Pat Kennedy - Your Washington, DC Real Estate Connection

I got a good weird call today from an agent who showed one of my listings.  It was a good call, because her buyers love the place and said they want to write an offer.  It was a weird call because when I told her we had an offer in counter, she paused. 

"How much?" she asked.

"What??????" 

"You have to tell me how much the other offer is.  It's in The Code.  Standard of Practice 1-15."

"Um, and which code might that be?  Send me the cite and I'll read it, but I don't think we're supposed to divulge the price and terms of an offer that is in counter."

Turns out, she took a course yesterday.  The attorney who conducted it called me a few minutes later and said that, yes, I had to tell her the terms of the other offer that came in.  And once again, I asked for a specific cite and suggested he send me a link. 

Now NAR has a Standard of Practice 1-15.  It reads:

REALTORS®, in response to inquiries from buyers or cooperating brokers shall, with the sellers’ approval, disclose the existence of offers on the property. Where disclosure is authorized, REALTORS® shall also disclose, if asked, whether offers were obtained by the listing licensee, another licensee in the listing firm, or by a cooperating broker. (Adopted 1/03, Amended 1/09))

I'm not a lawyer, and this lawyer who gave the class was on the other end of my IPhone.  I'm parsing the sentence, and I can't find anything that says I gotta blab about the details of the other offer, only that one exists, that neither I nor one of my office co-workers wrote it.  But he's a lawyer.  I'm not.

So I called my favorite lawyer/Realtor® - Northern Virginia's own Brian Block.  He said something very wise.  Do what your clients tell you to do.

My clients then, at my request, sent me instructions that said in totally unambiguous language that I was not to disclose the price or terms of any offer that had been submitted on their property. 

I asked the attorney who is training the next generation of young northern Virginia agents to please email me the specifics to back up his interpretation of Code, and he might be right.  It also occurred to me that it could be a Virginia Association of Realtors section, or maybe something promulgated by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that it might trump the NAR code.

But I can't imagine a scenario where it would be in my client's interest to disclose the terms and conditions of an offer, either one in counter or one that's been accepted but not settled. 

I'll let you know how it turns out.

It’s great fun to meet a colleague who just blows you away with her professionalism.

Last week, Kari Klaus, an agent with Zip Realty, called me very apologetically asking to show a listing at 9:30 am to her client.  That would have been totally fine except that it was 9:00 am, and the owners are not exactly morning people – I suspected they were still pressing their snooze alarm button!

I called the sellers who pulled themselves and the house together and were slipping out the door as Kari showed up.  And then, you know what she did?

She left the sellers a very gracious hand-written note thanking them for letting her show their home so early in the morning and on such short notice.

Nice touch, Kari!

She called me later.  It turns out that her buyer loves the place.  In addition, there is a funky offer that is going into its second week of tedious negotiations.  Her buyer might be St. Anthony answering my prayers for a second offer that isn’t horrible! 

My sellers are still talking about the lovely agent, not who got them out of bed on such short notice, but the agent who left such a gracious note for them.   So this little  touch was not only very polite, it was a smart business move.

So, Kari, you mom obviously raised you right!  I really hope we get to work together!

When I think of New York City, I think pigeons.  They were all over the place, usually in large groups looking for people to feed them bread crumbs.  And on this last trip, I realized there was something missing. 

Where are these birds?  Do they fly to Florida for the winter like many people who live in New York?

And today, as I was on my way to catch the TripperBus home, I finally saw one of the little guys.  Just one.  No playmates.  Nobody throwing him bread crumbs.

And I started to worry about them.  Hope they're alright!

Like many old railroad stations around the country, Grand Central has recreated itself as a destination in its own right.    It’s filled not only with people getting on and off trains, but also with people who are coming to the station for the restaurants and the shopping.

This trip, I discovered the Grand Central Market, with beautiful produce, fish, meat and cheese.  Oh!  And I don’t want to leave out the spices, flowers and the wine shop! 

If you forgot someone on Valentine’s Day, you can make it up!  And everything with red hearts is for sale!

If your favorite child of any age is having a birthday, this M&M’s cake is certain to be a huge hit.

Then I found these sardines – silly me!  I thought they came in cans!

If you are a native New Yorker and a serious cook looking for fine ingredients, you’ll fine them here!  Or if, like me, you are a tourist looking for prepared foods that might make a wonderful picnic, you won’t be disappointed. 

The market is in Grand Central Station near the exits to Lexington Avenue. 

Back in the 1990's, Washington, DC was a complete mess. 

Our Mayor way a major embarrassment - he managed to get re-elected after a stint in the slammer for cocaine use.  The city's infrastructure was in shambles.  Schools had leaky roofs.  The roads had, not pot holes, but axle-eating cocaine holes.  Our crime rate was among the highest in the country, and we had the distinction of having more murders per capita than any city in the nation.  The icing on the cake was a guy who managed to drive around shooting people out of an beat up old car, and they couldn't seem to find him until a bunch of people were dead and injured.

As DC residents were fleeing to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs in droves, the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

At a typical Open House, we would get only neighbors, and they wanted to sell their homes and were checking out what other people were asking. The market was totally in the toilet, with only the heartiest of the urban dwellers opting to live in town.

It was not pretty!

