• Sell Your Home With These 10 Affordable Tweaks
• 12 Bay Area County Report
• Willow Glen Home of the Week
• Luxury Home of the week
• NAR Settles Law Suit

NAR Settles Law Suit | New Listings Rose to the Highest Level in 17 Months in February (Luxury Home of the Week)

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  Breaking News: NAR Lawsuit Settlement Overview

Sell Your Home With These 10 Affordable Tweaks

NAR settles the lawsuit. Got a lot of traffic on this last weekend over the weekend. And it's, I'll show you what I have straight from NAR and then 10 things you can do to help sell your home. Willa Glenn house of the week, luxury house of the week, and listings rose to the highest in 17 months.

12 Bay Area County Report

And then we'll also do The 12-county snapshot. Let's get into this real quick, get this over and done with so that you can go on with your day. So the settlement is 481 million or something like that. I'm not exactly sure where this is all going. We haven't actually had the settlement agreed upon by the judge. This was just presented to the judge and everybody went off the wall over the weekend saying, this is what's going to happen. The truth is we don't know what's going to happen. It's all a bunch of supposition and posturing and this is what's going to happen. And this and that go through every little thing. The bottom line is NAR covered their ass. They made the bigger brokerages, the scapegoat. They're getting away with a lot and because they're supposed to be a pro-consumer and pro-realtor, they really didn't do much to protect us in this. I think they've lost a lot of ground and they lost a lot of face, especially with me. A lot of realtors are walking away. At the end of the day, I think what's going to happen is a lot of newer agents are going to get out of the business because they just don't Can't see the whole, I can't make people sign an agreement, which I don't know, whatever. That's totally up to them how they're going to do that. Implications of the NAR Settlement for Realtors and the Market Let's go into it. Implications of over 1 million NAR members, National Association of Realtors members are released from liability nationwide. And there's a, Down here it says anything that exceeded 2 billion in sales is not released. So the big players like Compass and Century 21 all these other companies, they're not Keller Williams more in Buffett's place, whatever that one is called they're all still going to have to deal with. So NAR didn't really take care of their own is this fair for the sellers? I think it's a great thing for the sellers. However, I think the buyers are going to have a little bit more of a struggle in the coming months. Try to figure out how to make these deals work and who it really hurts. It's first-time buyers, FHA buyers, and VA buyers because VA veterans buyers are not allowed to pay anything out of pocket except for um, like the appraisal, that's pretty much it. They can't do any repairs. They can't do anything out of pocket. So there's going to be a lot of changes coming down the pike. So just hold on, right? We don't know exactly where this is going to land. Cause again, we don't know the judge hasn't even approved this yet. So every time you see a video about, Hey, this is what's going to happen. We don't know. It's all supposition and posturing implications for association-owned MLSs. So here's the thing in our guidelines for as long as, for the 20 years I've been around and longer, the way that it worked was the seller paid the listing broker, right? And all agents work under a broker. So the broker got paid and then they took half of the commission and the other half went to the buyer's agent. So if it was five or 6%, they would split that down the middle. Sometimes it's a little wanky back and forth. Just depends on the brokerage, depends on the agent, depends on how the deal is structured. And then the buyer's agent would be paid through that system. The buyer's broker gets paid from that can close, and then the split goes to the agent and then whatever it is. And then whatever's left over goes to the brokerage. That's how it's always been. Now, the work is going to be put onto the onus of the buyer and the buyer's agent, where they have to go and negotiate their compensation, which could help the seller immensely. So my thoughts are, how is this going to help? The this, the buyer, it really doesn't. Could you put it into the agreement saying, Hey, seller, I want you to pay the buyer's agent, the two and a half, 3%, this is part of the structure. We'll see how that goes out. We don't know. And if they say the seller says, no, I'm not paying anything. Then the buyer has to pay whatever's on a buyer broker agreement. Buyer-broker agreements are going to become a normal practice. I've been doing that for the last five, or six years now. I used to be pretty lackadaisical about it. And here's the thing. When you work with a buyer's agent, you're hiring them. You're hiring them exclusively. And there are other options where you don't have to buy or hire them exclusively. However, why would I spend my time, energy, and money to go and show you a house and negotiate for you? And then you go and buy a house somewhere else. I'm just not going to do that. I just, can't do that. This is a business for me. I feed my kids with the money that I make off of this business. I pay my mortgage. I pay my taxes. I pay my insurance. I pay for healthcare. All that stuff comes off the top, including marketing. So if you're not going to commit to me, I'm not going to commit to you and you can go somewhere else. I have plenty of business going, what have you. I totally understand that. There's a lot of different options that are going to come down the pike. And we don't know where we're going to land. So just like there's discount listing agents, listing brokerages, now there's going to be discount listing or buyer agents where they just take a 5, 000 or 1 percent split and whatever's left over. However, just keep in mind that. If you're going to hire somebody or you're asking somebody to do some work for you, the intention is that you're going to compensate them somehow. And if the onus falls on you as the buyer, then you should pay that person, that agent, to do what you hired them to do. And if you come in and say I don't know if I'm going to buy or not, or la, there's going to be some implications on that too. So just be prepared. We don't know where this is going to land again. Navigating New NAR Rules and Their Impact on Buyers and Sellers

