This past summer we listed a home that was very nice indeed. Price: $1,200,000. It went under contract in 19 days, and sold a few weeks later for a price that the owners found quite acceptable.

Aside from our usual aggressive marketing, how can we account for such a good offer and fast sale? After all, the home did have a few quirks…some dated features…and wallpaper I wasn’t crazy about.

But sell it did, and here’s why: the home’s uniqueness - its overriding special features. In addition to a very private and nicely landscaped yard, the property had its own tennis court, large in-ground pool, and deep water dock just 5 minutes by boat to the Severn River.

There were other highlights, but the point is this: because the home was a unique package, it could compete in the market on its unique features - features that the buyers knew, or rightly assumed, they’d have difficulty finding in another property. Whether you’re selling real estate, art, or antique cast iron mechanical banks, uniqueness motivates buyers to act more quickly for fear of potential loss.

Contrast That With a Home Located in an Annapolis Subdivision…

…say 50 or 100 homes, perhaps 4 or 5 models to choose from, your usual upgrades. Ten or 12 percent of the subdivision is for sale. How will those homes compete with one another? On price. Absent starkly contrasting features or amenities, similar homes - in a market like the one we’re in - will almost always compete on price. Fear of potential loss diminishes when buyers perceive that supply is more predictable.

Buyers for such homes are being very patient in this market, watching competing homes leapfrog one another into the best price position before snapping them up. (Word of caution to buyers: if you do fall in love, don’t wait to make your play. There’s a good chance someone else has fallen in love with it too.)

And if you’re a subdivision seller? Your best hedge is to do everything you can to make your property stand out as unique among equals: be the cleanest, most freshly painted, best landscaped, least cluttered, and most inviting. And If you want to hear how we make all of our listings stand out as unique, email me at kenhaedrich@hotmail.com and I’ll email back.

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I read a blog post today that said Internet searches for the phrase “houses for sale” were at their highest point in 2 years. The author thought this an encouraging sign: investors, he speculated, are poised to step in at what looks like the bottom of the market, soon to be followed by everyone else who has been waiting for a signal that it’s the right time to buy.

Is he right? Are we bottomed out and about to experience a pent up homebuying rush?

I’m not sure, and I’m not sure anyone else is sure. But since we are out here in the trenches with actual homebuyers, we ARE sure of this: homebuyers are confused, overwhelmed by the negative news of the housing market and Wall Street bailouts. More than anything, buyers need to turn off the TV and seek the counsel of local, experienced professionals who can move them from fear and confusion to a sound, fact-based strategy for purchasing a home.

Putting Together a Team is a Homebuyer’s First Order of Business

If you’re considering purchasing - or selling - a home, do not wing it. To fully understand the ramifications of a real estate transaction, and to afford yourself all due protections, you need a team. First, seek the advice of a financial planner, preferably one with a strong real estate background. (We can arrange for a free consultation if you don’t have one.)

Second, establish a relationship with an experienced Realtor who will work his or her tail off for you and give you 5-star representation. (That would be us, or another Realtor who has earned your loyalty.) Your Realtor can be a key person in helping you put together your team.

Lastly, only work with an experienced, professional lender who comes highly recommended from a trusted source. Realtors know better than anyone which lenders are the real pros.

That’s the core of your team: Realtor, financial planner, lender. If putting together a team sounds like work, well, it is. But especially in this market, you can’t afford not to. We have a saying at Keller Williams: Nobody succeeds alone. Those cowboy days are long gone, pardner.  

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That’s right. Hip young agents are shedding the old ways. They’re no longer piling their buyers into gas guzzling SUVs and schlepping them from home to home. Rather, they’re donning helmets with their clients, hopping on bikes, and hitting the road. The concept is really gaining ground in places like Portland, Oregon where - apparently - the sight of sweaty, two-wheeling Realtors is becoming quite common. I decide to run the idea by the rest of The Moss Haedrich Team at Monday’s team meeting.

Are you out of your mind? That’s Kathy, one of our Buyer Specialists. She reminds me that she has new clients flying into town this morning, and there’s a good chance of rain this afternoon. Besides, her clients have 3 kids and she’s showing them expensive homes in Edgewater. “Driving down Route 2 is dangerous enough in a car. You want me to kill off the best buyers I have?”

