Tell Your Realtor To Shut Up And Listen To You
I grew up on Lake Martin, in the real estate business. I know what I like. I know which parts of Lake Martin I prefer. I have been all over this lake, and have friends in every corner. But guess what…
No one cares about that.
Especially my clients… nor should they.
One of the first things my dad taught me about Lake Martin real estate was “don’t show them what you like, show them what THEY like.” Simple but true.
The key to helping people be happy with their waterfront property is to focus on what they think, not you.
A realtor’s local knowledge and experience does matter, but only to the extent that they use that to help their clients get what they want. There are all kinds of buyers out there.
Some Lake Martin buyers prefer Kowaliga Creek to Blue Creek. Some prefer the Preserve at Stoney Ridge to the Ledges at The Ridge. It doesn’t matter what I prefer.
On the selling end, in order to be the best listing agent, I must look at a seller’s lake home with the eyes of an unbiased buyer, not filtered by my own preferences. I have to market each home based on its own unique properties. You don’t market a condo in Stillwaters the same way that you do a cabin in Little Kowaliga.
So how do you find out what people want? You shut up. You ask a good question, then you shut up and listen to their answer.
Not that I am perfect at this. I constantly have to remind myself to be quiet and listen. I make it a habit to ask specific, dialog inducing questions - not “did you like that waterfront lot?” - rather “what about that lot did you like?” The latter helps me understand their reasons instead of just logging a result.
The more I learn about the client, the better I can help, and the happier they will be.
I believe it was jazz great Dizzy Gillespie that said, “It’s taken me much of my life to learn what notes not to play.”
Amen, Dizzy.
Lake Martin Property : For Sale By Owner Tips
Lake Martin, like any real estate market, will always have its share of people selling their waterfront property themselves – aka For Sale By Owner or FSBO (pr FIZZ-bo). And that’s fine with me. I am not one of those realtors that looks down on FSBOs as idiots or realtor hating zealots. I think it is up to me as a real estate agent to prove to the FSBO prospect that I will save them time and make them money if I list and help sell their Lake Martin home or lot.
I talk to FSBOs all the time. What I try to do is help them by giving them the clear and un filtered truth about the Lake Martin market and how the market might react to their home. The decision to list or not to list is certainly up to them.
That being said, there will always be a segment of people that choose to sell their real estate themselves, without the help of an agent. So I figure I might as well be helpful in case the FSBO experiment doesn’t go well, maybe they’ll call me. They often do.
I read a great article for advice to FSBOs in today’s Wall Street Journal. Click here to read it. It had a lot of helpful sales strategies for FSBOs.
I would add to the article these suggestions to anyone selling their waterfront property themselves:
John’s Tips to any Lake Martin For Sale By Owner:
1. Get Your Own Website – Go to a domain seller like godaddy.com and buy your own website address. If your home’s address is 123 Lake Street – buy www.123Lake.com or whatever is available. The shorter the better. I do this for all of my listings. Use this on your flyers and advertisements. If you advertise your home on something like fsbo.com, its website will be something incoherent like www.fsbo.com/e34h3449ir4827 – no buyer can remember that, especially one that has been at Chimney Rock drinking beer for 3 hours. Once you have bought your site through godaddy, go to the control panel and choose “domain forwarding” to point the site to the long one at fsbo dot com. That way anyone who types 123lake.com in their browser will be taken automatically to the fsbo site.
2. Buy Custom Signs – Those “For Sale By Owner” signs you buy for $3 at WalMart might be appropriate for your used go-cart that you put out on highway 63, but do you really think it conveys the right image to someone you are asking to spend $600,000 for a waterfront home on Lake Martin? I use Cliff Grinnell at EBanr. His office is in Alex City on the Dadeville Highway. You need at least 2 – one for the road, and one for the waterfront. Make them double sided for greater visibility. I would go ahead and buy 4 so that you can switch them out to avoid being faded or dirty. Also be sure to get 2 “info tube” things at WalMart or Home Depot so you can put some flyers in both signs.
3. Make Effective Flyers – You start by taking great pictures of your home or lot. Then spend the money and have them printed by a high quality color LASER printer. Go to Kinko’s if you have no color laser printer of your own. Get them to go ahead and run 150 copies while they’re at it. The big cost here is the setup for a new print job, each additional copy is not as expensive, so you might as well print them all at one stop. If you’re putting the flyers in the info tubes in the signs, don’t waste a lot of space by pictures of the outside. They know what the outside looks like. Just use one or two of the lakeside so that they can easily remember which one is yours (odds are that yours is the 10th flyer they have pulled that day). If you are putting the flyer elsewhere then include more pictures of the waterfront. Most Lake Martin buyers are concerned about the property’s waterfront, so highlight that.
