I’m more than a touch old-fashioned … okay … call it curmudgeonly … in that I’m not a big fan of hassles. I’ve covered two World Series games and enjoyed the experience immensely. I’ve never worked a Super Bowl or NBA Finals, though I’ve worked NHL and NBA playoff games. The bigger the game, the bigger the hassle and the less inclined I am to deal with it all.

This, in short, is why I enjoy spring training – the simple sounds of cleats clacking against concrete, the aroma of fresh-cut grass in the air, the particular thump a fastball makes when it connects with a glove, the rapping of ball against bat …

… and the sights of sounds of more than 100 Japanese journalists following every movement of the Rangers’ splashy new acquisition, Yu Darvish.

Newspapers in America are on death watch; layoffs were announced for the Rangers’ hometown Fort Worth Star Telegram and somehow, someway, the newspapers of Japan collectively can fly more than 100 reporters and cameramen across the Pacific to watch one man stretch his hamstrings.

But I digress …

Half the major leagues currently train in the Valley of the Sun:

• Chicago Cubs – Mesa
• Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim – Tempe
• San Francisco Giants – Scottsdale Stadium, Scottsdale
• Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies – Salt River Field, Scottsdale
• Milwaukee Brewers – Maryvale Stadium, Phoenix
• Oakland Athletics – Phoenix Municipal Stadium, Phoenix
• San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners – Peoria
• Texas Rangers and Kansas City Royals – Surprise
• Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox – Camelback Ranch, Phoenix/Glendale
• Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians – Goodyear

Tickets are cheap, the beer is cold (and inexpensive) and most days you can see the starting nine playing the first three to seven innings depending on when you go.

And the next two weeks, when workouts are taking place, are an autograph hound’s haven as players are available just past a plastic flagged rope.

Albert Pujols is in Tempe, Manny Ramirez is back and in Phoenix, the aforementioned Yu Darvish is in Surprise and the unsuspended Ryan Braun is in Maryvale. And that’s just four of the 15.

Other places can keep their snow and frost. Spring Training is in the air here and all is well.

Not so with real estate. Here, buyers immediately turn into amateur psychologists … there’s a near constant desire for additional information, generally for the purpose of discerning the sellers’ intent and motivation, and that effort often turns out to not make much difference in the end.

We are, collectively, just not that smart. But when it comes to buying homes we think we are. And this the questions, presented in no particular order:

1) How much did the sellers pay for it? There are rare situations where this matters, such as during the run-up of 2005 when values were changing daily. In general, though, it’s an irrelevant question.

Picture purchasing a stock, say Apple. Right now it’s $502 a share. When I started working at Charles Schwab back in 1996, it was trading for $40 and change. If you’re looking to buy Apple, does it really matter at all that the seller purchased the stock for $45 a share 10 years ago? Not whatsoever. That was the market then, this is the market now.

While it’s understandable not to want to contribute too much to someone’s profit, the reality is it doesn’t at all matter what the seller paid for the stock. Or a house.

2) Why did the last contract fall through? Perhaps you have more faith in the collective intelligence of the human race than I do. (If so, turn on E! for about 30 minutes and you’ll be disabused of that notion.) There is a reason traders tend to run contrary to public opinion – the public, en masse, knows nothing.

This past week, one of my own buyers changed their mind on a property because the backyard was in too good of a condition to work for a rental property. They made this decision after seeing it in person, where it was identical to the photos in the MLS. In other words, there was no new information from the time they made the offer based on the MLS to the time they changed their mind.

They just changed their mind. Got cold feet. End of story. And their loss will be to the gain of a young family purchasing their first home, who will be happy as heck to have this house. It happens. Why they changed their mind matters not to this new couple. And it shouldn’t – it’s irrelevant.

3) What did the last inspection say? Two weeks ago, sellers of mine had to pay $300 for a structural engineer to check out a “missing” 2×4 in the roof truss structure mentioned by an inspector. The verdict? There was no “missing” 2×4. There was a bracket there but, structurally speaking, no point to have a 2×4 where the bracket happened to be. And so it was skipped.

Three hundred dollars to confirm what the sellers’ own inspector told them (or didn’t tell them, since it wasn’t called) back in 2010 and to learn that the buyers’ inspector was, as House would say, an idiot.

Hire your own inspector. Don’t worry about the last one and what he did or didn’t call, did or didn’t know. It’s irrelevant.

