WHATS HOT!

PRICING DIRECTION: As predicted the market has softened and prices have adjusted downward over the last several months. Many are saying the fed’s will drop interest rates towards the end of the 3rd qtr 2007 to stimulate the housing market. But right now mortgage rates are moving up.

HOMES THAT ARE PRICED RIGHT: This isn’t the 2005 real estate boom times. Forget cocktail party chit-chat. If you want to sale your home you better price it right for the current market. Not what homes in your neighborhood sold for 12 months ago? Sellers have to look at all the recent sales in their market not just one sale that brought top dollar! You’ll most likely make up for any downward price adjustment you took when you purchase your new home in this market.

ONLINE HOME VALUE SITES: I’m finding most of these sites aren’t up to date in th3 Atlanta area. It’s a great starting point if your thinking about buying or selling a home. But if you want accurate information call a professional real estate agent.

HOME OFFICES: Very hot feature for a home. We’ll see an increase in two home offices being in demand. With more and more people working from home commute times and gas prices with keep home offices in demand. I’m seeing more home offices that have built-in cabinets and work areas just like a professional work place. Windows and exterior doors are a huge plus. People will also look for homes located near alternative work spaces that will bridge the home office with places that will charge hourly rentals or monthly fees allowing SOHO’s to meet clients in a professional environment offering technology and privacy.

CAVING: Man and women alike are requiring more dedicated spaces where projects, hobbies or just a place to chill without being disturbed.

DUEL SLEEPING AREAS IN MASTER BEDROOM: Snoring rooms. I’m not kidding here. You’ll see a big demand for these as more are being offered in upscale homes. Snoring rooms are secondary bedrooms or sleeping areas within the master bedroom. People will love these as they are an alternative to the couch or guest bedrooms.

MODULAR BUILDING: I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this here in Atlanta already. With the rising cost of building a factory production home is the only alternative. Don’t think double wide when I say modular building. Factories will construct panels (A-B-C) for framing that can be used in many different floor plans. The panels will be shipped and deliver to the job site. These panels could have electrical junction boxes, switches and HV/AC heat ducts already installed. The benefits are huge because of cost and time reduction. Quality control will greatly be improved. When finished these homes will look just like an on site stick built homes

SUBSTAINED DESIGN: Sustainable Design is based on three areas; energy conservation, indoor air quality, and resource conversation. Natural forms of energy cannot be ignored any longer. Wind, solar and geo-thermal will be in high demand in the very near future!

CABINETS: Start mixing finishes and counter tops. It was only a short while back when all my clients started wanting granite and maple cabinets in there new home. I told all of my associates that this was going to date homes quicker than avocado appliances. Many of these people kept picking the same granite and cabinet colors. I now have buyer looking at homes saying they already look dated. Oh those millennium years.

HOME WIRING: Category 5 or above, data lines and multi line phones are very important in newer homes. Its must have!

HIGH DEMAND: Large kitchens, upgraded appliances, custom laundry rooms, basements or even better a finished basement, custom garages with industrial type flooring, highly finished screened in porch’s with fireplaces, stone patios, rear stairs, pools or room for pools, swim & tennis communities, public schools, custom wall and window treatments, brushed door handles and hinges, mixing different counter tops in the kitchen. Three + car garages, mixed stone, brick and heavy wood exteriors.

WHATS OUT!!

AS IS MARKETING: Buyers see this as a red flag. There is way too much competition out there. Don’t chase buyers away. Also don’t except a contract and inform the buyer their welcome to have a home inspection but you not willing to do anything. Let time take its course.

BUYER OR AGENT INCENTIVES: Free cars, gas credit vouchers, gourmet dinners and Plasma TV’s don’t sell homes anymore. Realistic pricing does!! Cut to the chase and drop the price if incentives are being considered! Agents chasing or steering their clients towards homes with these types of incentives are not looking after their clients best interest in some cases.

ENDLESS OPEN HOUSES: The OPEN HOUSE pendulum has swung the other way. Internet placement is essential. Only 1.5% of the homes in the nation sold because of an OPEN HOUSE. With gas being over $3.00 a gallon people don’t drive around looking at homes like they use to. Keep in mind they can surf the web for about $1.00 a day. Many agents are scared to be alone in an open house. It’s just a dinosaur marketing mentality. Home buyers have moved past OPEN HOUSES I’m just wondering when some sellers will?

FULL PRICE OFFERS: Not in this market. If a home is priced right for the market you can expect to see offers within 2.5% of the true market value. Don’t confuse buyer interest or lookers with a hard written contract from a willing and able buyer. Negotiate every contract presented to you till the buyer signs or walks.

