Two dirty little real estate secrets.....

Secret #1: Investors are out there buying NOW. In fact, according to Inman News, investors are three times more active right now than traditional homebuyers. 33% of investors surveyed are intending to buy during the next two years, as opposed to 8.6% of typical homebuyers. Of the investors, 11% expect to resell  their properties within the next year, while 50% intend to hold the properties for at least five years.
   The message here is pretty clear: now is the time to BUY property in Los Angeles.

Secret #2: There are a lot of bad houses out there. What some people don't realize is that it's my job to make sure my clients aren't wasting their time by looking at them; it's my job to screen them out. Now of course one man's 'bad' house may be another man's castle and, as I've seen over all these years, money can fix a lot of 'bad'.
   But not all. It's my job to let you know that a certain layout or a certain location may limit the return you ultimately see on the property. Most of the time these are properties I will eliminate from the list of those you should be seeing, because neither of us needs to be wasting our time. On a typical Tuesday, which is Broker's Open House day in Los Angeles for new listings, I'll see 10-12 houses in a 3 hour span, in various parts of town. There are some Tuesdays when, by house #10, I just want to be put out of my misery. Some of the houses may be just plain bad with no architectural, aesthetic or practical merit. Some will be mundane copies of what sellers,designers or flippers perceive as the reigning style, a style which has already become its own cliche and is on the way out. And some may be wonderful houses that are woefully over priced. As a client of mine, you will get to skip these.
      Sometimes listing agents will unwittingly give me a helping hand and spare me the pain of having to physically see their listings, simply by the photos they choose to post on the MLS. Photos are a very tricky thing. There are any number of properties where I'll see the photos first and think "Wow!", only to then discover, upon seeing the house, that the photos far exceed the real experience. Then again, certain houses or certain rooms do not lend themselves to photos that actually tell the story of what that house feels like. I try to be cautious on my listings that the photos are not misleading, but I would rather have few photos than bad photos or pictures that really tell you nothing other than what furniture the Seller owns.
   Yet some of the best laughs I get are from listing photos in the MLS where I'm totally mystified as to why the listing agent thought this photo would want to make potential buyers live there. Here are a few of my recent favorites in this category:

This is a house up on the 'Bird' streets above the Sunset Strip, on the market for $1,400,000! What's the message here? "Live here and you too can be messy?" Or maybe, "Hey-buy my house AND clean it up for me."

This is a house in Beachwood Canyon, on the market for just shy of $1,700,000. Okay, at least they cleaned the room, even if they didn't have time to hang the picture or replace the dead flowers. But they could have just told us there is a bathroom because does this photo really inspire the fantasy of living there?

Really? This one is my favorite. Look, I've had to run in and make, or remake, plenty of beds during my career in real estate. But what does this photo say to a prospective buyer? Clearly, "I'm about to kill myself. Want to join me?"
  Not too surprisingly, all 3 of these homes have been languishing on the market for quite a long time. The good news is that you and I will not be seeing them.
Jamie Foreman