4) Why are they selling? Only answer that matters – “because they want to move.” The only reason buyers ask is so they can justify in their own mind the offer they’re going to make, looking for desperation that may or may not exist. Don’t outsmart yourself. Work the numbers, listen to your agent (assuming your agent has a functioning brain) and make an offer that works for you. Stop worrying about why they are selling – it’s really irrelevant. They’re selling because they want or need to.

5) Why has this home been on the market so long? Maybe it’s the house. Maybe it’s the seller’s stubbornness. Maybe it’s the agent’s unique decision to post one front photo of the house. Maybe it’s because the seller only will allow showings between 1:15 and 1:30 on a Tuesday morning. Again, trust in the collective stupidity of mankind and your own intelligence and make a decision based on what works for you, what might not have worked for the masses – it’s irrelevant.

Buying real estate is different because of the sums involved but, for the most part, it’s not much different than any other type of purpose. When I bought my new computer monitor this week at Fry’s, I didn’t wonder why they happened to be selling the monitor. It was for sale. That was enough.

Same goes for the couch I bought off of Craigslist. It’s for sale. Looked good. It’s mine now.

Stop thinking so hard and leaving yourself caught in paralysis by analysis. It’s irrelevant. And pointless, too.

If you remember my old analogy about the Phoenix real estate market being like a car stuck in the mud. The accelerator’s being pushed to the floor but the tires keep spinning, unable to gain any traction. Why? The lenders are standing to the side with a water hose making even more mud. How? By continuing to price homes below current market levels in order to initiate a quick sale.

Price new homes to the market at the level of the past sales and they’ll still move. Maybe it will take 10 days instead of five, but they’ll still sell. And then you’ll see prices move …

A mere 32 months later, and the market’s gaining traction. And just as a car stuck in the mud will leap forward as soon as traction is regained before resuming a more normal path, the Phoenix real estate market,  in some of the most hardest hit areas over the past couple of years, is jumping forward.

Let’s take Laveen, just southwest of downtown …

Prices jumped forward and seemingly are settling a bit (though situations like the one my buyers found themselves in, where they were one of 15 bidders on a house the first day it came on the market and the final sales price will be above list are more common.)

Not so in Litchfield Park, at least as far as the settling is concerned:

Especially in the sub-$100k category, the pressing demand and the roadblock caused by ridiculously inventory brings to mind a different scene:

Terrible man, indeed.

What a time it is to be an equity seller. The world is your river of chocolate.

If you ever watch poker on television, or play poker yourself, the speech generally comes when someone thinks they’re in a strong position but really isn’t all that certain. Lacking that certainty, a monologue begins all with the specific purpose of uncovering information.

I just received The Speech from a listing agent in Westbrook Village regarding a property on which I wrote an offer. To this agent, the only comp that matters is the casita he sold next door – a casita selling for the highest price per square foot in Westbrook’s older phase in at least six months.

When that property closes, this agent will have sold exactly one property ever in Westbrook Village, a 5,000-odd home active adult community in Peoria.

One property or, more specifically, one fewer than I put under contract myself in Westbrook this week. Or about a dozen less than I’ve sold there over the past couple of years.

Unlike the rest of the Valley, where demand has soared while inventory has been non-existent, the active adult communities have been running largely out of sync. It took an extra year before values really started to fall and there’s been virtually no sign of prices stabilizing.

Around the corner from this same casita was a bank-owned property listed at $140,000. One of my buyers had it under contract at $125k before changing her mind; it eventually sold for $120,000. In nearly every subassociation in Westbrook, values have been falling to levels not seen in years.

“We have to coach our buyers that there is a changing dynamic in this market,” said this agent. “They can’t just walk in with the expectation of purchasing a home below market value.”

Of course, market value is in the eye of the beholder. The question is, who has a better handle on the property’s true market value – the agent looking at one comp or the agent looking at several.

Did I mention neither of my two buyers this week in Westbrook Village are paying full price for their properties?

“Given the activity we’ve had at our open houses, we’re confident we’ll get a stronger offer.”

I hope so, for the sake of my owners in the area. But I have to say, I tend to wonder about an agent who confuses open house foot traffic with real interest. Any experienced agent knows someone saying “I’ll write an offer in 10 minutes” is about as solid a prospect as someone who never comes through the open house, not until the contract is in hand.

