Weekly Real Estate News Quiz: Think You're Up On The Biggest Headlines?
Keller Offers is making a pivot to target mid-tier markets that haven't been served by some of the industry's leading iBuyers like Zillow Offers, Opendoor and its own partner Offerpad. The first is Birmingham, Alabama, the company announced Thursday.
Paul Manafort’s former son-in-law, Jeffrey Yohai, was sentenced to nine years and two months in prison for a series of fraud schemes involving high-end Los Angeles real estate.
As first reported by Politico, Yohai, 37, pleaded guilty to a variety of frauds, including leading investors to believe that he was building spec houses in wealthy parts of Los Angeles while using the money for personal expenses, giving fraudulent information to obtain loans for investments and renting out luxury homes without the owners’ permission. Other scams included selling nonexistent backstage passes for the Coachella music festival and pawning band equipment that did not belong to him.
“When I was in Amsterdam walking around the red light district, the women in the windows were marketing to my boyfriend,” Duvall wrote for Inman on Thursday. “‘Don’t you wanna come in for awhile?’ was their tagline.”
“Now, I don’t know much about how prostitutes find their clients, but I do know where to find homebuyers — and it ain’t at open houses.”
Read the story here.
The board of directors of the National Association of Realtors has overwhelmingly passed a controversial policy proposal designed to combat pocket listings.
In a 729-70 vote, the trade group’s 800-member board on Monday morning voted to approve the Clear Cooperation Policy, which will require listing brokers to submit a listing to the multiple listing service within one business day of marketing a property to the public.
All of the above.
With the overheated seller’s market fading in the rearview mirror in many regions of the country, transaction protocols are morphing to meet the new realities. In our market, a significant percentage of deals over the past eight years have been “as-is” — buyers were typically told to accept the current property condition or not bother writing an offer.
Read the story here.
Brad Nelson, a 10-year veteran of Sotheby’s International Realty, is the Realogy-affiliated brand’s new chief marketing officer, replacing Kevin Thompson, who had been with the company since 2017.
Nelson, who previously served as the chief marketing officer at two of the company’s largest affiliated franchisees and more recently as a marketing leader for the company’s own-side brokerages, will be tasked with supporting the brand’s agents and companies through the development of marketing, product and technology offerings.
Gary Keller, who co-founded the real estate franchisor Keller Williams more than three decades ago, believes his company just had its best quarter in history. Keller Williams, according to its published third-quarter results, saw both transaction sides and sales volume increase year-over-year at a higher rate than the industry’s overall transaction and sales volume increases.
“This quarter was the most impressive quarter we’ve experienced in the 36-year history of our company,” Keller, the CEO, and chairman of Keller Williams, said in a statement. “We owe the entirety of our success to our agents. It’s their expertise and their passion for the business that makes us the company we are.”
In a relatively close vote, 489 in favor and 352 opposed, the board voted to require NAR’s 1.3 million members to complete training on the Realtor Code of Ethics every three years instead of every two years and that the current two-year cycle end on Dec. 31, 2021.
The owners of a notorious Pennsylvania home that went viral earlier this year after pictures of its basement sex dungeon were posted on Redfin and Zillow have pulled the property off the market and turned it into a erotic retreat.
In February, Coldwell Banker agent Melissa Leonard listed the Colonial-style home in the Philadelphia suburb of Maple Glen for $750,000. She put up photos of the house as well as its most interesting feature — a basement decked out with whips, chains and all things worthy of a “50 Shades of Gray” film set. While gaining a lot of attention, the photos of the dungeon were soon flagged as “inappropriate content” and pulled from Zillow and Redfin.
Four hours east of Seattle, Spokane is a small mountain city known for its outdoor lifestyle. Like many towns in Washington state, it’s seen housing values rise rapidly over the past decade even if, not being within easy driving distance of Seattle, it was not part of the Amazon boom that drew hordes of tech workers to western Washington.