FADING TRENDS BUYER TRENDS: Small bedrooms, lots of glass on upper kitchen cabinet doors, bowl shaped sinks that are mounted on top of a vanity, stainless steel appliances, granite counter tops are starting to fade, oversized front foyer staircases, 2 story great rooms, sponged wall painting, home remodeling projects not done to professional standards, drop ceilings in basements, any brass fixtures or brass shower frames, wall paper, painting old kitchen cabinets, bamboo or laminate flooring.

Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre is scheduled to open September 15 2007. This has turned out to be a beautiful modern performance building and is going to enhance Cobb’s Platinum Triangle tremendously. The presents of this building should generate a lot of synergy for future projects in this area.

The Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center will cost $145 million to build. It will hold premier opera’s, concerts, Broadway Shows, ballets, education and family shows, corporate meetings and events.

The breath-taking facility will include the 2700 seat John A Williams Theater and a 10,000 sq ft ballroom, 9500 sq ft Courtyard, 3100 sq ft Terrace and 1700 parking spaces.

I drove by the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre a few days ago and all I could say was, Wow!! The Cumberland Mall and Cobb Galleria Area has a very bright future ahead of it.

Federal Aviation Administration director Marion Blakely announced that Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport will receive a $1 million grant that will fund a 2 year study. It seems it’s going to take 2 years to determine if Hartsfield-Jackson International should be expanded or if we should build another airport somewhere else in the metro area to meet future demand. I’m not sure if you remember but Hartsfields–Jackson International’s last runway expansion was the largest cubic feet of earth (dirt) ever moved in the history of the US to build the new runway. They conveyed across 8 lanes of interstate. It was a mechanical marvel. I know somewhere in the US there is a big hole in the ground from where all that dirt came from.

So I’m taking it the federal government needs to figure out if Hartsfield-Jackson International has the space to expand?? It would seem to me the last runway expansion would have a feasibility study of some kind they could use to quickly figure this option out?? But what do I know?? In Ms Blakey’s opinion, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas and San Diego all have airports in the US that will not meet the demand in the very near future. She claims one of the reasons airline demand will be up is because gas prices will hit $4 dollars a gallon. As I read the article in the AJC I started to think out loud. Gas is going to be $4 a gallon and stamps now cost .41 cents. This isn’t a pretty picture Barry.

Marion Blakely I want you to know at $4 a gallon combined with the fact stamps now cost .41 cents in my household airline demand may be down…..and I FLY FOR FREE!! It’s simply because I can’t afford stamps!! We should be spending money trying to figure out why the US Postal Service can not seem to make ends meet. Has anyone been to a post office lately? Have you looked at the mailing date on mail you receive to see how long it took to get too you?? Something else that’s a little scary is the US Postal Service is now going to print a universal stamp with no set amount on them?? That’s like me asking a person to sign a contract without a purchase price. What we need is runway expansions at US Post offices to meet our immediate needs!!

Honestly, now I’m starting to feel that neither gas prices nor airline travel cost will be my problem. Buying stamps to pay my bills will be!!

Atlanta’s growth tops the nation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Atlanta was the number one metro area in the country for population growth. Atlanta added more residents between 2000 and 2006 than any other city!

Atlanta’s metro population is now over 5,138,000 as of July 2006. This growth has been great for our real estate market and is one of the major reasons we haven’t had a real estate bubble or significant drop in homes values. The only downside to me has been the increase in our traffic. When I hear someone say to me, Oh you live in Atlanta, I hear the traffic is horrible. How do you deal with it? I usually tell people that the only reason we have traffic is because everybody wants to live here. We have well paying jobs and an excellent quality of life. If you can make appointments between 9:30 am to about 4:30 pm you can move around this city pretty easy. But commute times can be very long for many and it didn’t use to be. Traffic has greatly increased. Commute times are now issues for many living here.

No questions more people will be coming to Atlanta in the future. We need high speed mass transit systems to accommodate our current and future population. As Atlanta grows a lot of people will be forced further away from the city into out laying counties in order to find affordable housing. I feel as time goes by it’s going to be harder to convince someone and companies to move here if they know they have over a 1 hour plus commute to and from work everyday. I feel as county governments see their population increase and as they build their infrastructure for new houses, they also need to have a new job development plan that brings jobs to their own areas and counties so people work and live within a reasonable proximity of each other. I know Cobb County has this sort to strategic plan in place. Not only has Cobb County grown in population but also in job opportunities it had created. This is a very key piece of the puzzle in offering a great place to live with a quality of life others cities will envy.

Atlanta has the best job opportunities south of the Mason Dixon Line if not in the country. I would love to see all surrounding counties work together to accomplish a premier mass transit system.