There’s a time and place for The Speech, no question. But it doesn’t work when there’s nothing more behind the speech than a bluff and a prayer.

I’ve got the buyer. I know the market. I’ve got the nuts, son. Good luck with your two-outer.

Photo credit: Images of Money via Flickr Creative Commons

1. When you were selling your house and the buyer asked for virtually no repairs and absolutely no ticky-tack items? That was my prepping the buyers’ agent ahead of time about what repairs you might or might not be willing to make.
2. When your FHA appraisal didn’t come through and the bank selling the home lowered the purchase price to appraised value even though there’s no contractual obligation to do so? That was me working with the listing agent to make sure the asset manager understands how little leverage he or she has once an FHA appraisal is complete.
3. When your home sold above the recent comps and still hit the number for the appraisal? That was me getting the right price on it from the get go.
4. When someone stole the oven out of the HUD house and HUD shrugged? That was me writing a check to cover the cost of the oven out of my own pocket.
5. When your below-market offer got accepted anyway, even in a market where values are starting to climb and demand is high? That was me negotiating on your behalf and positioning your offer in the best possible light.
6. When the exact home you’re looking for comes on the market and you hear about it that day? That’s me jumping into the listings – the real listings in the MLS, not Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make Believe on Trulia and Zillow – and getting you the information ASAP.
7. When you purchase a home in a retirement community and there are fees that don’t appear on TruZilia and you’re not surprised? That was me providing you the accurate information up front.
8. And when you don’t necessarily have to pay all those fees? That’s me putting my experience to work to best craft your offer so your out-of-pocket expenses are limited.
9. When you find yourself overwhelmed by the process, wondering why this person and that person isn’t moving as quickly as you might like? That’s me calming you down and explaining how the process works and re-setting expectations appropriately.
10. And when you go to Trulia Voices and get a half-dozen different opinions from agents in five different states who have never been to Arizona much less learned our real estate laws and customs and you can’t figure out what’s right or wrong? I’m the one with the real answers – maybe not what you need to hear, but absolutely what you need to know.

Disintermediate that, kids.

There are only 14,124 properties of any type available in Maricopa County.

And the Arizona Regional MLS shows only 16,998 properties for sale total (ARMLS includes listings from around the state but primarily Maricopa and Pinal Counties).

With such thin inventory, can truly stunning marketing efforts by listing agents be far behind?

Today’s tip … don’t let your kids punch up your photos using Microsoft Paint.

But then there was this whistling sound overhead and, while I don’t think I caught any direct flak, there’s a more than decent chance there will be some collateral damage from this minor bombshell …

On February 13, 2012, at a Special Called Meeting of the ARMLS Board of Directors, Bob Bemis tendered his resignation notice as ARMLS CEO, to accept the newly created position of Vice President of Partner Relations for Zillow, Inc. in Seattle. Over his four years at ARMLS, Bob built a legacy of strong leadership, and is widely credited within the MLS industry with moving ARMLS to world class status.

So … our incredibly forward thinking of CEO is leaving ARMLS to go to Zillow which, if it ever finds a way to tear down contractually the so-called Chinese Wall between Zillow and IDX provider Diverse Solutions, will then have access to the entire Phoenix-area Arizona Regional MLS.

Which I’m not certain is a good thing. Or maybe it’s less bad than I think. I’m not sure. I’m putting my head back down for a little while and going back to the offers I have out.

Is this property still available? When can it be shown if so? Please email me..

And here’s the link to the property.

Hello Brandon. Unfortunately, that property is SOLD. It was a HUD home, and it closed on 6/28/11 for $153,000.

This time, it wasn’t even me writing the response. Made my heart smile a bit, honestly.

For all the talk about syndication and whether it’s good for the customer, here’s the basic reality:

When the data is unreliable, and once it’s known to be unreliable, it won’t be relied upon. As ag

ents, we ought to be spending more time educating our clients about the shoddiness of the data on these sites than claiming that a listing on Trulia or Zillow is going to help a house get sold quicker.

Could it happen? Sure. Are the odds better than having a skywriter sketch an MLS number across the sky? Well, if you believe the thousands/millions of eyes argument, no, not really. (Though it might be hard for the skywriter to add pictures … guess we need a banner plane instead. But I miss skywriters.)

Cash isn’t king here in the Phoenix real estate market – it’s a necessity, at least if you’re shopping for homes under the $60,000 mark and it’s damn helpful all the way up to $100,000.