NAR Settles Law Suit

So new NAR rules, written agreements, long encouragement, what service and value will be provided for how much the settlement provides that the participants must enter into a written representation agreement with those buyers. This change will go into effect in mid-July. So I have a couple of listings come up and my clients came up and it said, how does this affect me? And I said it doesn't because we're going to be closed before July. It's just, that's just the way it is. So don't think it's like I can take advantage of this now. I don't have to pay a buyer's agent. You never had to. And the constant con the conversations I've always had is we suggest two and a half, 3 percent you can pay him a dollar. Totally up to you how that's going to work. However, there's something called steering and I go into an explanation about that. Not all agents do it. Now, not all agents will work with that. A good agent will have representation, a representation agreement in place saying that if the seller isn't paying, you're going to, the buyer will pay me that kind of thing. So will this lower Commissions. I don't think so. I have a sliding scale. I have a tiered service that I offer. I offered to get it on the MLS today so here's some listing. Here's some work we work with you and we get your house fixed up, and ready to go. Or we could do a complete turnkey. I gave you those options and I explained to you the costs and the timeframe and all this other stuff that might affect the sale of your home, either positively or negatively. I let you make that decision and then we go from there. I never played that game of this is this, that is I always suggest that you offer two and a half percent, no matter what. The other part of this thing, this litigation or the settlement is that we're now taking any compensation off of the table. So in the MLS or whatever, it's not going to be available for you. And it's a mystery bag. You don't know how you're going to deal with that. The seller. So now the buyer's agent has to negotiate with the seller to say, Hey, I expect two and a half percent and the seller can say, go pound sand. I'm not going to do that, or I'm not going to pay you two and a half percent. I'll pay you a thousand dollars. I'll pay you 10, 000. And then there's an agreement between the Delta, the buyer. So it's going to be very consuming. It helps. So at the end of the day, this helps the sellers. Immensely. It hurts the buyers and it makes it very difficult to work with buyer's agents these days. Top 10 Tips to Make Your Home More Sellable All right, Lance let's talk about things, 10 things to do to make your house more sellable, landscape and exteriors, quick cleanup. So yeah, if you're, if you just painted your house five years ago, there's a lot of dust. I don't know if you can hear, but there's a pool being buried right now across the street from me. They're taking out the pool and there's dirt flying everywhere. My truck is filthy. That means that there's dirt flying onto the walls of my house. If I were to put the house on the market, I'd go and power, wash it, get all that dust off, and then make sure that it looks nice and pretty. And then I would make sure that the landscape looks nice and done. Get the mulch, and put it around on the dirt to make it look. Manicured, put some perennials in there, trim up your trees and bush bushes, and clean your landscape, your grass, et cetera. Make it look presentable because curb appeal is probably the most important thing. The first five seconds, right? Five to 10 seconds is where they make the buyer make a judgment call into whether or not they like the house. They like the neighborhood, they like everything, but then the house looks like a total mess. Like a third. They're gonna, they're gonna pass on a lot of those houses if they're the turnkey type. Give your door and doorbell some love. Yeah. Clean it, dust it. If it's wood, put some wood oil on it, make it look nice and good. Fresh. If it's painted, think about repainting it, scrubbing it down, scratching it down, or sending it down and repainting it. The same thing with the doorbell put a new doorbell on it, and get the little ring fixture. Cause everybody loves the ring. That's a big selling thing right now. These days evaluate all the doors. It's a big thing, right? If you have dings and scratches on your doors, paint them. If you have Brown doors, paint them white. There's a new thing where everybody's painting their doors black. Not necessarily my thing, but if it's