!  I’d planned to provide the chamber music!

So, he’s buying my friend Cheryl’s house.  It’s perfect for him – the house I fixed him up with is a much better match than the friend I introduced him to. 

The house is cute.  It has fabulous vibes and feng shui.  Jeff has these little parties we call “Chirp and Burbs”, bad music and good food!  And the deck and back yard are totally perfect.  Then there are the neighbors – they are going to totally love him!  It’s one of those blocks where people talk to each other, walk each other’s dogs in an emergency, and have each other’s keys.

It’s an easy walk to Whole Foods and Guapo’s, my favorite place for margaritas and this amazing Cuban pork dish.

So he gets the keys tomorrow.  Tonight I’ve gotten three panicy emails.

Yikes!  What’r points?  Page 156 of my book, you idiot!

Yikes!  Will the really mean listing agent be there?  Yes.  We’ll deal with it.

Yikes!  Does the new roof have a warranty?  Yes. Pas de persperatione!

This guy is one of the people on this earth who I just love to bits.  If I wind up gumming Jello in a nursing home when I’m 105, I want Jeff to be there with me.

Dang!  I can’t believe I get paid real money to do this stuff!

Yesterday, I moved a bunch of stuff around to meet an appraiser at Rosedale Cottage - under contract!  Yippee!  With, you guessed it, a 21-day appraisal contingency! 

I was supposed to meet her at 11:00 am.  I showed up 10 minutes early, turned on lights, opened up the door to the lovely garden overlooking the spires of the National Cathedral and waited.  And waited.  And called her - no answer.  And wrote a blog post.  Waited some more.  Finally, at noon, I left.

Now, in addition to making the appointment the day before, I called in the morning to reconfirm, leaving a voice mail message when she did not answer.  During the wait, I tried a couple of more times.  Voice mail.

So this afternoon, she called again, like nothing had happened, to schedule an appointment.

Now, on such occasions, even I can be driven to snittiness.    But wait!  She's the appraiser!  I have to suck up!

So butter wouldn't melt in my mouth.  I was so sweet that, had it started to rain at that moment, I would have melted!

When I nicely asked her to call me if she couldn't keep the appointment, so just said, "Oh, yeah!  Sorry." 

Sounded like a freaking Valley girl!

No problem, I told her.  I'll just blog about it.

No comment.

Now, she sounds about the age of the grandaughter the kid I forgot to have might have had.  And I have a $2 million transaction hanging in the balance.

This is scary.  Very very scary!

Today, I had a settlement that was both fun and smooth as butter – thank to blog buddy, Ken Montville!

A few months ago, Ken referred me a favorite client.  Wayne was selling his home in Cheverly, MD and wanted to find a really cool in-town condo.   You know – great kitchen, great location and great space. 

Our second time out, we found it.  But we had to wait until Wayne’s place sold, which happened a few weeks later.  Then, we called back the listing agent, made an offer, reached a meeting of the minds (lister, Kathy Brandel, was a great negotiator), and today, we had a wonderful settlement.

Wayne had his first settlement this morning.  The buyers’ agent for his old house started her career working for Lenn Harley.  Ken called me to say they were waiting for the funds to be wired from the first settlement from Bank of America.  He waited at the first title company for the wire transfer, then he drove the check to Paramount Title in downtown DC to our settlement this afternoon.

So, here’s the picture!  And everybody is smiling!  Ken and me and a favorite client – Wayne! 

Today on tour, I stopped at a broker’s open held by an agent with whom I have a very long history.  Julie and I were classmates at the old Shannon & Luchs Academy of Real Estate back in 1983.  This year, our licenses will celebrate their 25 birthdays!

She served a great lunch, with shrimp, pesto tortellini, little quiches, and heavenly cheesecake from the Cheesecake factory!  It was just delicious, and had the effect of attracting a lot of agents and slowing all of us down – to enjoy the pretty house and chat with each other. 

Julie and I, the old pros, were regaling our colleagues with our newbie stories – and the agents who were really nice to us as rookies.

Then, one of the agents, one who I had worked with at my old company began to share a Pat story with my assembled colleagues.

“About a week after I got licenced,” she said, “Pat told me she ate rookie agents for breakfast!  And I totally believed her!”

Oh!  My!  God!  Did I actually say that?

Our words out of our mouth are like blog posts!  When we put up a blog, it’s on the Internet forever!  When we blurt out words, they are in the hearer’s brain forever – and they can escape at any moment in front of people whose respect we value!

Now if I really did eat newbies for breakfast, it would have been even more embarrassing!

Today on tour, we stopped by a pretty house an a thickly wooded lot backing up to Rock Creek Park.  So far, a wow!

But wait!  We walked in the door and, sniff sniff, we realized this house had bad breath.  Really bad breath!  It had three damp drooling big dogs bad breath!  It had occasional turf marking on the oriental rug breath.

As the agent began pointing out the features of this fine home, my colleague blurted out, “Geez!  Smell the dogs!”

And without missing a beat, the listing agent ignored the comment and showed is into a renovated kitchen.

Now housitosis is just about as hard for a buyer to ignor as halitosis in a bad blind date is for me.

If your house flunks the sniff test, better give it some minty toothpaste and strong mouthwash.

If you have a listing with an armed alarm system, I hereby promise you, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, that if I show it, I will set that alarm off.

I did that today showing a cute house in Shepherd Park, a lovely DC neighborhood.

While there was no warning on MLS, the agent did include detailed, very clear instructions were on a little piece of blue paper stuffed inside the lockbox.  I saw it.  I read it.