4. Be Available At An Instant To Talk Or Show The Home – Put your cell phone number on all advertisements. Don’t confuse buyers by giving your home phone in town, your home phone at Lake Martin, your office phone, your fax, etc. Just one will do. Then KEEP THE CELL PHONE ON YOU at all times. When it rings, answer it. If you don’t answer the phone, the majority of buyers will move along and not leave a message. If they want to see it now, show it now.
5. Call Or Email Me With Questions – Every property on Lake Martin is unique, with its own special selling points to promote and challenges to overcome to a potential buyer. If you’re stumped, give me a shout. I am glad to help you think of an answer, even if you plan to continue to sell it yourself.
Do you have another helpful FSBO tip for the rest of Lake Martin? Leave a comment below and help us all out! If you can’t see the “Leave a Reply” box below, click “Continue” then scroll down to the bottom.
If You Don’t Like My Service, Please Fire Me On The Spot
Why do some real estate agents insist on holding their sellers to the last day of a listing contract? I don’t know if my market on Lake Martin is different, but I don’t see the point in guilt tripping a seller into staying with me if they are unhappy or decide not to sell.
Obviously, I am in the business to sell Lake Martin real estate. I don’t go into a listing intending not to sell it, not to give bad service. But I find that in talking to some sellers, they are leery of signing a listing contract for fear that they will be held in slavery by an agent. Once they figure out that they can fire me anytime they want, it makes them feel better about the agreement. I only want them as clients if they’re happy with how hard I am working for them.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I found myself telling this to the owners of these new listings. I 
assured them that if they wanted out of the listing agreement at any time, for whatever reason, that’s OK with me. They wouldn’t owe me a dime. I even wrote it into the listing agreement to let them know that I meant it. It was surprising to most of them.
Coincidentally, I saw a great post on the same subject by Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate guy. I agree with his take 100%. It is a real advantage to own your own small brokerage. I can make rules like this for myself. I don’t have to wade through some big corporate bureaucracy. I make the policies, and can work with clients to suit their needs, not according to the whims of Big Brother.
Lake Martin Is High, But So Is Real Estate Inventory
Spring rains have filled Lake Martin faster than almost anyone expected – in the first 3 months of 2008 we went from bone dry to runnething over. Will the waterfront real estate market bounce back in three months, too?
Not likely. There is still a lot of inventory to sell which I think will continue to make 2008 a great time to be a buyer. To wit:
A comparison of the first quarter sales in 2008 shows that in the entire Lake Martin residential waterfront market on the MLS(*), there were fewer sales this year than in 2007.
If you look back to the post where I reviewed Lake Martin waterfront sales in 2007, you will remember that January – March 2007 saw 43 waterfront properties sold:
The same statistics in the first three months of 2008 in the Lake Martin MLS shows sales of only 17:
Is it time for sellers to to give up? Will 2008 see only 58 waterfront homes (17 * 4) sold? Of course not. History shows us that the four months February – May of every year counts for almost 50% of residential waterfront sales on Lake Martin. We still have half of that critical period to go before we get a better prediction on 2008.
Also remember – January and February 2008 sales were also affected by the drought. Just look at news reports from that period – they were dire. Some people openly wondered if the lake would EVER come back. The water level really didn’t start shooting up until the last week in February – when it rose a whopping 4 feet in 7 days. Since then, spirits have been buoyed and more buyers are crawling the coves.
So can sellers relax? Will Lake Martin’s water level comeback springboard the real estate market back into the raging sellers’ market of 2005?
Not likely.
There is still a lot of inventory. There is a lot of competition for the buyers’ attention. It is still very possible to sell in this market (the fact that my lights are on testify to that fact). I am telling all of my sellers that we must continue with intense focus on the golden trinity of real estate: pricing, marketing, and staging. As a seller, you must do all 3 exceptionally well in order to sell on Lake Martin right now. The sellers who get overconfident now will be the last to sell this year, guaranteed.
