It’s going to be a hot day. You might have been showing houses to a difficult client or put out fires for a challenging escrow. You know you’re not going to want to go home and turn on the oven to cook. Make that hot car do double-duty.
Some chicken or salmon, maybe a few onions and peppers, wrap in foil, lodge on a flat service over the engine, perhaps around the valves. Use a clamp if you need to. A 30-45 minute drive oughta do it.
In my never ending quest to put Elvis and real estate into the same post, today is the 30th anniversary of Elvis’ death, and I thought what better way to celebrate “Weep Week” than to write about Elvis Real Estate.
When Reno and then wife Laura were looking for a bigger house, he was thumbing through real estate magazines on a Friday night when he saw the Chino Canyon home listed. He called at 9 a.m. on Saturday. “Is it really Elvis’ house?” he asked. Assured it was, he responded, “I’ll be right there, and I am buying it.” He bought the house sight unseen for $1,275,000.
“When we moved in, within a matter of hours on the first day people were stopping by taking pictures,” Fontana relates. “We were so thrilled to say, ‘Would you like to come in and see the house?”‘ The Fontanas don’t share most homeowners’ objection to having a lot of strangers coming into their house. “Even though we own the house, we like to think we are caretakers,” Reno says. “It’s open for Elvis fans.”
For the first few months, they invited people in for free. One day, after touring the home, a gentleman said, “It’s really gracious of you, but here’s $50.” After that, the Fontanas fully realized the value of what they had. Ninety percent of the furnishings belonged to Elvis. “You are not just seeing a house he used to live in. You are seeing a real part of his life,” Fontana says.
Because of his dedication to Elvis and Elvis fans, Fontana has researched and gotten confirmation from people who knew Elvis, and obtained written authentication whenever possible. He has a copy of the house title signed by Elvis and Priscilla Presley in 1970, when they bought it for $85,000. The Presleys were not the only famous owners. In 1960, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc purchased the house; and in 1981, Frankie Valli bought it for $750,000. In 1986, Valli sold it to a Japanese corporation for $2.2 million. From then until the Fontanas purchased it, the home was open for a few weeks.
The house on Chino Canyon Road is not the only piece of real estate that Elvis enjoyed in Palm Springs.
In 1967, Elvis and Priscilla were to be married by the pool in the backyard of the house. But the arrival of friends and family tipped off then-leading gossip columnist Rona Barrett (who also lived in the neighborhood) that a wedding was imminent. As the media descended upon the house, Elvis and Priscilla changed plans, deciding to get married in Vegas. In the middle of the night, they snuck into an alley behind the house, where a limo took them to Frank Sinatra’s learjet. They were married in the Aladdin Hotel.
The next day they returned to honeymoon in the Palm Springs house, which is how it got its nickname as the “Elvis Honeymoon House.”
At Inman Connect, I was excited to see some of the Duets. I guess they called them that because if they’d called them Debates, some of the characters wouldn’t have shown up for the point/counter-point situation.
Some folks from outside of the Pacific NW may have been wondering why they paired these two strong personalities together.
Vulcan Capital, the investment arm of Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen, is one of the largest investors in Redfin, a company committed to “disrupting” the real estate business through their limited service and rebate business plan. Vulcan Capital invested a huge amount of cash in Redfin, but when it came time to list and market their new condo developments, they didn’t hire Redfin.
What better person than Lennox to chit-chat with Glenn?
Brad Inman was the moderator and subjected the two to some piercing questions. First question: What’s your market share? Lennox Scott, with over 61,000 closed transactions last year, grossed more than 17 billion dollars in sales volume. They have 132 offices and over 4,500 sales associates located throughout Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and Scott said they have a 17% market share in a 3-county area.
When it was Kelman’s turn to answer, he hemmed and hawed a bit and confessed to a 2% market share in Seattle. However, I couldn’t find even that. No matter how I looked at the stats, the highest I could find was a market share of 1.37% for Seattle and a total market share of 0.57.
The market share numbers come from the total number of sold units in each city. So, for example, from Jul 1, 2006 to Jun 30, 2007 Redfin had a total of 221 sold units in Seattle out of a total 23,576 sold units (that number is in my calculations but not on the graph) in Seattle for a market share of 0.94%. For the entire market area of 10 major cities noted, there’s a total market share of 0.57 for the last 12 months.
There were other stumbles along the way. When the subject of compensation for sales agents came up, Kelman wouldn’t discuss salary. But Lennox Scott seemed unable to articulate why a commissioned sales person may be preferable to one paid on salary. Which I would have been glad to do, if anyone would have asked me.