So far this year, there have been 783 closed sales of properties listed at $60,000 or less. Of those, 674 have been cash sales – that’s 86 percent.

Under $100,000, there have been 1,500 cash sales from among the 2,307 closed sales so far this year – that’s 65 percent.

It’s a strong sellers market – little inventory, lots of demand. And, with that, a lot of games are being played by the sellers, particularly the banks. To whit:

“This particular seller has made a business decision on a great majority of their properties to implement an “Offer Acceptance Holding Period”, thus for the first 10 days of the initial listing period we are not able to accept, counter, or reject any offer.  Please advise the buyer or buyers of this policy and to be patient with us.  This will give you some more time to gather additional offers and enter them into Res.Net, hopefully making it possible for all involved to obtain the absolute highest & best offer for this property.  Also, I believe that it will weed out those buyers who may really have not been all that interested and aren’t willing to wait for the 10 day period to expire.”

Let’s just forget that last part about “weeding out” buyers who might not have been all that interested. This is a money play, pure and simple. Collect the offers, build the tension and see how high things can go.

Or how about this note from another listing:

Go check it out, understand that the price is meant to drive in higher offers than the original price, and make an appropriate offer. It has only been in MLS for 6 hours and it already has at least a full price offer. Ask your professional real estate agent for more info.

To be honest, my stomach clenches every time I see something like this as it reminds of me 2005 and not whatsoever in a good way.

On the first street past the median, 66th Avenue, there is a large sign on the right shoulder – No U-Turns allowed. There’s a similar sign at the next intersection on 66th Drive. If you turn onto 66th Avenue, there are two more signs at Caribbean and Acapulco.

Every day, these signs are ignored. One day, in fact, I watched in amazement as some lady in an SUV was cursing passionately at me because I pulled up to the stop sign at 66th and Greenway, not leaving her enough room to make her illegal U-turn. Think on that one.

I did, and I have a solution.

Beginning this weekend, I’m going to start handing out friendly reminders to anyone making said U-turn that said U-turns are, in fact, illegal. They will be on note cards not featuring the official City of Glendale logo because this activity will not in any way be sanctioned by the city. I’m seeing an inefficiency in the traffic market and I intend to rectify that situation.

About two weeks after beginning this, I will write a press release discussing the immediate drop in ticketable offenses at the intersection. I can’t say there will be a drop in tickets because, in the nine years I’ve lived in this house, I’ve never seen anyone cited for an illegal U-turn, even as children go sprinting across the street to avoid being hit by cars turning illegally. Zero still is zero.

But that’s not really important. What is important is I will have a statistic to tout, albeit one that’s rather vague and somewhat difficult to quantify in any meaningful manner.

After about a month, I will move from friendly reminders to actual citations with a $25 fine payable to the “City of Glendale’s Traffic Safety citizens Committee.” I will keep the word citizens in lower case and make sure the logo only reads “Glendale Traffic Safety Committee” in an effort to dampen the fact this effort has not been sanctioned by the city and, in fact, I have zero real background in traffic control and no real authority to issue citations.

Inevitably, seeing an official P.O. Box as an address, I will receive some fines from people not reading the fine print because they are too dazzled by my fancy logo. I then will issue a press release discussing the increase of revenues to the city (through sales tax I’ll pay for the business, not from the citations that never were authorized) along with the continued decrease in ticketable offenses.

Any claim of revenue to the city, of course, is being invented out of whole cloth but that’s what you want to do if you want to develop an air of authenticity around the venture. And having actual authenticity often is less important than seeing that there’s authenticity.

(Speaking of venture, did I mention I’m seeking venture capital to seed this venture? Send me a check.)

In three months time, I will construct a toll booth at the intersection of 66th Avenue and Greenway and start charging a 25-cent toll on all southbound traffic. True, there are several other roads people can use, but after being dazzled by my press releases extolling the extreme safety of this road since my project began, how could responsible  drivers possibly risk life and limb using another road just as safe when there are no press releases to support that utterly provable fact?

There will be grumbling at the beginning, I am sure, just as there would be grumbling at the first two steps as well. People will question why they are paying the toll but I will hand them a brochure extolling the safety of this road in comparison to others even a couple of blocks away. The city won’t stop me because to do so would mean having to counter my slick press releases with real “facts” that won’t be presented in nearly as slick a fashion or with as nice of a website.