So Congress stepped in.  They appointed a sort of receiver to take over the budget, so the Mayor lost control of the purse strings.  Then they started to remove key city departments from his control, and he began to have less and less power.  And things started to turn around a little bit - but a key problem remained.  The city had no real tax base left because so many of the residents had flown the coop.

To get people to move back into town, they started to repair some of the broken systems and infrastructure - schools and roads.  The trash was getting picked up regularly.  The police force got beefed up and started to crack down on crime.  Then they came up with two other proposals to make DC living attractive.

One was to eliminatie federal income tax for DC residents, and while I thought it was a fabulous idea, it never went anywhere. 

But the other did get adopted - that was a federal income tax credit of $5000 for "first time" DC homebuyers with annual incomes of less than $75,000.

And it worked!  It even worked well!

Of course, with an income of $75,000, you couldn't qualify for much of a house, so much of the benefits accrued to the condo market, which had been totally dead.  Younger buyers in their first jobs - the ones who usually rented - were buying condos that the owners hadn't been able to sell for years.  Their sellers became buyers of smaller houses, and their sellers bought bigger homes.  It had a trickle-up effect.

And the tax credit was one factor that helped us to get these property virgins off the fence. These buyers had the same concerns that buyers have today - would this city ever come back, or would their homes lose value?  And the city did come back.  We've learned to elect great mayors, and it's become a terrific place to live.

And I, for one, give that tax credit a lot of the credit for the DC market turnaround. I plan to use the new Federal tax credit as an important tool for all of my eligible buyers!

The summer after my sophomore year in college, I got a job gluing bows, feathers and hearts onto greeting cards at the Hallmark Card factory in Topeka, Kansas.  And it was sweltering - no air conditioning.  And this was summer in Kansas, where triple digit temperatures were common!

And most of that summer, I was working on Valentine cards.  They were cutesy and fuzzy and heartsy.  There were cloyingly sweet verses and lots of flowers and all that.  And at the end of the day, I'd be soaked in sweat and covered with bits of fuzz and glitter that probably are in my lungs till this day.  Remember, this was a long time ago before it occurred to anyone to invent a face mask.

Under the watchful eye of the company time and motion engineer, we would glue on whatever was required at lightening speed - there were quotas to meet each hour, although I can't recall being paid a bonus for meeting or exceeding the magic number. 

By the time I quit in early September, I'd had it with greeting cards - particularly those meant to be exchanged on February 14th! 

So what's love got to do with it?  For me, absolutely nothing.  While I'm an otherwise good girlfriend, I'm a Valentine's Day Grinch!

Well, I might get Willy the Labradoodle a heart-shaped doggie cookie!

Sharon Simms wrote a post today about a St. Petersburg condo that was never completed.  A group purchased the building from the bankruptcy court and will open the building next year as an apartment building for seniors.

As I read Sharon's post, I had to wonder about the people who had planned to buy one of these condos.

They bought off the plans, excited about what the space would become.  They signed contracts and put down a nice big earnest money check.  And then poof!  The project fell victim to the economic meltdown.  And this scenario has repeated itself over and over in would-be communities across the country.   Sometimes the failures occur after some of the buyers have settled on their units.

So what happens?

In "what if" situations, the ground rules vary from state to state and are governed by the contract.  And before you sign a contract and write an earnest money check for a new community, you should get answers to some important questions. Like what would happen to your earnest money in a developer's bankruptcy?  If prices plummet before you settle, is there a way for you to get out of the contract?

Most developers have their own boiler-plate contract forms, and they can be weighted in favor of, well, not you!  While your agent can give you some information about any risks involved, your agent really can't give you legal advice. 

And if I were about to sign a developer's contract in this market, I would pay a really good real estate lawyer to look it over and give me the scary details.

The last time I was in an AT&T store, I left annoyed.  I was so annoyed that I canceled my service, stomped out and took my number over to T-Mobile.  And over the years, I've had a wonderful relationship with T-Mobile and the Blackberry that's been a handy little tool of the trade. 

Then Apple invented the I-Phone.  And I wanted one.  But I'd have to go back to AT&T, their exclusive carrier.  And I wasn't over our bad break up yet.  I sure wasn't ready to go crawling back to them just for a shiny new toy!

So yesterday I found myself back inside of an AT&T store buying my new I-Phone. And what a difference!

The guy who helped me really had an attitude - a great attitude! 

His name was Josseph Polite.  He knew pretty much everything there was to know about his product, and he knew how to explain how it worked and how their programs worked.  I had a whole bunch of questions about roaming charges overseas, and he didn't miss a beat explaining the advantages of their programs.

The best part was when I joked about the instruction manual - you Mac people know that Apple doesn't do manuals.  Well, Josseph broke into a huge smile, then he emailed me one on the spot!

With the job market being tight, companies like AT&T can attract a better sales force.  They have to gin up their services and be price competitive (their rates are actually a lot lower than they were when I broke up with them a few years ago). 

T-Mobile tried to make the decision to leave as hard as possible.  After all, they had provided me with excellent service for years, and they suggested I look at their new G-Phone - a great product but not very Mac compatible. 

And while breaking up was hard to do, this new I-Phone rocks!  And Josseph told me to bring in my old Blackberry and MacBook, and they would sync everything for me.  If I were managing a real estate office, I think I'd try to recruit the guy!

And if we're all smart, we'll look at guys like Josseph Polite as an example of the kind of service that we need to strive for.