Are you considering selling your waterfront property now that Lake Martin’s water is up? Or maybe you just wonder how the last 24 months have affected its possible value? Call or email John for a no guilt, no hassle, pain free Comparable Market Analysis. See the contact info at the top of this page. If you don’t want to sell after we talk, no hard feelings – I promise.
(*)Disclaimers: All of the above info was taken from the Lake Martin Area Association of Realtors’ Multiple Listing Service. Accuracy is not guaranteed but deemed reliable. The above does not include sales by FSBOs or developers that sell privately and not through the MLS. But, I do think that the above represents a very large majority of all sales on Lake Martin.
Lake Martin Property Taxes - It Pays To Do Your Homework
Lake Martin waterfront property owners are in one of three counties – Tallapoosa County, Elmore County, or Coosa County. If you’re considering buying on Lake Martin, and are curious about property taxes, you would need to research all three counties to cover of your bases.
There are some similarities, however, in that they all are governed by the state of Alabama’s property tax laws. The property tax fiscal year in Alabama runs October 1 - September 30 every year. So the property taxes you would pay by December 31, 2007, were generated based on a snapshot of value taken on October 1, 2006. Here is some info for further research:
Tallapoosa County – Click here for a link to the Tallapoosa County Tax Assessor. The office number is 256–825–1046. Click here for an online calculator for Tallapoosa County taxes. It is a really good tutorial of how to translate assessment and millage rates to the actual taxes you might pay. They use an example of a $100,000 single family home, not in city limits, which yields a tax of $300.00 per year.
Elmore County – Click here for a link to the Elmore County Tax Assessor. The office number is 334–567–1184. Click here for a link to their explanation of rates and here for the millage rates.
Coosa County – At this writing, Coosa County does not have its own website. Click here for info. The Revenue Commissioner is Charlie Luker, and is a heckofa nice guy. His number is 256–377–4916. Their rates may be a tad different from Tallapoosa and Elmore, but for planning purposes, they are about equal.
Online Research
All three counties employ third party websites to publish their property tax map and owner information. The online sites are very useful, but take caution. The best way to determine current ownership is to do a deed search at the courthouse. Also, most of the time the lot lines are generally correct. But the best way to know your lot lines is to get a professional survey.
Many times the info online will only give you who was the owner on the previous October 1. That said, sometimes the counties update a sale as the year goes along. Consider if John Doe owned a property at 10-1-07 and sold on 1–10–08 to Bob Smith. Many times I have seen where the will leave John Doe as the owner but have Bob Smith’s name and mailing address in the mailing address slot. Then when the next year rolls around, they bump John Doe off and Bob Smith is property owner. But this is only a case by case observation.
Need Help?
If you are thinking about buying waterfront property on Lake Martin, and need some help in sifting through all of the Counties, school districts, and tax zones, I would be glad to help you estimate what your annual property taxes might be. As compared to other states, property taxes in Alabama are pretty low, so hopefully it will be a nice surprise. Email me, come by my Kowaliga office, or call my number at the top of this page. I would be glad to help you out.
Lake Martin Real Estate MLS Statistics - 2007 In Review
The Lake Martin real estate market suffered a major slowdown in 2007 for a variety of reasons. I dug through the sales results in the Lake Martin MLS to attempt to cut through the gossip and analyze the numbers.
In 2007, the number of Lake Martin waterfront homes sold was about 35% less than in 2006. 2006 was about 17% less than the peak of the sellers’ market in 2005:
Witness the Transformation From Sellers’ to Buyers’ Market:
In 2006 and 2007, the number of Lake Martin waterfront homes that were added as new listings to the market out paced those that were actually sold every month. Therefore sales inventories ballooned, and this 24 month period proved crucial:
More Analysis Of Waterfront Homes Sold in 2007:
153 Lake Martin homes sold in 2007. Of those, 114 were homes and 39 were condos. Of the 153, 142 were deeded lot homes and 11 were leased lot homes.
Prices of Homes Sold in 2007:
Of the 153, 13 homes were listed as having sold at $0. This happens sometimes. Most of the time it is at the request of the seller. A minority of people don’t want “their business” on the MLS. Sometimes it is a builder that doesn’t want to publish how far he dropped the price. So the below statistics will only deal with the 140 that sold and published prices:
The most expensive home sold was for $3.88 million in The Ridge. The lowest was a manufactured home on a leased lot in Pleasure Point for $25,000.