I see her point. I decide we should probably start with the buyers we’ve been working with for more than a year. Who knows? Maybe the jolt of adrenaline from pedaling around Annapolis on two wheels will finally push them off the fence.

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Or at least we were. But now I’ve gone and purchased an E-ZPass, one of those electronic thingamabobs you mount on your windshield so you can fly through toll booths. 

The straw that broke the camel’s back was a massive bottleneck this past Monday at the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike. Everything was fine and then, for no good reason, hundreds of cars were funneled into just four open lanes marked “Cash Only.” (An equal number were closed, for crying out loud.) The Fortunates, those who had the foresight to purchase an E-ZPass already, flew through specially marked lanes. We, The Unfortunates bucked, bumped and fumed our way through the toll at a snail’s pace, shooting menacing stares at anyone who dared to butt in line. It was not pretty.

Real Estate Sales Have Bottlenecked Across the Country of Late, Too, Including Here in Annapolis

Indeed, homes are piling up on the market while buyers - many of them paralyzed by dire reports in the media - just sit back and wait. Meanwhile, frustrated sellers find themselves inching their way, like the “Cash Only” masses, toward a sale, all the while experiencing the home seller’s version of road rage. Many are giving up, taking their homes off the market, or opting to rent.

There’s No Such Thing as An E-ZPass for Home Sellers, But There IS a Path of Least Resistance - And The Traffic There is Moving

We know because four of our listings - from $1,200,000 to under $300K - have gone under contract in the last 4 weeks. Two of them took less than 3 weeks to get there. So we’re familiar with the signs along that path, and here’s what they say:  (more…)

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I normally try to keep a safe distance from anything that involves sharp objects and blood, especially my own.

The notable exception is once every few months when we - The Moss Haedrich Team - help to organize a community blood drive at our office. Our local area needs roughly 7,300 units of blood each year and it takes work and a small army of volunteer donors to keep the supply from running low. We’re glad to do our part and help rally some troops for the effort.

Incidentally, all the blood that’s donated to the Anne Arundel Medical Center’s Blood Donor Center  - and that includes the blood mobile program - stays right here in the community, where it is used for more than 3,000 life saving transfusions each year.

If you’d like to help out and pitch in a pint, the AAMC Blood Mobile will be parked at our office at 7 Old Solomons Island Road this Thursday, June 19th, from 10:00AM to 1:00PM. In addition to plenty of moral support for big sissies like myself, they’ll be refreshments on hand. As a bonus, you’ll get a free mini-physical including blood pressure and temperature checks, blood iron level test, and cholesterol screening. All good stuff to know.

You can just show up if you like - well hydrated, please - but if you’d like to reserve a 15 minute time slot, or have any other questions, call me directly 410-507-7222. Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you there.

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I wonder how many visitors come to Annapolis for a day trip and miss Maryland Avenue entirely. Most, I’m afraid.

Shame, because it’s less crowded than Main Street and the City Dock area, the shops and galleries are great, and the architecture is some of the most striking that you’ll find in town. In the 18th century, Maryland Ave was the most fashionable residential street in the city, and it’s not hard - as you stroll from one end to the other - to imagine the privileged lives of the residents who built some of the homes here.

Here are a few of the sights you’ll see along this historic street.

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Getting lost is underrated. Hardly anybody gets lost anymore, thanks to Mapquest and GPS devices. But we managed to do so today, searching for a piece a property we were scheduled to preview. Our wrong turn landed us in a neighbor’s driveway, where we got talking to the owner who kindly offered us on a tour of her property.

The owner and her husband, she told us, have owned the property for nearly three decades and it looked as if they’d spent much of that time in the gardens. They were simply gorgeous - lush beds, stone pathways, a serene park-like feel. It was landscape as art. Have a peek.

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Much of our work as agents involves telling people things they’d rather not hear: We need to adjust the selling price. Your septic system has issues. The would-be buyers have withdrawn their offer and are moving to Costa Rica instead.

That’s why I don’t mind paying someone else, on occasion, to tell people things I’d rather not tell them and that they’d rather not hear. Just makes my life a little easier.

One such person is our team stager/designer, Linda Donnelly. Not only does Linda have years of interior design experience. Nobody is better than she is at spotting potential buyer objections and offering sound solutions. That’s why she works with our sellers: to eliminate objections to a sale. It works: the homes she has staged for us sell, and beat the average days on market considerably.

