Kary L. Krismer's Discussions

Your county recorder (or auditor) may have a website, but keep in mind 95% of those people are in denial. Also, buying a pre-foreclosure property, while not as risky as a foreclosure property, does still have risks. I'm familiar with one where the buyer has hauled out one large U-Haul truck of stuff to storage, and two large dumpsters of junk (so far).

Adreth,I don't know what your year point was about. I was talking about 06 to 07. I have no idea why you think I'd be talking about a different time span. Spring and summer 06 was a period of a buyer frenzy.Second, your link doesn't show Seattle dropping (it doesn't even give any data). But the latest data does in fact show median prices up in this area.

I think trying to predict prices is rather pointless. If anyone could do that, they wouldn't waste their time predicting real estate prices--they'd be too busy making money off of the stock market or commodities, etc.If you told me a year ago that our inventories would be where they are today, I'd have predicted our prices would be in the toilet. The inventories still worry me, but so far they aren't having an effect.

Here's the current data for most counties in Western Washington:http://www.nwrealestate.com/nwrpub/common/mktg.cfmThere are a few counties where the median is down (Jefferson County is down 25% if I recall correctly) but most are up, and overall it's up.

Mine is easy to pick. We had a client in foreclosure, but working under a workout agreement. It required 4 payments, the last of which was after the foreclosure sale date, so the agreement provided for the sale to be continued.Three people at the bank confirmed that she'd made her first three payments on time, and someone at the deed of trust trustee's office confirmed that the sale was to be continued, but no one could give a date of the continued sale. We kept pushing for a date, just to make sure it had been continued, and when they researched it--they came back indicating that the case had fallen through the cracks. They discovered this on the Monday prior to the Friday foreclosure, with our sale set for the next following.But for us pushing the issue (our client was satisfied that the sale had been continued, because that's what she'd been told), our client would have had a nice lawsuit, rather than over $40,000 in net proceeds.Anyway, needless to say she's a satisfied client. The only thing we did wrong was the property actually sold a week or two earlier than what the perfect time would have been. Clearly a case where it was a very good thing she didn't go FSBO.

Swelltrain,I did a walk through where the owner thought his property was worth $350,000. Turns out I don't even think it's worth $300,000. When I looked at the history of the property, it was listed just over two years ago for $269,000. It didn't sell. A couple of months later this guy bought it for $299,000 in a FSBO transaction.We've had double digit increases in price every year since he bought, but he's still not to the point where he can sell and break even after costs of sale. So rather than save thousands of dollars being unrepresented, he cost himself thousands of dollars--more that 10% of the value of his house.That said, some people are perfectly capabable of representing themselves. And some agents aren't the best at representing their clients' interests. You can have good and bad outcomes either way.But the biggest problem with your theory is that it's not clear a buyer saves any money not being represented. Ordinarily the agent just doubles up on the commission.

LOL. Actually I did it only because if I hadn't I'd have lost my commission. ;-)

I thnk the OP's house was listed, and he was complaining that the agent hadn't found a buyer.That can happen. Sometimes it's the agent's fault, sometimes it's the seller's fault, and sometimes it's just the market.

Swelltrain,There are actually some ethical rules against the commission being reduced--it can't be done in all instances.It's not quite as bad as the ethical rule attorneys have that prevent them from loaning or giving money to their clients (that's just designed to protect the attorney, not the client).This rule protects the system. If an agent has a pre-arranged deal to cut the commission, it has to be disclosed in the listing. That way the other agents know that they could be operating at a disadvantage to other offers. That's something that's not good for their clients, so their is a client-based reason for the rule.

I think agents are always paranoid that other agents might not show their listings for some reason or another (e.g. Tacoma agents might not show listings by Seattle agents).I've never seen any proof of that. I've even seen some houses sell quickly where the selling office commission was only 1.5%.