LOTS:
Sales of waterfront lots on Lake Martin were also affected in 2007. In total, 37 lots were sold in 2007, as compared to 55 in 2006. The monthly sales numbers are:
As the numbers point, out, now is a great time to buy Lake Martin waterfront real estate. Do you need help finding the best deal? Let me show you around..
Or do you own Lake Martin property, and are wondering how all of this news affects your particular situation? Call me, I will be glad to give you an idea of how the changing real estate market will translate to your bottom line. No cost, no pressure, no kidding.
Still curious about Lake Martin real estate statistics? Leave a reply below and suggest how you would like me to slice and dice the numbers.
Disclaimers: All of the above info was taken from the Lake Martin Area Association of Realtors’ Multiple Listing Service. Accuracy is not guaranteed but deemed reliable. The above does not include sales by FSBOs or developers that sell privately and not through the MLS. But, I do think that the above represents a very large majority of all sales on Lake Martin.
Local Lending Would Have Helped Mortgage Mess
The Lake Martin real estate market has not really felt a direct effect of the mortgage meltdown yet. Sure, the subprime fiasco has caused conventional and jumbo rates to rise, but I consider that indirect. By direct effect I mean huge waves of foreclosures from high risk loans, and we haven’t really seen that on Lake Martin up to this point. I don’t think we will see as much of that here as was seen in other markets, because I don’t think that many of the 2004 and 2005 sales were fueled by speculators. A quick trip to the Tallapoosa County Courthouse last week confirmed the low foreclosure rate.
This is not true of other markets around the nation. Headlines like this abound: “Fraud Seen As Major Driver In Wave Of Foreclosures.” In a subject this big, there is a lot of blame to go around: borrowers who falsify their income to buy a home they know they cannot afford, unscrupulous realtors selling for commissions instead of trying to educate clients on wise home buying, dial-a-dollar appraisers who will sell their integrity for $400 a pop, and downright dirty mortgage brokers who churn up new paper and burn families in their wake.
Basically, in many of the cases I think much of this could have been avoided if buyers had stuck with local lenders.
I know this sounds naive of me. Sure, the mortgage industry has changed in the past 10 years.
I know, I know, huge national companies can loan you money no matter where you buy, from Alaska to Port Orange. Sure, because of the internets they can offer low low rates with no no documentation.
So why go with your local yokel lender?
And how would local lending would have helped this mess?
First of all, it’s true, huge national companies can make mortgage loans anywhere with great rates. But the opposite is also true - local banks can tap national rate markets, and almost always match the best rate you can find on the internet. Plus their closing costs are usually lower, at Lake Martin, or anywhere else.
Secondly, more local lending would have helped because it’s human nature to care more about the person you know than you do about some number that’s three states away. If you’re a buyer, would you try to convince your local banker that you can afford a caviar home when she knows you can barely make the payments on your Gremlin? And if you’re a mortgage lender, how willing would you be to give a buyer a loan that you know you will have to foreclose in three months, if your wives are in the same bunko group? If you’re an appraiser who’s on the edge, wouldn’t it be easier to lie to an out of state lender versus one that you sit by at every Friday night football game?
I am not suggesting that we all turn the clock back 40 years and only deal with the bank on the corner and that we all have a credit account at the Feed n Seed. Shareholders pressure banks to make lots of loans, and to do that, they must venture out of state. I get that. But maybe this latest mortgage scare will cause lenders to return to common sense lending.
All Real Estate Is Local (This Means You, Lake Martin)
Life as a Lake Martin area realtor means I hear (and try to answer) lots of questions. One I get regularly is:
“I saw on CNN where home prices in (fill in here with name of huge city 3,000 miles away) are down 75%. All the sellers are being foreclosed on their sub prime mortgages. It’s spreading across the nation like locusts. When will Lake Martin be on sale like that?”
My answer – probably never.
It’s because All Real Estate Is Local. Including (and especially) Lake Martin.
A couple of days ago I read a great post on the WSJ Developments Blog entitled “There Is No National Housing Market.” Also another good one with the same title on the Matrix Blog. Basically they point out that while all markets are influenced by things like the mortgage market, most pricing and activity in the real estate industry is due to local factors. What might be true for rent on the west side of Manhattan won’t set the price in the middle of a Edward Scissorhands-esque subdivision in Tampa.
The “locality truth” is especially evident on Lake Martin. We have about 770 miles of shoreline, but only about 30% of it is developed. Of the undeveloped waterfront property, 99% of it is owned by only two companies: Alabama Power and Russell Lands. They are very good at not flooding the market with too much supply, which helps hold prices up. Think the De Beers diamond cartel.