And soon I will add advertising to the side of the road, residential neighborhood or not, and charge a premium because of all the eyes who will see these small advertisements when they stop to pay their toll.

How many people see each ad is irrelevant – I only need to promote the total number of eyes who see the ad. And, now that I think of it, I’ll double the number presuming that in 99 percent of the cases each person had two eyes with which to see the ad. Verification is less important than an air of authenticity.

Soon, within the year, people will stop questioning how someone with no background in traffic management and no authority vested from the city had been able to do such a thing. It will seem like my toll booth and this toll road always have been there and are an integral part of the landscape, as opposed to being conceived of and developed by an interloper who was filling a void that never really existed.

This all sounds far-fetched but there are real-life examples to which I can point.

Trulia and Zillow are two “real estate” websites that were developed to fill a void that didn’t really exist. It’s not like it was difficult for real estate consumers to find listings information on true real estate sites provided by agents and brokers, at least not if they could work Google. But Trulia and Zillow entered the fray nevertheless.

Both started issuing press released only vaguely connected to reality.

Trulia would discuss trends in the prices of real estate listings – price reductions and that sort of thing – using utterly incomplete and often incorrect data based on what was on its own site. Not that the details mattered. Reporters with no desire to question the source, including our favorite real estate remora Inman News, simply printed what was provided.

Zillow started publishing press releases about the fluctuations in “Zestimates” – the websites’ valuation estimates created using a proprietary formula that every now and then had some relation to actual trends in the real estate market. While real estate agents spent their time explaining to their clients that, no, that “Zestimate” you see has nothing to do with your home’s value, the media was printing the changes in “Zestimates” as real facts as opposed to fluctuations in Santa Claus’ North Pole workforce.

Both Trulia and Zillow, now entrenched in the real estate space despite having no real authority to be in the space, used the authority of the media and the lack of sophistication of the buying public to create their own aura of necessity. Why ask an agent a question personally when you can survey a group of agents, none of whom are simply trying to win business, on specific questions regarding the contract you wrote? Why use an agent’s site when the public had been conditioned to believe the false listings were the truth?

Soon, both Trulia and Zillow offered advertisements to agents knowing full well that we are a class of alleged “business people” who best prove the maxim that a fool and his money are soon parted. Real estate agents will pay for anything that seems like it will prevent them from having to really work to prospect.

That there might be an end game in mind, such as with my toll booth, never would occur to anyone. But for all three of the people who watched ABC’s “V”, we know how this ends even if they “are of peace, always”. And it ain’t in the public’s favor.

Zillow eventually became so legitimate that it purchased one of the nation’s leading IDX providers, Diverse Solution. And here, ironically, for the first time the real estate establishment took notice.

Santa Barbara’s MLS moved first and Denver’s Metrolist followed suit, cancelling its contract with DS for the evil of being owned by Zillow.

Both of these moves are akin to the City of Glendale closing 66th Avenue to motor traffic a couple of years after my tollbooth opens for business to prevent me from collecting tolls. Or of the presumed President of the United States on “V” nuking the entire country to get rid of Anna and the Visitors.

And maybe that’s the sign of how powerful Zillow has become.

Two MLS boards have decided the only way to strike back at Zillow is to hurt their own agent members by banning use of the same IDX technology many have used for years, long before Zillow acquired Diverse Solutions. Rather than either admit the battle was lost long ago or find a reasonable solution, they have cut off their agents’ noses to spite the boards’ public face and made it more difficult for a public that could easily find the listings on member agents sites to find those same listings.

(Does Sandicor’s own public-facing site have something to do with this? Possibly. Yet somehow no one seems to think there’s an issue with an MLS competing with its own dues-paying members for internet consumers. You’d almost think buyers agents don’t actually exist and that whatever listing agents want goes.)

Hopefully, our own Arizona Regional MLS has more sense than this. (Given the new tax information software integrated into ARMLS replacing iMapp, who knows.)

Not that any of this matters. I figure I’ll be able to collect at least three years of tollbooth revenue and a nice chunk of venture capital before the tide turns against me. Trulia and Zillow showed me the way.

UPDATE: Error on my part – Sandicor is continuing its relationship with Diverse Solutions; is was Santa Barbara’s MLS along with Denver’s Metrolist that severed ties with DS. Many thanks to Ricardo Bueno for the clarification.