something you want to do, we can discuss it, right? I don't care but make it look fresh and smart and clean. And like you just installed them. Yeah. Carpets and floors. If your doors are, if your floors are all dinged up, or if your carpet has stains in them, think about it. replacing them or getting them cleaned up or finished, refinished. Scents are a big thing. You walk into a house and it smells like fish. automatically that person, that buyer is going to be turned off, right? I'm not a big fan of the Febreze or the candles, wax, smell thing. It comes in. It tells me that you're hiding a smell. So what I always say is freshen up with fresh flowers, open up your windows, and let the dusty, musty air get out. If you have animals, I have dogs, I have chickens, you name it, get rid of those. Furniture, getting rid of, sorry, get rid of the furniture that they might be hanging out on sleeping on because their dander and their stink and their smell gets all over that. So get rid of those couches and keep the dogs from getting onto those, that furniture as well. Same thing with carpet, right? The carpet is a huge sponge of smell. So if you smoke or you cook a lot of fish, get rid of that carpet, just replace it. It's not super expensive. We're talking about million-dollar houses here in California. If you cheap out on 2, 500, 3, 000, you're going to wind up losing 10 to 15, 000 worth of value in it. So there you go. Clean and fix any wall blemishes. Yeah. I have kids and I have dings and I have smudges. I have grease and I'll have stuff that the kids just naturally touch the walls. So you clean it off, make it look new. You can do it with soap and water. You can do it with the little melamine bars. Totally up to you. If a door or a wall is completely scratched up, I suggest you paint that wall, and make it look fresh. People are expecting, even if it's an as-is sale, they expect the house to look at least decent or else they're going to fall into the wholesale brand as if it's a piece of crap. I'm not doing anything. You're not going to get a premium price for it. You might. But I suggest you tighten it up, organize, you're going to move. And if you come to me and say, I'm not in a hurry to move, I'm not really committed, and all that I'm not committed to getting your house sold. When you're telling your buyer that you're not committed to selling your house, and it looks like that. Like you're living in it, which is fine when you live in it. That's fine. But when you sell your house, clear away the clutter, put everything in boxes, throw them into your garage, store them, and get them stored up so that your house looks like your floor model. Or a model home that you're ready to sell, right? That's a big, huge indicator. When I walk into a house and it looks like they haven't done a damn thing to the house and there's clothes and crap everywhere and it smells funny. I know right away that it's going to be a problem getting them out of that house when you organize it and it makes it look like you're ready to sell. The big question I get is, Does the person even still live here? I know that this person's motivated to move, right? If you have stuff everywhere, they haven't really done any packing. Then you're not really motivated to move and it's going to, it's going to look that way. Fix cabinet and drawer tracks. It is everything about you. I mean my cabinets are painted white and I get dings on them So if I want to go sell my house I would pop I would fill in the scratches and repaint it and make it look like it's brand new I make sure everything works right to get rid of half the pots and pans and storage bowls that I have in there So it looks like it's Livable, but it also looks like I'm moving. Make sure everything works because when you look at one thing that doesn't work, then all of a sudden you open up Pandora's box and it looks like the house hasn't been maintained at all. Yeah. Clean your appliances. This is a big one. This is huge. Clean your appliances and it doesn't matter if you did it two weeks ago, if you're getting it on sale and you cook, clean your appliances, pull out your oven, and your stove, and get all the grease and gunk off of it. Vacuum behind there, pull your refrigerator out, get all that stuff, clean it, and make it look as new as possible. And it took me a couple of seconds to understand what polish with finishes means if you're towel rack and your toilet paper roll dispenser and all that stuff looks old and grimy replace it, and just get rid of it. Okay. That's it.

