Friday Link-o-Rama

Posted on September 1, 2006 by Doug Heddings
  • Economy: perhaps not so terrible, by some measures. And vacancy rates are down. But consumers aren’t fired up.
  • A reader asks MarketWatch’s Lew Sichelman if it’s reasonable to ask an agent to take $10,000 less because the sale went really quickly–before any advertising has even been done. Sichelman’s response: "I’m going to pop your bubble on this one. Totally off-base here! Left field and beyond! You should have negotiated the commission before the fact, not after. I don’t know what you do for a living, but if MarketWatch.com came to me and asked me to take less money because your question was easier to answer than most others, I’d be so angry my eyes would pop out of their sockets."
  • Basketball City is about to be homeless.
  • Josh Barbanel reports on a good investment: "She bought her newly renovated house on West 138th Street, just off Riverside Drive, for less than $250,000 through a city housing program. Now she has it on the market for $1.4 million."
  • An admittedly unscientific poll about Zillow shows most people are suspicious of those prices.
  • Carol Lloyd looks at sellers who refuse to believe the realities of today’s market: "Some agents are less politic about the frustrations of dealing with unrealistic sellers. ‘She’s in for an education, all right,’ one agent, who asked to remain nameless, told me after dishing the dirt on a prospective client. ‘She thinks her condo is worth more than it is, she wants to live there while it’s up for sale, she doesn’t want to stage it and she doesn’t want to do a speck of work on it. Not even painting!’ He pauses. ‘Well, she’s gonna learn the hard way, and it’s not going to be pretty.’"
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