A Long Road and A Lot of Lockboxes

Almost a year ago, December 31st, 2008, to be exact, I got direct message from a prospective home buyer on Twitter.  And a simple 140 character request turned into a wonderful adventure for first-time home buyers, who are now living in a beautiful house, with the mountain view in North Scottsdale that was so critically important to them.

Not that the road was without bumps.  I wrote four, or was it five contracts, before we got one to stick. A short sale with a huge outstanding HOA bill, a foreclosure that couldn’t be sold to someone using FHA financing for 90 days, and a few other opportunities that just didn’t work out.

Over the course of the past year, we monitored the market and when a property with potential showed up, we hopped in the car and spent the afternoon together.  Over time, we came to know each other, and I think, even look forward to the time spent together.  The more I learned about my younger clients, the more impressed I was.  They were focused, committed, and progressing in their respective careers.   If their diligence in their home search is any indication, they will go far.

First-time home buyers can get overwhelmed with the search process and think that looking through hundreds of homes on the Internet will create a situation where we can go out and find the perfect house quickly.  While it does speed the process, in reality (depending on the market and price range), it can take quite a while to find "the" house.  And at that point, the agent and clients just have to hunker down, keep up the search, and be ready to roll if a house with great potential comes on the market.

I do use a lot of Internet tools to help shorten the car search part of looking for a home, BUT getting in the car and driving, visiting a select number of homes is critical.  A buyer cannot get the feel for home values without doing the actual, physical leg work, because home values are both objective and subjective. 

Price per square foot, in a given neighborhood or zip code, is easy to determine online.  The value of a mountain or lake view, or proximity to other desirable locations, can be viewed and estimated using Google Maps and Google Earth. Time on market and how many price reductions the seller has made also give a buyer insight into whether the house is priced to the market.

However, driving up to the house and walking in the front door, will tell a prospective buyer more than any amount of online searching.  Photographs, virtual tours, floor plans, and videos share a lot about a house, and are very helpful for a buyer to short-list homes they want visit in person.  Buyers may even have a pretty good sense that a house is going to work for them, but until they get inside, walk the house, and really get a feel for its layout and how they feel inside, they just don’t know.  Buyers have told me after the fact, that the moment they walked in the front door, they knew it was their house.

My clients closed on their house well over a month ago, and sent me a thank you card.  In part, the note said:

Thank you so much for all your hard work.  It has been a long road and a lot of lockboxes, and we appreciate you sticking with us.

I’d never thought of the home search in terms of lockboxes, but that’s what it takes to get in the front door, and that’s what a Realtor does to find the home that buyers are going to choose to live in, to wake in, to create memories in. 

And, that’s what drives me to do the best job I can.