Alarm code to enter, it said, was 01101. 

I am a little dyslexic.  I punched in 1001 oops! 

And as I was trying to figure out what to do, there was a loud, ear piercing, nerve jangling, wake the dead from eternal sleep sustained blast.

I managed to make it stop, looked at my buyer and said, “Let’s make it fast!  We need to leave before Officer Friendly shows up!”  He agreed, and we didn’t spend a lot of time appreciating the lovely paint job, smart Italian import granite counters, renovated baths or gleaming hardwoods.  We got through and got out – fast.

As we were leaving, another agent who is a friend of mine arrived.  I explained what happened, and he got really nervous.  If the police showed up, it would be him and not me explaining what was going on.

“We need to be quick,” I heard him say to his clients as we hopped into my car and sped off.

If your client is an art collector with priceless antiques, and is living in a richly furnished place in a funky neighborhood (or even a decent one), maybe an alarm makes sense.  But this house was vacant, and Shepherd Park is hardly a high crime area.  And it was an inexpensive house - one of the smallest in the neighborhood!

This extra little piece of techno-security is probably costing money by delaying the sale and helping the place sell for less money that a similar place with no alarm.  And it’s probably costing more than the losses they would incur in the unlikely event of a real break-in.

I don’t remember an alarm system on Katherine Graham’s gazillion dollar house in Georgetown when it went on the market – at least not after they removed the Picassos!  Or maybe it was that her agents met us and our buyers at the house and turned the silly alarm off before we got there.

We have a sort of culture in my office that brings to mind some of the really good things about blogging on Active Rain – actually there are a bunch of Evers & Company bloggers who see Cati Bannier and I having so much fun and learning so much, they are jumping on board!

The other day, an agent sent out a sort of  “all call” email with a dilemma.

It was her listing, and it’s supposed to settle next week.  The offer included a seller subsidy. 

So far, so good.

But our boiler-plate contracts say that if the seller subsidy winds up exceeding the closing cost reimbursement allowed by the lender, the excess goes to the seller.

Hmmmm.  Herein lies the dilemma.

The closing cost subsidy called for in the contract exceeded the lender’s maximum by about $2,200.  It turns out that the buyer broker and the lender were pressuring the sellers (through my colleague) to write the buyers a check under the table for $2,200.  She sent out an email: “Help!  What should my sellers do?”

And it was great to read the responses.  It was like reading the comments on a really good Active Rain post.  We are a small brokerage with some really, really fabulous agents.

And, the email traffic made all of us realize that when, as a buyer broker, we include a seller subsidy, we have to be sure that the amount does not exceed whatever the lender will allow.

While all of this was going on, the news of the FBI busts of mortgage fraud bad guys came out.  One of the comments reminded her of an agent with another company who got an unpaid vacation when the real estate commission suspended his license for doing something like that. 

And at the end of the day, the agent who sent the original email understood that whatever happened to the sellers’ subsidy had to show up on the settlement sheet. 

Now, I think she got that before she sent the email.  So did all of the agents who commented.  And she’ll probably use our comments to show the buyer broker and the loan officer to justify her advice to her clients – which she would have given them in any case.

Nothing under the table!  Nothing under the table!

Except maybe your feet.

When I came to Washington after finally graduating from college, I was thrown into the deep end of a pool filled with really good writers and they assumed that I would swim with the best of them. 

Yikes!

Panic!

I had done a brilliant term paper on airline overcharges for a professor who wrote about regulatory agencies for Consumer Reports Magazine – I was a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines going to night school in New York City.  Professor Galloway and I collaborated on a series of articles that were published in the magazine – my ideas and his well-honed way with words.  He recommended me to Ralph Nader’s airline group, and they assumed I could write when they hired me.  WRONG!

It took a while. 

Back in those days, we wrote drafts by hand.  Then I did a double-spaced hunt and peck on my old Smith Corona portable.  Next step was a lot of cut and paste, hand written changes and, finally, a re-type.

Oh, and did I mention that I hadn’t ever learned to type?

I had a great teacher and mentor in a colleague named Reuben Robertson – I dedicated The Irreverent Guide to Real Estate to his memory.  I gradually became a better writer, but it did not become easier for me to write – until, that is, I got my first computer.

In the old days, writing a blog post would have taken hours.  Today, I can put it into a full screen format, cut, paste and edit as necessary, and with spell-chek and grammar help, it’s so much easier than it used to be!

It's what real writers call "word smithing".

And I gotta say, “Thank you Bill Gates!”

Without Microsoft Word, a serious Active Rain addiction would be extremely time consuming!

Before I started to blog on Active Rain, I was somewhere on page 10 if you did a Google search for Patricia Kennedy.  I got beat out by Patricia Kennedy Lawfuord, President Kennedy's little sister, Patricia Kennedy the porn star, and a few others who were doctors, college professors and PTA presidents.  After about a month on Active Rain, I was on Page 1, behind Patricia Kennedy Lawford, but way ahead of the porn star - sometimes in the Number 2 slot.

After reading Broker Bryant's post earlier this week, I Googled myself.  And guess what?  Ms. Patty Porn Star Kennedy beats me out once again!  So do many of the doctors, professors and PTA presidents with whom I share a name!  And I'm on about Page 5!  Yikes!

So I have to wonder - what are all of those nice internet consultants who call me every week going to be doing for their clients?  Has anyone out there figured out how to work with whatever Google is doing now?

And when I checked the various versions of real estate and Washington, DC, page 1 was totally full of the national companies that are calling us offering to sell us leads.  Grrrr!