Videos boosting sales of Naples homes sight-unseen! NAPLES — Dan and Andrea Greenstein plunked down $455,000 on a two-bedroom Pelican Bay condo — even though they’d never seen it. “We weren’t even 100 percent sure where it was,” said Dan Greenstein, 60, a Hopkins, Minn., real estate attorney. But they loved Naples, where they’d vacationed over the years, and wanted to buy a retirement home before rapidly rising prices got any higher or supply got any tighter. So, relying on cellphone videos their agent sent them as well as the online listing, they pulled the trigger in June. Two months after they closed, “we held our breath and put the key in the door,” Dan Greenstein recalled. Welcome to blind buying — a time when a hot housing market and new technology have combined to convince buyers to buy a home before they’ve ever set foot across its threshold. While people have been searching for homes on the web almost since it was invented, their methods have changed radically in recent years. Their expectations of real estate agents also have changed, including wanting to see videos of the home. Of course, the web has had a profound effect on how we buy everything — in less than a generation it has shaken up the role of the agent as main information provider and eclipsed all of the agent’s traditional tools, such as signs and printed newsletters and brochures. The National Association of Realtors said the web’s use as a home shopping tool grew from 2 percent in 1995 to 74 percent in 2004. Last year, it hit 92 percent. And the phenomenon isn’t confined to the young: three out of four seniors begin their home searches online, the National Association of Realtors said. Nor is it limited to any particular type of buyer, though Rick Sharga, executive vice president of Auction. com, said the usual online buyers — institutional investors who scoop up properties in bulk with plans to rent them — increasingly are being joined by individuals who plan to live in them. People aren’t just surfing on their laptops, as they did a few years ago. Rather, they’re more often turning to mobile devices, according to a report issued jointly last year by the National Association of Realtors and Google. With the ability to show properties any time and anywhere, property searches on mobile devices leaped 120 percent in 2012 over 2011, the report said. People are shopping online for homes at idle moments, just as they do for sweaters, the report found — at restaurants, at work, while waiting in line, while watching television and at other people’s homes. And, as the Naples real estate team of Gordie Lazich and Mark Maran discovered, even while on vacation in Europe. Their clients, Montclair, N.J., residents Gary and Louise Trabka, had gone overseas during Thanksgiving when the two agents spotted what they thought would be the perfect home for the Trabkas — a $4 million home in Royal Harbor. So they made a few smartphone videos and sent them off. The Trabkas signed a contract and put down a $50,000 deposit. “It took a little leap of faith,” said Gary Trabka, 59, a retired investment manager, who was happy with the choice when he eventually saw it in person shortly before closing. He added he wouldn’t have made such a bold move if he hadn’t had confidence in his agents’ judgment, bolstered by their video skills. Becoming videographers and online tour guides are rapidly becoming critical skills for today’s agents. That’s one reason why more than half of all agents and brokers spent more than $500 on new technology like smartphones, tablets and digital cameras in 2012, the national Realtors group reported in a technology survey of its members. Yet it isn’t high production values that attract online shoppers, even though many brokerages now require agents to have professionally shot listings for competitive reasons. Instead, more than half of home shoppers turn to YouTube — the top destination to watch videos on properties — over brokerage and aggregator websites, The Quiet Man for the National Film Registry Association of Realtors and Google report found. That’s no surprise to Bonita Springs real estate agent Peggy Wagner. She finds her buyer clients actually prefer her homemade smartphone productions to the expensively produced “virtual tours” and carefully lit collections of static shots on most of today’s listings. “They’re not so glossy and fake,” she said. Some agents say their buyer clients are skeptical of sophisticated presentations, because they have become wise to the tricks that some professional photographers use to make homes look more desirable. Among them: fisheye lenses to widen walls visually or digitally altering photos to remove unsightly features like backyard power lines. So they want the agents representing them to show the property’s flaws, like shower mold and broken tiles. “People want us to zoom in on all sorts of details,” Naples real estate agent Gary Blaine said. “They want to see how clean the grout is.” But the casually produced reality videos don’t always show the gritty truth. Dan Greenstein said his agent’s videotape didn’t really prepare him for how dirty and worn the condo was, once he turned the key in the lock. He and his wife wound up replacing the appliances and fixtures, as well as repainting and installing new flooring. “We spent 10 percent more than we anticipated,” he said. Nevertheless, for buyers on a budget, or who are looking for a deal, there may be no other option than to buy sight unseen. The competition is fierce, and decisions must be made with lightning speed. Mark and Joanne Mizerak discovered that when they saw how fast homes selling for less than $200,000 disappeared in their preferred location, Golden Gate Estates. “It was scary buying without seeing,” said Mark Mizerak, 62, a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., carpenter. “But I didn’t have the money to come down every time a house we might like came on the market.” The Mizeraks relied on the video their agent, Wagner, made of the four-bedroom home they eventually bought, complete with estimates of how close the neighbors were. Wagner later taped the home inspector, who pointed out problems with the pool. The unvarnished videos gave the couple the confidence to grab the home for $195,000 before the market became unaffordable for them — even though they don’t plan to move in until they both retire in 2016. Not every buyer finds buying online to be nerve-wracking. Gene Mills, a Bethlehem, Pa., resident, recently spent more than $400,000 for a new four-bedroom carriage home in The Quarry without seeing anything more than an emailed floor plan. He couldn’t, because neither the home nor a model of it had been built. Yet that didn’t bother him, since the 60-year-old sales executive was more interested in the views from the lot, which his agent videotaped, and the community amenities than he was in the home itself. Indeed, the only contingency he put in his contract was that he be allowed to play the golf course before the closing to see if it was challenging enough — which he did. It met with his approval, so he signed the contract without ever seeing the home, which is under construction. Mills isn’t worried that it may not turn out exactly as he envisions. “With enough money, you can make any modification you want,” he said.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 18:11:20 +0000
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