Willow Glen Home of the Week

Spotlight on Willow Glen: Home of the Week Will Glenn home of the week, two bedrooms, one bath. That's the lowest listing price of the, of in Willow Glenn, 1. 4 million for a thousand square feet. That's crazy. It's 1, 400 per square foot. Crazy. Just on the market today and it's almost walking distance to downtown Santa downtown Willow Glen. That's where all the restaurants are, but you can take a nice saunter down to Minnesota and Lincoln have some fun, and then come back. And there you go. This one's going to sell fast because. It's a great little piece of property. Take a look at it. Oh, we're not going to be able to look at it. There you go. Okay.

Luxury Home of the Week

Luxury Living: Belvedere Home of the Week Luxury home of the week. This is Belvedere in Belvedere up in Marin County. This is a beautiful home. Let's take a look. Four bedrooms, five baths, 8, 100 square feet for a meal, a mere 23 million. These are not my listings by the way. 30, 000 square foot lot. So it's just a shade four, six, five, three, Oh, four, three, five, six. So is an acre. So it's just about two-thirds of an acre on the hill. And look at that view. That's what you're paying for. That is gorgeous. Beautiful house going slow. All right, we'll go back to that in a little bit. If you want to take a look at these listings, they're linked down below in my blog, go to the blog and you'll see the complete list. Real Estate Market Trends: Listings and Sales Insights The links and their listings went up highest in 17 months, but we expected it. Now, last year we had a major retraction in supply or contraction in supply, right? This was because we had those 2 percent listings and nobody was selling their houses. Now that's coming back to normal, but they're definitely not doing it. Back to 21, 22 numbers, because well, we have a lot of people buying up property for Airbnb, the industrial investors like black rock, et cetera. If you have 18, 000 homes that you're turning, and converting into rentals, you're an industrial investor and you're taking away from home buyers. And a lot of these homes are our first-time home buyers. Type homes, there are smaller starter homes and they're harder for home buyers and first-time home buyers to move in because there's a lack of supply. So it says here that we went up 1. 3, 3. 8 over a month over a month, which is fine. They were up 14 percent year over year since May 21. There you go. Home prices post the biggest increase in nearly a year and a half. We climbed 6. 6. We're back up to 4. 8. One, two, that was September. I don't think I have that number here for you, but I will get that for you for that tomorrow. The median sales price for February 24, the highest was four 16. And then they contracted that down to four 14 or something like that. So February 422, 000, that's pacing for 5 million, five, five and a half million. So that's still lower than what we're back at the peak. We're at six and a half, 6. 3, I think million homes. So, go ahead and take a look at that. Nothing big happening here. Santa Clara, we're at 1100 homes sold at 2. 3 billion and the average sales price is 2. 1 million. That's not the median. The median right now for Santa Clara is 1. 7 on average, right? That's over the last three months, three weeks. Cause remember I lost my couple of years, my last spreadsheet. So I'm rebuilding this. The next one is Cemetery take a look at the sales volume is 1. 86, but if their average sales price is 2. 4. And yes, houses are selling for much higher than the list price, even in San Francisco is bouncing back nicely because everybody's going back to San Francisco. Everybody left San Francisco. Now they're coming back. And I think what happened is they're realizing that homebuyers are going where the path of least resistance is, and now they can go to San Francisco, but I've always maintained that Sonoma and Napa. These are great places to buy because you can buy houses at 95 percent or 95 cents on the dollar and there are a lot of listings to choose from. Sonoma, you have almost 740, almost 740 houses and you can get a little bit of a discount if you price it right. Right now Alameda has almost 2000. Alameda is being really healthy and we have. 2000 active list. Now, these are not active lists. These are new home sales. Right now we have I think like 1900 available for sale. Let me see if I can find that. Yeah. We'll get that later. So there you go. All right. Wrapping Up: Key Takeaways from Today's Real Estate Update Today we talked about the NAR lawsuit being settled, 10 things you can do to help make your house a little more sellable, and the Willow Glen house of the week. And. The Belvedere House of the Week, the Luxury Home of the Week, and then talk about housing going up. It's good. We need that to happen. I'm Vito. I'm Vito with Abitano. We'll see you out there.

Vito Scarnecchia Real Estate Broker, Veteran, Dad DRE#: 01407676 408-705-6817 Vito@abitano.com Website: abitano.com https://www.onereal.com/vito-scarnecchia-1 update your home value: https://hmbt.co/bT7qRJ RELOCATION@ABITANO.COM FREE DESKTOP APPRAISAL https://www.propertyrate.com/agent/vitoscarnecchia If you are moving ANYWHERE in the world - Let me know! I know a LOT of AMAZING Agents! Book appointments here: https://calendly.com/abitano/15min Home Buyers Course YT YouTube.com/SanJoseLiving IG https://www.instagram.com/abitanogroup/ FB https://www.facebook.com/vito.scarnecchia/ LI https://www.linkedin.com/in/vito-scarnecchia/ Blog http://blog.abitano.com/ POD https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/oxdH1Hwfcvb Professional Photography by Kim E https://photosbykime.com / Local Real Estate Market and Home Value Report https://hmbt.co/bT7qRJ Financial Intelligence https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0R5pjHIAPguZ5GDEB-fTbGJXKpWK3coK9Khymv_GTWkMnyQ/viewform?usp=send_form https://www.onereal.com/vito-scarnecchia-1 Willow Glen's five most expensive homes https://youtu.be/3A_E2ck0ePg

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