Looking Twice at Overpriced Homes

From Elizabeth Weintraub,

It's Not Always a Physical Defect that Drives Away Homebuyers

Emotional Selling

“Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts. People ultimately judge only one thing about you: how you make them feel”. Seth Godin makes these statements about emotional selling in his recent books entitled The Dip and Small Is The New Big.

Do people really buy emotionally and then justify with logic? Let me tell you about two recent sales and I’ll have you be the judge. Dottie S. had a home on 3 acres. She wanted to downsize and simplify her life. Her property was listed for $699,000 prior to the market softening. Within the first week she had three offers. One contract was for $690,000. The second offer was $675,000. And, the third offer was $655,000.

Which offer do you feel Dottie accepted?

If you selected the highest offer you are using your left logical brain. Dottie accepted the $655,000 offer and chose not to counter with a higher price. When this buyer viewed the property he asked the seller when she wanted to move. Dottie replied she was tight on funds, and wanted to stay in the property after the close and move at her leisure.

This buyer allowed the seller to remain in the property for two weeks after the close gratis. He also offered his moving truck and manpower to assist the seller to relocate to her newer property, which was less than one mile away. In return for his creative concessions he received a very accommodating price.

Annette & Fred recently purchased a house. He was a veteran. The house he selected had another offer come in the same weekend he wrote his contract. The other offer was a few thousand more and had fewer costs for the seller to pay. Do you feel the seller accepted Annette & Fred’s offer?

Their selling agent was the only agent that accompanied the listing agent to present the offer to the seller. He asked if either were veterans. Nobody at that table was a vet. The agent pointed out his client had just finished serving their county. He simply asked if the seller would allow his veteran to purchase their home. The seller wrote a minor counteroffer  which was accepted.

Emotional selling goes beyond features and benefits. It’s a very powerful tool in either a buyer or sellers market.

Sales Trends (MLS)

Greater Phoenix

Misty Williams, Tribune

Owners cope as houses linger on market

Downsizing plans, retirement moves await sale of homes

Associated Press
Sept. 3, 2007 12:00 AM

Escrow express line

Are your listings in the short escrow express line, or the long lines with all the other sellers?  In Phoenix there are over 56,000 active listings on the market. This does not include new homes & specs. In August 2007 there were about 4200 homes that sold. This means there is over a 13 month supply of houses for sale.

Each seller and listing agent has a choice to wait in the long line with the thousands of other sellers or the short escrow line.  In order to qualify for the short line you must price the property 5-10% below market value.  If you are not properly priced below market the buyers won’t ‘check you out’ and other agents won’t allow your listing in their showing lane.

Seth Godin, in his great book entitled The Dip says any shopper/seller has three choices when he is ready to check out. Pick a line and stay in it. Change lines once.  Or, change lines on numerous occasions.  Each time a seller lowers their price they qualify for a shorter checkout line.

Why wouldn’t a seller want to properly price their house?  Because they are not ‘serious about selling’. There is a big difference between listing a home and pricing it to sell. A wise man once said, “Price is only important when you don’t want something enough”. Only serious sellers that have aggressive prices belong in this buyers market.

Why would an agent take an overpriced listing? Many times their ego is in the way.  With enough listings they qualify for a monthly trophy.  Unfortunately, this award cannot be used to pay for the agent’s monthly bill, or the listing holding costs.

In Phoenix 1 in every 100 homes is in foreclosure. This is up 55% from 2006. In August 2007 there were 2500 notice of defaults sent to various sellers.  This will still be the sixth best year ever for sellers based on the number of sales. The economy is strong.  But, in order to qualify for the express escrow lane, the price must be right.

By Paul Pastore

After a Struggle to Escape Comes an Effort to Adjust

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 12, 2007

Correction Appended

“God Grew Tired of Us,” a sober, uplifting documentary that follows the resettlement in the United States of three young men uprooted as children by the civil war in Sudan, is the softer, Hollywood-sanctioned version of an earlier documentary, “The Lost Boys of Sudan.” A National Geographic production, directed by Christopher Quinn and narrated by Nicole Kidman in her loftiest A-student elocution, “God” won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. How could it not? Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn’t leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.

