Original Post New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/realestate/23njzo.html?_r=1&ref=realestate
WITH the last year such a dismal and confusing period for so many home sellers in New Jersey, some inevitably decided along the way to drop one agent and try another.
Susan Stava for The New York Times
Danuta Tyszka of Weichert Realtors recently became the agent for a house on Homestead Street in Clifton, which hadn’t sold after six months with another agent.
“Of course, in today’s market,” she added, “really the most important thing is price.”
Or luck, added other brokers based in towns around the northern part of the state. Some say they see themselves as harder-working than others; several suggested that they were particularly talented at attracting as many people as possible to see a house or staging it in its best light. But each of about a dozen questioned about the logistics of the typical home sale says luck plays an indefinable yet crucial part in finding a solid buyer these days.
Danuta Tyszka, an agent at Weichert Realtors in Wayne, described having listed a four-bedroom two-bath house in Clifton last spring and shown it to 80 prospective buyers, none of whom made an offer. After four months, she advised the sellers to let the listing expire and allow her to relist the house for a lower price — $10,000 less, down from the high $500,000s — to see if “fresh” home shoppers would appear.
“The first people who came to see it made a full-price offer,” she recalled. “I don’t really know that the price drop made that big of a difference. It was more like lucky timing.”
Ms. Tyszka is now marketing another Clifton house, a four-bedroom bilevel at 70 Homestead Street, which was listed with another agent for six months. She picked up the listing in December after meeting the sellers through their son, whose apartment lease she had brokered.
With this house, too, she has dropped the price $10,000, to $469,000 from $479,000 — but lightning has not struck a second time as of yet. “The market is very, very difficult in Clifton,” she said. “I’ve had a couple of sales of other houses fall through just as they were about to close. The main reason seemed to be that people are scared, even when they find a house they like, at a good price.”
Using multiple-listing statistics from 2010, Margaret Miggins, an agent at Keller Williams Realty in Short Hills, found that fewer than 50 percent of listed homes sold within a year. She looked at 16 middle- to high-income communities — in Essex, Union and Morris Counties — in which she markets houses. Comparing the total number of homes listed in each town with the total number of closed sales in 2010, she found that Summit did best, with 48 percent of listings sold. (There were 448 houses listed, and 217 closed sales.)
Chatham and Madison came within a percentage point or two of Summit.
In West Orange, a large community in which sales have been slow, only 24 percent of listed houses were sold (1,001 listings, 240 closed sales).
“Price is, of course, a crucial matter,” Ms. Miggins said. “If you are not willing to change your price, do not switch Realtors. And even if you are, it does not always work.”
State regulations prohibit a broker from poaching another’s active listing, or even suggesting that a better job might be done. Still, it is common practice for them to try and snap up one another’s listings when they expire — typically after six months.
Ms. Miggins says she trolls the Multiple Listing Service Web sites for expired listings, and makes cold calls to homeowners if their names and numbers are listed.
“An agent who really knows an area, and knows how to market a particular house in the best possible way, definitely can make a difference,” she said. But she also said she avoided any sellers who seemed as if they might be inflexible about price.
“Every time we take a listing,” she said, “we spend a lot of money as well as time, on advertisings, Web sites, virtual tours, having floor plans done, setting up a computer on a table by the door so there are pictures scrolling the moment someone walks in — and I don’t want to waste all that.”
Roberta Baldwin, a broker with the Keller Williams NJ Metro Group in Montclair, echoed that sentiment. “It is every agent’s nightmare,” she said. “You put in the time and effort — I’ve even gone so far as to paint and refinish floors for a client — and the house doesn’t sell. Then someone else picks it up, and it goes.”
On the other hand, sometimes it is the real estate professional who decides to leave the client.
Ms. Baldwin said she had occasionally suggested to sellers that they might want to terminate a listing agreement. “If you can see that they are unhappy, and you are unhappy,” she said, “then the best thing to do is to bring that into the open and talk about it. Poor chemistry can occur, or the parties can simply get mired in a situation, although you have done the very best you can, and it is best for everyone to walk away.”
In today’s market, she said, “I think the main reason why some people decide to switch Realtors is that they just don’t know what else to do.”
In Montclair, there are half a dozen high-end homes that have not sold despite multiple price reductions and Realtor switches. One, a Victorian at 183 Grove Street with a third-floor ballroom where Enrico Caruso is reputed to have sung, was marketed by Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty last year with an original asking price of $1.44 million, after selling for $1.4 million in 2007.
After six month, it was listed by Halstead Properties at $1.3 million; it is now listed as a possible short sale at $999,999.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 23, 2011, on page RE9 of the New York edition..
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