With the current market conditions real estate agents more and more are being asked to reduce their commission. This is mainly due to the fact homes just aren’t bringing as much as they were a short while back. I totally understand the seller’s position. But on the other side of the coin when the market is good sellers don’t share their profits with agents. Most of the time it’s not a situation where the seller’s home hasn’t appreciated. It’s the fact sellers have taken most or all of the equity out of their homes over the years. Some don’t seem to realize they have made money on their home. This is how they got the 2nd mortgages and equity lines of credit. But for some they’ve simply gone too far and their expectations are based on high appraisals they’ve gotten from refinancing their homes. Very seldom can a real estate professional sell a home for what the refinance appraisal claims its worth. There are several different types of appraisals done in the market and they’re used for different situations. Home equity and refinance appraisals are always higher than what a home could sell for. Don’t ask me why, but it’s the truth!

I cannot tell you how many times sellers say to me that they need ”X” amount of money of their home in order to buy the next home. I think it’s easy to understand what you need…..has nothing to do with what your homes worth. Thus, sellers ask the real estate agent to reduce their commission in order to achieve their desired net at closing. Lets look at this another way. Indulge me for a moment, what if your boss asked you to take a pay cut because he or she is going buy a boat or put a pool in their backyard. What would you think? Doesn’t make sense does it? Are you going to work hard for them under this arrangement?

I know this may sound crazy, but in the current real estate environment this is the time sellers need to pay more in commissions. Yes I said pay more in commissions, not less. Stop taking all the incentive away from selling your home, think for a moment how you would perform in your own personal job if you were financially rewarded for completing a project on time!! Trust me, most real estate agents aren’t knocking it dead as far a pay goes. We have a lot of hidden cost home sellers never see or hear anything about. I suggest sellers focus more on their bottom line and not what the commissions are. I understand you want to walk away with as much cash as possible at the closing table. But that doesn’t always happen by reducing the commission!

Thirteen states have local housing markets, which are appreciating and Housing Predictor projects at least 9 more will be aded to the list by summers end.

Georgia
Mississippi
Texas
Utah
Arkansas
Alabama
North Carolina
Tennessee
Louisiana
Idaho
New Mexico
South Caroline

OPEN HOUSES – WASTE OF TIME

MSN Real Estate ran an online article March 25 2007 about OPEN HOUSES. For years I’ve personally felt OPEN HOUSES simply don’t work. The MSN article supports my position and even suggest having OPEN HOUSES on multiple weekends can even hurt your homes strength in the market. I know of recent incident where an open house brought in a person that wasn’t interested in buying a home at all. They were just looking (nosey neighbor). This person ended up being someone that gossips a lot and felt she needed to talk about this home that was for sale. She ran into and told several good potential buyers her personal thoughts about the property. This is what we consider bad viral marketing. This is not at all what you want to happen when your selling a home!! With out the open house this would have never happened. OPEN HOUSES open the doors to more problems and security issues than contracts to sell. I feel the same about agent caravans and luncheons. All of these marketing approaches are as old as a dinosaur. They do not work, they only make the seller think the agent is doing something to sell their home. They’re doing something alright….and it’s WRONG!! There’s no question marketing homes for sale has changed for ever. You’ll find very few high volume real estate agents that embrace or support these marketing practices. If they do they’ll send a new agent or an agent that is willing to try anything to get their business going.

Why don’t OPEN HOUSES work any more? The Internet!! Approximately 80% of the home buyers now shop for homes on line, after they see a virtual tour they know if they want to see a house or not. No one seems to have the time anymore to ride around trying to find a home by looking at OPEN HOUSES. It’s just not an efficient way to find a new home. It’s so 90’s!!

With over 80% of the home buyers shopping for their new homes on line I find it totally amazing how many home sellers list with real estate agents without any internet presents. If a real estate agent shows you a template site his or her broker gave them ….that web site is pretty much useless. You couldn’t find that site if you tried for days doing searches on the major internet search engines. Almost all of these broker/agent template sites don’t even have a domain name. They don’t work at all for internet exposure. Why would a seller list with an agent they cannot find on the internet? Agents have to have personal web sites with domain names and content that gets the site ranked high up on the main web pages like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Agents have to invest in web placement. It’s not cheap for internet placement. Technology scares the heck out of most real estate agents and spending any marekting money scares them even more. I find it amazing how many agents don’t add more than one picture to their FMLS listings and other free websites. I’m surprised how many real estate agents don’t even add virtual tours. Yet they will sit for hours in a house on Sunday praying someone will come and buy that house. A Virtual Tour takes 5 minutes to order and reaches tons of people.