As it balances excruciating images of hardship, suffering and starvation with wry observations of newly arrived immigrants learning to use electric appliances and visiting their first supermarket, you are won over by the charm, good manners and nobility of its three subjects, John Bul Dau, Panther Bior and Daniel Abul Pach. Each is a member of the Dinka, the Christian, animist, agricultural people in southern Sudan driven from their land by Islamic government forces from the north. Except for a couple of sentences about the hasty British partition of Sudan, the film offers no historical background.

The three, who ranged in age from their mid-20s to their early 30s, were among the 25,000 “lost boys,” ages 3 to 13, who fled their villages in the 1980s to escape extermination or sterilization. They traveled on foot for five years, while starvation, dehydration, disease, wild animals and attacks from rebel soldiers reduced their number to a few thousand, before they landed in a United Nations refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya.

Once in Kenya, they formed their own communal society, which the movie portrays as a gentle, hierarchal brotherhood where the older children took care of the younger. During 10 years in limbo they received some education, secondhand clothing and meager rations.

John, Daniel and Panther were among a group selected for resettlement by the International Rescue Committee and flown to New York by way of Nairobi and Brussels. Once in the United States, Daniel and Panther, best friends at Kakuma, became roommates in Pittsburgh. John, the oldest, settled in Syracuse.

Followed over the course of four years, each of the three men reacts differently (but positively) to the excruciating pressures of adjusting to a non-agricultural society where success is measured in dollars. After a year’s initial support, each is expected to fend for himself and to pay back his airfare to the United States. That often means working three jobs a day doing things like flipping burgers at McDonald’s and busing tables in a restaurant, while sending as much money to relatives in Africa as can be squeezed out of a minimum wage.

As time passes, their loneliness and feelings of being cut off from the culture in which they were born deepen and become a palpable ache. It is expressed in a sad reflection by John on the plight of Sudan, which gives the film its title.

With the help of the International Red Cross and other agencies, John is able to locate the family he hasn’t seen or heard from in more than a decade in a Uganda refugee camp. In the most wrenching scene, his mother arrives in the United States and at the first sight of John collapses on the floor, clinging to him and emitting keening yelps of joy.

The movie shows very little social interaction between the three men and ordinary Americans, beyond the polite exchanges of foreigners struggling to communicate. Racial hostility is alluded to only once, when a group of lost boys is asked to go out in smaller numbers so as not to alarm the neighbors.

The movie’s poignant early scenes, filmed in Kenya, show a community sustained by a remarkable spirit of brotherhood. At the camp, John, who is unusually tall as well as one of the oldest, was a group leader for more than a thousand other boys. Daniel, a natural entertainer, was also a leader and formed a group called the Parliament. Both he and Panther, who returned to Africa to marry (and is currently working to bring his wife to the United States), live in Pittsburgh and attend college.

Because its ratio of joy to horror is about 60-40, “God Grew Tired of Us” is more user-friendly than its forerunner, which opened in New York three years ago, and addressed such touchy issues as the cultural gulf between Sudanese immigrants and African-Americans. If the more inspirational “God Grew Tired of Us” hovers on the edge of sentimentality, it never goes overboard. As these hard-working learners struggle for a foothold, swallowing their anxiety and loneliness, they persevere with a stoicism that is almost saintly.

“God Grew Tired of Us” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It includes harrowing images of starving children.

GOD GREW TIRED OF US

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Christopher Quinn; narrated by Nicole Kidman; director of photography, Paul Daley; edited by Geoffrey Richman; music by Mark McAdam, Mark Nelson and Jamie Staff; produced by Molly Bradford Pace and Mr. Quinn; released by Newmarket/National Geographic Films. In Manhattan at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, 139-143 East Houston Street, East Village. Running time: 90 minutes.


Correction: January 11, 2007

A listing of credits in Weekend on Friday with a film review of “God Grew Tired of Us” omitted an editor and a producer. In addition to Geoffrey Richman, Johanna Giebelhaus edited the film, and Tommy Walker was a producer, along with Molly Bradford Pace and Christopher Quinn.