Linda is extremely pleasant, but the experience - I must tell you - can be challenging for a seller. Imagine a 3-or 4-hour marathon session in which your home is put under a microscope, shortcomings are served up, and corrective homework is lavishly assigned. I worry how some clients will hold up. Linda knows to call me right away after a consultation and give me an update.

How did it go, I’ll ask.

Fine, she’ll say, until I told them they had to get rid of their dogs.

Linda likes to tease me, but her sense of humor is one of the things that makes her so good at what she does. This, too: she’s not afraid to roll up her sleeves and do much of the needed work with our clients. I think of her as our personal trainer for home sellers: she’ll push you to make your home look as irresistible as it can be. And in the end you’ll get the results you were hoping for.   

Linda’s services, by the way, are included for free when we list a home. Call for more details.

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Several years back, on my first day in real estate, I sat down with the team leader of the Keller Williams office here in Annapolis. I signed some papers, had a stack of books and a training schedule handed to me, and then this:

So Ken - tell me about your Big Why.

Sorry? It sounded like she thought I owned a ranch in Montana, The Big Y.

Your Big Why. Why are you here? What’s the one thing that gives meaning and purpose to your life more than any other?

Well, I hadn’t really considered it. And truth be told, I thought the question was a bit lofty for someone who hadn’t even learned to use the office copier yet, let alone sell a single house. But I was new, eager to make my mark, and vaguely recall mumbling something about the opportunity to help people and make a decent living in the process.

Read pages 72 and 73 in there, she said, pointing at one of the books she had just handed me. That will help you figure it out.

Gary Keller, on The Focusing Power of a Big Why

The book in question is one we at Keller Williams refer to as “the red book” - The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, written by our company’s co-founder, Gary Keller.

Sure enough, right there on page 72 was this: “…we’ve discovered that the one thing that all high achievers have in common is they are working for a Big Why. The Big Why is about having a purpose, a mission, or a need, that in turn gives you focus. High achievers always have a Big Why powering their actions.”

I was intrigued, and followed the exercise Gary outlined, writing down everything that motivated me. I was underwhelmed: to my eye, what I had written looked like a ragtag group of Little and Medium Whys. There wasn’t a Big Why in sight. A life of insignificance loomed before me. I had better get digging for a Big Why, and fast, if I wanted to be a high achiever too.

The Power Behind Being the Best You Can Be

I didn’t realize it at the time, but - as Gary went on to explain - there is nothing wrong with a collection of lesser whys: we all have to pay our mortgage or rent, fund retirement accounts, help put our kids through college.

But those - and all of our smaller whys, says Gary - will fall into place naturally if we simply put this one Big Why at the forefront of all others: to be the best we can possibly be. A powerful Big Why like this, he points out, gives foundational support to all of your other whys. It’s like geese flying in formation: the lead goose expends all the energy, while the others draft behind with much less effort.

“Being your best” he goes on to say, “is actually a goal-less pursuit. You can never really reach a point where you can truthfully say, ‘I just can’t grow anymore.’ And what is so exciting about that is this kind of Big Why can create a life that literally explodes with limitless possibility and unlimited growth.”

All Those Big Whys Help Build Stronger Communities

One of the things I love about Keller Williams is the large number of individuals we attract who have a Be the Best You Can Be mentality. That’s not really surprising, given the fact that KW agents have - at their disposal - all of the tools and training necessary for achieving greatness. (more…)

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Today is Fun Friday on this blog and for 919 new graduates of the Naval Academy I imagine this was about the most fun they’ve had in 4 years.

To the graduates and their families…to those of us who live in Annapolis and perhaps served in the Navy…this is a very big day and we all take pride in this annual event. We’ve watched these young men and women mature before our very eyes, seen the sportsmanship they display on the football field and in other athletic events - and we can’t help but feel proud to be part of this community.

Admiral Michael G. Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed the graduating class and offered some good advice: learn from your mistakes; be accountable for your actions; and question authority when appropriate. Not a bad code to live by.

The ceremony ended the way it always does, with the hat toss. If you’ve never seen it before, watch this clip - one I just found on YouTube - from this year’s graduation.

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