Last week I included some high tech tools for consumers that can help them in their search for property to buy. As the old saying goes, however, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Here’s an anecdote from one of my firm’s clients who used Zillow, a very popular real estate Web tool, to find an amazing value in the Glenville section of Greenwich and contacted a Realtor in my firm, Maureen Curry, to find out more about the property.
Zillow has had some major growing pains as it tries to include not just all the listed homes for sale in the U.S. but every home in the U.S., whether it’s for sale or not. Most surveys put that number at over 130,000,000 housing units.
That’s a daunting task and errors are bound to happen. When Realtors start circling your house and buyers start knocking on your door, however, the annoyance and loss of privacy can be quite upsetting. This indeed happened to the owners of a home in Glenville.
As my Realtor and I approached the home at 11 Greenway Drive, Barbara Albano, an owner, leaned out her door and shouted “it’s not for sale.” Obviously upset, she told me that she was considering legal action against Zillow and Coldwell Banker, the firm listing the property shown on the website. Zillow placed it on the Greenwich map, included 15 photos and a Realtor description of the property, and showed that it had been listed for sale on December 14, 2012 for $194,900 and removed from sale on January 29th.
Barbara had been besieged by buyers and agents who would have written a personal check on the spot for her home for that amount. Obviously not the same home when you look at the lead photo and compare it to her home, Zillow still had it pictured and included on their website.
Even as I write this on Feb. 2, the price history and property description are obviously from some California listing, but the 15 photos have now been removed.
The original photo had a watermark in the lower right-hand corner, “CRMLS,” an imprint of the California Regional MLS, an Orange County multiple listing service. I don’t know where that pictured home is actually located, but we don’t have any homes in Greenwich that look like that priced below $200,000. Even the land would sell for much more than that in our town.
The moral of the story is that local real estate agents who know the town’s properties should be your best guide to real values in our town, despite the best efforts to describe them from cyberspace.
Greenwich sales
statistics for 2012
Here’s a snapshot from our local multiple listing service of Greenwich real estate sales in 2012 as compared to sales in the previous three years. The sales have been picking up in the single family, condominium and co-operative apartment sections of our market, while sales prices seem to have stabilized and have started to rise in the single-family housing sector. Condos and co-ops continue to slide in price, but the real value seems to be in multi-family housing and land.
For those investors who are looking for a place to invest their money, Greenwich has been and continues to be a great investment. This is especially true for multi-family homes that can be bought relatively inexpensively, produce income from rents, which have risen recently, and be assets that should also rise in value as demand increases and the housing market recovers. That’s Robert Kiyosaki’s model described in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad, What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money – That The Poor And Middle Class Do Not!”
This Week’s Success Quote
“The main reason people struggle financially is because they have spent years in school but learned nothing about money. The result is that people learn to work for money. … But never learn to have money work for them.”
— Robert Kiyosaki, investor, entrepreneur, educator, best-selling author
Ken Edwards is the principal Broker for Edwards Associates and has lived in town since 1974. All opinions expressed in this column are entirely his own and not those of this publisher. Comments, questions and suggestions may be sent to K_W_Edwards@Yahoo.com or call or text him at (203) 918-4444. Questions of general interest will be addressed in this column while others will receive individual responses.