A Vietnam P.O.W. Story, Tangling With the Vines of Convention

By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Published: July 4, 2007

The Navy airman Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), the hero of Werner Herzog’s Vietnam-era P.O.W. escape film, “Rescue Dawn,” at first seems a conventional action-movie hero: handsome, resourceful, brave and optimistic. But the more time spent with him, the more eccentricities he reveals. He has a geeky laugh. His sunny-side-up speechifying suggests an elementary school gym coach with a Vince Lombardi fixation. He only seems typical.

So does Mr. Herzog’s movie, which reimagines his 1997 documentary, “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” as a drama of imprisonment, survival and perseverance. Although financed independently, it superficially resembles the likes of “Papillon” and “The Great Escape.” With its straightforward narrative, which observes Dengler being shot down during his first mission over Laos; surviving torture, isolation, confinement and starvation; and hatching a daring breakout, “Rescue Dawn” seems a departure from Mr. Herzog’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Grizzly Man” and other cautionary tales of visionary madmen.

Dengler is also an advertisement for capitalist democracy: a German immigrant who survived Allied bombing during World War II, settled in the United States and became a baseball-and-apple-pie American. In early shipboard scenes, the film’s cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, lights Mr. Bale like Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” and Mr. Bale’s gung-ho grin seals the comparison.

When Dengler’s captors demand that he sign a confession declaring himself a criminal, Dengler refuses, because to do so would be ungrateful to his adoptive country. He’s as matter-of-fact as a diabetic declining a chocolate bar. Yet these indicators of superheroism exist to be subverted. Dengler endures misery without succumbing to the despair that has crushed his cellmates, but he starts to seem as unhinged as Mr. Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Under these conditions, hope is a form of insanity.

Dengler is just one oddball among many. His comrades include best friend and mentor, Duane (the great Steve Zahn, whose ravaged face recalls Steve McQueen’s in “Papillon”), and “Gene from Eugene” (Jeremy Davies, in a boldly stylized, sure-to-be-divisive performance), a longhaired, emaciated redneck whose cadences and gestures suggest a deranged skid row preacher.

In the past, Mr. Herzog has been criticized for his tendency to treat residents of the third world as part of the scenery, but in “Rescue Dawn” he has empathy for Dengler’s captors. They are prisoners, too. They’re vicious because they’re bored and depressed, but they occasionally display kindness. When they consider executing the prisoners and abandoning the camp, Mr. Herzog makes it clear that this potential course of action is not evidence of subhuman evil, but a desperate plan hatched by men who don’t have enough food to feed themselves and their inmates and would rather just go home to their families. As Duane explains to Dengler, “The jungle is the prison — don’t you get it?”

The film is not without flaws. The story’s basis in fact doesn’t inoculate it against charges of predictability. Klaus Badelt’s score can be intrusively emphatic. And the triumphant ending — in which Dengler is welcomed back to his carrier with applause and speeches — is disappointingly conventional. For the most part, though, “Rescue Dawn” is a marvel: a satisfying genre picture that challenges the viewer’s expectations.

The film’s most daring aspect is its portrait of the love that blossoms between men in bleak circumstances. While platonic, Dengler and Duane’s relationship has the depth and detail of a great marriage — one in which the spouses understand each other so well that they can have a silent conversation with their eyes. Dengler’s commitment to helping Duane escape — despite choking vines, whizzing bullets, pounding rain and leech-infested waters — is as reflexive as the integrity he displays when he refuses to sign that confession. As Dengler literally and figuratively lets Duane lean on him, the film’s tenderness goes so far beyond male-bonding cliché that it becomes a political statement: a radical reimagining of the phrase “doing what a man’s gotta do” that rejects John Wayne as a masculine ideal and replaces him with Jesus.

“Rescue Dawn”  is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has profanity, graphic violence, torture and assorted jungle miseries.

Written and directed by Werner Herzog; director of photography, Peter Zeitlinger; edited by Joe Bini; music by Klaus Badelt; produced by Steve Marlton, Elton Brand and Harry Knapp; released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Running time: 120 minutes.

WITH: Christian Bale (Dieter Dengler), Steve Zahn (Duane) and Jeremy Davies (Gene).

Correction: July 03, 2007

A film review on July 4 about “Rescue Dawn,” written and directed by Werner Herzog, misspelled the title of another Herzog film with which “Rescue Dawn” was contrasted. It is “Fitzcarraldo,” not “Fizcarraldo.”