All Forum Posts by: Michael Stole

How could I find out what the average rental rate is in an area? Is this information available on MLS? Thanks.

Hi, BPers,

When selling a house, is virtual tour a useful instrument? Does it require a lot time or any specific tech to make a virtual tour? Thanks.

Thanks to J, Financexaminer, and Sean. You made great replies.

But it does not hurt to make a listing for that client, right? Making a list is not much work.
I am not an agent, so I don't know if an agent pays any fee to his/her broker or to MLS for listing a house?

If the agent gets lucky, the listing may still attract some motivated buyers who just LOVE the house, the agent can eventually sell the property without doing much work.

BA in corporate finance, and master and phd in economics.

For those seller's agens, what would you do if the seller insisted on a unreasonably high listing price, and were not much negotiable on the sale price?

Would you just put the list on MLS, and then forget about it? Or this challenge will force you to spend more time and effort on advertising and searching for potential customers?

Any experience or suggestion will be appreciated.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.137.3041&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The above is the address directly linked to that article in pdf formate. Here is a quote from their article.

Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real estate agents have an incentive to convince clients to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly. We test these predictions by comparing home sales in which real estate agents are hired to when an agent sells his own home. Consistent with the theory, we find homes owned by real estate agents sell for 3.7% more than other houses and stay on the market 9.5 days longer, controlling for observables. Greater information asymmetry leads to larger distortions.

The reason I asked this question is because of a research article written by two economists. The author also wrote the famous book "freakonomics".

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/rest.90.4.599

They find that agent-owned houses sell for 3.7% more than other houses and stay no the market 9.5 days longer. They conclude that agents are better informed, and exploit this informational advantage to convince their clients to sell too cheaply and too quickly.

But I don't completely buy their theory. I mean, for REOs and HUD-owned houses, banks and HUD may simply be more motivated to sell cheap and quickly, but not because they are fooled by their clients.

I would like to know what you guys think, as you guys are more experienced in this market.

bank-owed (REO) and HUD-owned properties are sold much cheaper than other properties. What do you think mainly causes this difference?

Because they are not well informed about the market? I mean, In theory their agents always have ways to persuade them to sell fast at lower prices, just to secure the commision.

Or they are motivated by themselves to sell cheaper but faster?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

The following is what I found from Fannie Mac, which makes a clear distinction between short sale and pre-foreclosure. REO is easy to define and understand. As to "foreclosure" on MLS, I never understand what it refers to.

Q6. Is a preforeclosure the same as a short sale?

No, not necessarily, although historically the terms have been used interchangeably. For
Fannie Mae’s purposes, a preforeclosure assumes that the borrower has been
delinquent in paying his or her mortgage and the servicer/investor agrees to accept a
lesser amount to avoid the time and expense of a foreclosure action. A short-sale,
however, can refer to situations in which the servicer/investor of the mortgage agrees to
a payoff of a lesser amount than is actually owed, even on a current mortgage, to
facilitate the sale of the property to a third party.

When a house is listed as "foreclosure" on MLS, what exactly does it mean? The other categories include "short sale", "pre-foreclosure", and "REO", so they are not referring to the same type of listings. And almost 80% of the "foreclosure" listings I look at ended up being expired!

According to my understanding, "foreclosure" is sheriff sale. However, sheriff sale will never be listed on MLS by a agent, because no agent (but attorny) is hired for handling sheriff sale.

So what is "foreclosure" on MLS referring to?