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No downtime in a down market

By Alison Rogers, Monday, May 26, 2008.

Yet another sign that my market is slowing down: Everyone is paying waaay too much attention to me.

I have two open deals, a sale and a rental. (Or I suppose I should say, two immediate deals where I represent the owners. There are multiple deals where I'm tangled up with buyers, but in this climate those people could be buying three years from now.)

So anyway, I found out last week that I was going to need surgery on Monday. So I told my sponsoring broker, handed him keys ...
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Four perks in a down market

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, May 18, 2008.

Here in Manhattan, home sales are starting to slow. Things that are priced well still go, but the atmosphere is worse, like a plane flight that still goes between cities but hits pockets of bumpy air. One recent example: I have a listing that moved to an accepted offer at a pleasing price very quickly, but then of course both sides couldn't get the contract battened down with any speed.

Still, to a rookie, a down market isn't all bad news. For one thing, when you're building a career, you don't suffer a business slump. Loss of income? Me? Well, I'm just getting started, so there's no high plateau to fall from. more...

Chewing on rent-versus-sell decision

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, May 11, 2008.

So I wrote last week that I had gone on two "soft" listing presentations -- situations where I was in a property and met the owner, though I wasn't necessarily pitching them at the time. As a result of these low-key situations, I was relaxed … and then it hit me, after the fact, that these had been practice sales calls. So I sat down with Bernice Ross' CDs, "List and Sell Real Estate Like Crazy!" and graded myself after the fact. more...

Agents: a test on grading yourself

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, May 4, 2008.

I have a listing where the contract has been out, for various reasons, for weeks instead of days. All the parties involved want this deal to happen, so every day I wake up and tend to the deal, which feels excruciatingly like moving down a football field one yard at a time. more...

Courting customers: Who's coming back, who's long gone

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, April 27, 2008.

So, as far as I understand it, this real estate game is about getting customers, servicing them, getting paid, and getting more customers.

I once prowled around to see how much of my time I should spend getting customers (as opposed to servicing them and getting paid) and I was told "8 hours a week." That assumes I work a 40-hour week, which I don't, but I'm willing to extrapolate it as a rule of thumb that I'm supposed to be spending 20 percent of my work time acquiring customers. more...

Rookie searches for chametz

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

Like Easter, Passover is always a spring holiday. One of the lovely things about it is that there is not only a tradition but also a religious requirement to clean beforehand. Since Passover commemorates an escape that took place so quickly there was not time for the bread to rise, the cleaning takes the form of getting rid of bread and bread products. It's the time of year that stray Cheerio behind the couch gets vacuumed up -- but there tends to be a lot of auxiliary dusting and polishing too. more...

Don't be fooled: fence-sitters are not buyers

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, April 13, 2008.

Dear friend/person who read something I was quoted as saying in the media/random blogger:

Thank you so much for your thoughts on the state of the housing market. I was most impressed with your emphatic declaration that real estate is currently overpriced and that the nearly 70 percent of Americans who own their own homes are "just a bunch of ninnies." more...

Keep chin above mortgage waters

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, April 6, 2008.

"We were supposed to close today, and our mortgage broker just requested some extra paperwork from the lawyer yesterday. Why didn't she ask for it earlier instead of screwing up our closing?"

"The apartment makes sense for us to buy if it saves us $7,000 a month in rent -- do those numbers work?"

"If you use a mortgage broker, who pays the fees: you or the bank?"

"I heard interest rates were at 6 percent -- how come I got quoted 8 percent on my loan?" more...

An agent planning for retirement

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, March 30, 2008.

I left my old corporate job, with its lovely 401(k) that offered cushy matching funds, in 2005.

The year after was such a financial disaster -- I piled on credit-card debt like, well, a sailor on shore leave with a fistful of credit cards -- that I didn't make any retirement contributions at all.

But now, I am doing my 2007 taxes, and (huzzah!) I get to be responsible again. That means I'm making a contribution to my retirement funds. more...

Secrets to showing: It's OK to talk to agent

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, March 23, 2008.

I have a new listing on the market and it's generating a lot of excitement -- a few dozen visitors in the first week and a half it's been listed. As a result, I have not only seen clients in various shapes and sizes, I have also seen just about every style of buyer's broker imaginable. In a world where the listing is in play (and people don't necessarily know that they're going to be written about) I don't want to be too specific, but here are some composite impressions that might be helpful to buyers and buyer's brokers everywhere. more...

Six months and no closings

By Alison Rogers, Monday, March 17, 2008.

I have a new listing for a $2 million, two-bedroom condo in SoHo. For those of you who don't live in the amusement park that is Manhattan, let me assure you that that is cheap, and I have been showing -- so far by appointment only -- like crazy. By the time my first week ends, I will have had a dozen showings, including one second showing, before I even get to my open house. more...

Change yourself first; customers will follow

By Alison Rogers, Monday, March 10, 2008.

I met Alice Heiman, as I have done so many serendipitous things, online. (Longtime readers of this column will know that's how I met my husband.) A sales coach -- whose background is in sales training, so she has "trained the trainers" -- she is based in Reno, Nev., where she offers some of the best advice for salespeople I have ever seen. more...

Week in the life between closings

By Alison Rogers, Monday, March 3, 2008.

Friday: I make plans for a renter to come in. He is relocating from, dig this, Iceland. This to me is so exotic that I could just die, because I grew up in Arkansas, and Iceland to me is as far away and exotic as the moon. I have a client who's a moon man; I will be excited just to meet him. more...

Flashy extras: silly or saleable?

By Alison Rogers, Monday, February 25, 2008.

I just had a client go to contract on a new, and very nice, apartment. The location is great, the finishes are great, and the reputation of the builder is great, making it likely that the home that gets delivered is the same as the home that was promised -- a bit of a rarity these days.

Also, there's a television embedded in the bathroom mirror.

My client thinks that's a little silly -- it is a little silly -- but it was a signature touch by the developers to show off how "fresh" the building is. more...

Hangin' in the realty office

By Alison Rogers, Monday, February 18, 2008.

I've been finishing up my continuing education (five hours to go) so I've been in the office nearly every day for a week.

This is pretty unusual for me, because I'm almost never in the office. If I'm meeting a client, I go to where the client is. If I have to run a computer search, I sit in my apartment.

I notice as I'm hanging out that the office is LOUD. All those other agents, yakking away about their own things. There's a lot of trading info back-and-forth ("I have this listing, any customers for it?") but nothing that I couldn't get if I stopped in once a week. more...

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