This year alone Re/Max invested over 50 million into REMAX.com. RE/MAX.com is now the 5th largest real estate web site and climbing daily. That’s an amazing accomplishment in one year. RE/MAX is a global company. There simple isn’t anyway for any of Atlanta’s small boutique brokers to compete on a local, national or global level as far a internet marketing goes. Again 80% of the home buyers are looking for homes on the web. Why would sellers ever want and OPEN HOUSE?? If you look at the facts why would anyone put forth the effort when you only stand a 2% chance of being successful. That’s just just a plain waste of time?

I’ve always embraced cutting edge technology. My personal web site will get over 70,000 hits this month. My pro-active internet marketing campaign brings in 10 to 20 prospects a week. My other pro-active marketing campaigns allows me to communicate with 50 to 75 new people a week. These aren’t cold calls. These are people looking to buy or sell real estate. With my internet marketing campaigns my average listings get approximately 300+ people a month taking a virtual tour of any given property. The average suburban OPEN HOUSE gets maybe 3 to 4 people any given Sunday if lucky. Now would rather have 2 to 4 people coming on Sunday or 75+ people a week looking at your home? I think we know the answer here!!

The facts are consumer sentiment about open houses has dropped drastically over the years. So when you decide to sell your home. Ask agents what type of web marketing plan they have. Hire an agent that has a pro-active marketing plans and drip markketing campaigns in place. Oh by the way, make sure the agent even has a marketing plan in place!! The agents with pro active marketing campaigns sell homes faster and for more money everyday of the week! Pro active marketing is not putting a OPEN HOUSE sign with balloons on the street…..not by a long shot!!! Agent luncheon’s, agent caravan’s and open houses are PASSIVE SELLING!! If PASSIVE SELLING methods are the way you want to go then save yourself some money! Hire a cater and a home sitter, not a real estate agent!

The AJC reported this morning that the metro poulation is now over 5 million people. Take a look at how Atlanta grew. It took 122 years from the founding of Atlanta to reach 1 million people in 1959, The second million came 21 years later in 1980. The third million came 13 years later, the fourth million seven years and the fifth million less than six years. Atlanta is the land of opportunity. Everyday I speak to people thinking of moving here either for jobs, cost of living or they want to be near their grandkids. Yes I’m seeing more and more older people wanting the come to the metro area to retire. Many love the fact that Cobb County gives them a huge property tax break if they purchase a home in that county. What we need now is a better mass transit systems to move all these people from place to place. HOTLANTA I expect we’re see a lot more growth in the immediate future. With this type of growth you will see homes with close proximity to Atlanta appreciate faster than homes with long commutes.

Georgia companies among ‘most admired’
Atlanta Business Chronicle - 3:09 PM EST Tuesday, March 6, 2007
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Fifteen Georgia companies have landed on FORTUNE magazine’s “America’s Most Admired Companies” list for 2007.

The complete list of the companies will appear in FORTUNE’s March 19 edition.

United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS) ranked 16th most admired in the United States, the highest of any Georgia company, according to the report.

The list also includes Aflac Inc. (NYSE: AFL), Beazer Homes USA Inc. (NYSE: BZH), BellSouth Corp. (now owned by AT&T Inc.), BlueLinx Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BXC), The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. (NYSE: CCE), Cox Communications, Delta Air Lines Inc. (Pink Sheets: DALRQ), Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX), Genuine Parts Co. (NYSE: GPC), GoldKist (now owned by Pilgrim’s Pride Corp.), The Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD), Southern Co. (NYSE: SO) and SunTrust Banks Inc. (NYSE: STI).

Published annually by FORTUNE, the list serves as a report card on corporate reputations. To create the list, executives, directors, and analysts were asked to rate companies in their own industry on eight criteria — innovation, people management, use of corporate assets, social responsibility, quality of management, financial soundness, long-term investment, and quality of products/services. A total of 616 companies in 68 industries were surveyed during the fourth quarter of 2006.

If you haven’t taken the time to drive through the new West Vinings Village you should. This has turned out to be a beautiful development. I’m very excited about style and direction this community will bring to the Vinings area. Residential sales have been great for The Flats at Ashton Woods. The first building of condos is sold out and the second building is 56% sold.

I’m proud to say I’ll be helping the 1st homeowner to close the 23rd of February.

The retail area is going to feature the following.
Sports Bar / Steakhouse
Hair Salon
5 Guy Burger
Je Belles’ – Formal Boutique
Japanese / Sushi Bar
Akberet Welde Spa
Meal Makers
McCary’s Irsh Pub
Vantage Staffing
General Denistry
Pashmere’s Ladies Boutique
Nora’s Art Gallery
Blue Moon Pizza
Carr’s Barber Shop
Thai Restaurant
And more to come

Note what you see now is the first phase of the West Vinings Village development. The second phase could have a grocery store concept! The best is yet to come. West Vinings Village will have a very positive impact on the Vinings area!