Another truth about Lake Martin real estate is that you don’t have huge developers selling 
hundreds of spec homes in one subdivision at a time. Sure, there are some builders with $5 million in unsold homes – but that amount is concentrated in 3 homes. Sure, some builders are hurting, but not enough to affect the market (yet). And they’re not hurting because of some national phenomenon, but because they themselves have raised their prices too high too quickly. Simple supply and demand. Moreover, most waterfront property for sale right now is by private citizens, not builders, whom are not under too much pressure to sell.
I agree, the sub prime mess did not help Lake Martin waterfront sales in 2007. But it wasn’t a majority player. The majority of the slowdown was due to unrealistic sellers, with a minority influence of the drought thrown in for good measure. Odds are pretty good that it will straighten out in 2008, and 2009 will be the start of the next seller’s market.
So why aren’t the talking heads reporting this? I guess media reports that are numbers based and rational don’t pull those huge national ratings.
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Lake Martin Real Estate Spotlight: Eagle’s Point
One of Lake Martin’s newest developments – Eagle’s Point – has a model home that is ready to see plus several other spaces for lots.
Located at the easternmost end of Coosa County Road 20, Eagle’s Point has big water views looking southeast at the junction of Parker Creek and Kowaliga towards Willow Point and Sand Island.
Density: Phase I of Eagle’s Point has a total of 11 homes planned. Each home will have and its own pier. They have already cleared out the home sites, so if you drive by boat or car, you’ll see the phase I area. The planned Phase II extends east, across the causeway towards Veazy’s Marina. There are 20 planned homes in Phase II. A Phase III of interior lots is also planned.
House Plans: Eagle’s Point offers three different house plans. There are 2 plans with 3 
bedrooms and 2.5 baths. One plan has 4 beds and 4.5 baths. All are three stories and have at least 2,500 square feet.
Builder: All the homes will be built by Lake Martin builder Sammy Ransome. You cannot bring your own builder.
Pricing: The smallest home on lots 4 and 5 go for $980,000. The 2,762 square foot 4/4.5 is priced at $1,175,000. Right now there are 2 on the MLS – lot one (a 3/3.5 and 2,762 sf) priced at $1,115,000 and lot two (4/4 at 2,762) priced at $1,150,000. Prices like these put it in a similar to other Lake Martin developments like The Ridge and Willow Point.
Amenities: Eagle’s Point will have a gated entrance, private beach, common area fire pits, community dock for guests, golf cart parking by boat launch.
Directions: Eagle’s Point is in the Coosa County side of Lake Martin, at the end of Coosa County Road 20. Google Map to Eagle’s Point
Lake Mag Interview: The Uncensored Director’s Cut
Lake Martin Magazine interviewed me a couple of weeks ago about the effect of the drought on the Lake Martin real estate market, and general trends affecting buyers, sellers, and realtors. They included it in an article called “Special Report: The Water Issue” in the November 2007 issue. I thought Nikki Reeves and Kenneth Boone did a good job of covering a huge topic.
While they didn’t publish the entire interview, they did use a couple of nuggets, and managed to add in a compliment to me. Here’s the entire interview, with the parts that Lake Magazine used highlighted in yellow:
Lake Magazine: Has the lake level affected your individual/company’s business this year in comparison to previous years? Has it done so in a positive/negative way?
John Coley: While I personally have been fortunate to have a better year in 2007 than 2006, I can’t say that for the real estate market as a whole. Through August, the number of waterfront closings per year was down 35%, from 346 to 226. I can’t help but think that a portion of that is due to the low lake level. I don’t think that it’s a majority of the culprit, though. I think the major blame for a slower market still lies at the feet of sellers who have overpriced their offerings. From 2000 to 2006 sellers became accustomed to 30% gains in value per year, and priced in 07 accordingly. The facts have shown that there was little or no value gain in 07 from 06, and some sellers have not figured that out yet. Case in point is the auction in July 07 at Harbor Pointe. They sold 25 condos in one day even though the water was extremely low, so you can’t blame it on the level. They sold them because the prices were low enough for buyers to accept.
LM: Do you think the drought will be a positive thing for the lake market - in terms of rebalancing a surplus of property and real estate agents?
JC: This is kind of a philosophical question. I think it is part of the natural free market cycle of business