At one point, Brad Inman questioned the wisdom of Redfin’s move into other cities when their market share in Seattle was so dismal. I, for one, think it’s a brilliant move, and urge Redfin management to continue its move and penetration into other markets, especially the South and the Mid-West
3 days , 5 inscribed ballpoint pens, 7 parties and receptions, 10 personalized notepads, 40 speakers and 100’s of ideas and hare-brained schemes later, I’m back in Seattle from Inman’s Connect convention, a meeting of the best minds in the real estate and technology sector who got together to share information, buy or sell. Even if you thought you were just there to listen or speak, believe me, you were buying or selling something and the behind-the-scenes deal-making was making me as giddy as a school girl at her first prom.
The VC’s are throwing around a lot of money, some on ideas that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Some of the start-ups I heard about this year probably won’t be back next, but it was fun listening to their founders earnest sales pitch or watching the demo on their laptop, and their charm and eagerness was infectious as they were showing off their latest program, platform, software, sales portal or site design.
It was fun being around such smart people, but exhausting too. The real estate industry is getting crowded with new programs and software and lead-generating portals and search and mapping functions, only a few will ever get accepted or bought or become an industry standard. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t receive an email from someone trying to get me to purchase their lead-generating products, perhaps a link to get my name in some directory or on some website that promises hundreds of leads delivered daily, directly into my in-box.
The sad thing is some of these ideas are genuinely revolutionary, but that does not necessarily guarantee success. Just like in any business, it’s who you know. If you can get a franchise in a large market to purchase your product, you may have a chance for it to become an industry standard. If not, you may be relegated to the sidelines or obscurity. And some products and ideas seem to be designed, not to work and function in an actual money-making business, but in the hope that someone will buy them out.
There were quite a few large well-known companies represented at Inman, but some of the smaller firms that I like are:
Imprev: This is such a cool product, I hesitate to even tell anyone else about it. Even neophytes can make flash presentations and web movies, beautiful flyers, listing presentations, postcards and more, for just $299 year. If you’re an agent, you must have these products.
Real Bird: This company provides an affordable way for individual agents to have a professional map-based IDX search service for their website or blog. For only $159 a year, you can get a cool interactive map on your site. If you don’t have one, you should get one now.
And I’m looking forward to the launch of SpotIt, a new package by Onboard LLC, that promises to be a good addition to a brokerages website to add additional content without having to reinvent the wheel. From OnBoard:
SpotIt leverages OnBoard’s database of Nearby Spots by allowing users to view local “Spots,” share their opinions about them and vote on their favorites. Through our SpotIt API, these “hot spots” can be integrated directly into your website. Provide context to your listings and neighborhood information by displaying the positive opinions of people in the know.
You might have seen the original Shift Happens a few months ago, but it’s been remade, a little more professionally, still called Shift Happens, still kind of scary.
I’m still at Inman Connect, but I just received this email from an old friend and mortgage broker who worked for American Home Mortgage, and I thought it timely to share.
American Home Mortgage announced today that the company will cease to exist after tomorrow, Friday, August 3, 2007. The company plans to seek bankruptcy under the Chapter 11 statutes.
How did this happen to the 10th largest mortgage lender in the US, a company that was growing exponentially? Essentially, market forces dragged the company down because as a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), the company’s source of capital was Wall Street. Unlike a bank, who has deposits and the Federal Home Loan Bank for borrowed funds, a REIT depends on the securities markets for capitalization.
The stock price had gone from a 52 week high of about $39 to around $11 a month ago, but the thinking was that the price had been depressed because of overall concern about mortgage delinquencies and defaults nationwide. AHM had almost $1 billion in the bank and was operating normally. Plus, our portfolio of loans was not considered in the sub-prime category. We funded a lot of stated income and interest only loans, but not much in the way of loans that would be considered seriously high risk.
Then last week a margin call came from one of our institutional investors as additional collateral against our pool of mortgage backed securities. Other Wall Street investors grew concerned and issued margin calls, too. That action burned through the cash the company had on hand. Then it was announced that a promised stock dividend for 7/31 was not going to be paid and the analysts turned very sour on the company. The stock was frozen and not traded on Monday. Once it resumed trading on Tuesday, the value sunk to about $1 per share.
With no cash on hand and credit lines frozen, the company ceased funding loans on Monday, 7/30. That’s a huge no-no and it’s been a big headache for us at the branch level……
Luckily, my friend has 26 years invested in the mortgage industry, he knows the business and can be successful at it, but there about 7000 other employees of the firm that may not be so lucky.
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