Estate Agents

Selling a home can be incredibly stressful, which is why many of us can appreciate aggressive real estate agents who work hard to make a sale. That said, there is a major difference between assertive and unethical. Anita Grey wasn't quite sure what to do upon discovering that a potential buyer's real estate agent had used a butter knife to pry open a storm door to show her Odenton home while the 53-year-old retired office worker was out visiting friends. "No one had called to set up an appointment," Grey said.

Proposed requirements increasing a real estate brokerage's supervision of its agents is raising concerns in the industry. The Maryland Real Estate Commission is expected to vote on the proposals Wednesday.Real estate agents are considered by law to be independent contractors and under minimal supervision of their brokerages.Agents work for themselves. They aren't paid unless they transact business. They don't get reimbursed for their expenses, and they don't receive health and other benefits or paid vacations.

DO YOU ADMIT to having a secret dream home? A place that you'd give almost anything to own, if it ever came on the market and you had an exclusive chance to bid on it?Well, there may be a discreet new way for you to make that dream house your very own. A Web site known as HomeRoute (www.HomeRoute.com) has just introduced a feature that allows anyone with a serious infatuation with a specific house anywhere in the United States to find out whether it might be available for sale -- even though its owners haven't listed it or decided to sell.

There are a lot of legendary sales stories making the rounds in Baltimore real estate offices this summer. Names and addresses are scarce for the stories -- but they are backed up by some sizzling sales trends in the area's oldest, most elegant neighborhoods.There's the story about the couple who have bid on houses five times. They've lost out every time -- but they're not giving up on finding a place to live in Roland Park or Homeland.There's the one about the Homeland house that sold in three hours -- for more than the asking price.

AMERICAN HOME buyers, sellers and real estate agents are on the verge of the next big step in marketing technology: The transformation of what are now millions of static, noninteractive photographic home listings on the Internet into "virtual home tours," allowing visitors to walk around rooms, peer through windows and meander through back yards, online.Beginning early in 1999, mass-market virtual tours are scheduled to make their debut on the largest Web site for home real estate listings -- Realtor.

The state attorney general's office agreed yesterday to mediate an unusual complaint from the residents of a 20-year-old Pasadena subdivision who say the developers they bought their homes from lied to them.Residents say they were told that Mansion House Crossing, a dead-end road leading to a horse farm and wooded grove, would never become a thoroughfare. A little more than 10 years ago, the county cut through the farm and the woods to connect Mansion House to two main arteries on the peninsula, Mountain Road on one end and Duvall Highway on the other.

Agents should navigate clauses on developmentYour June 16 article, "Legislator writing bill to inform homebuyers," was welcome news.Many years ago, I wish there had been such a bill. Real estate agents have their own agendas, and they are not the same as the buyers'. I lost 14 feet of property because frontage had grown over onto the county road. When further development started, we were in for a big surprise.No one had told us when we purchased that half our front yard was on county property.

WILL HOLDING a weekend open house conducted by your real estate agent actually help sell your home? Probably not.New research suggests that, contrary to the expectations of most home sellers, real estate agents themselves don't think much of open houses as a selling technique. In fact, three-quarters of them surveyed in a new academic study say they hold open houses primarily to "appease sellers," and to make contact with potential buyers who might be interested in other homes on the market -- not the one being held open.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Carol Abell and her family joined six other families for their annual block party on Nearbrook Lane in Carney, a community of about 10,000 people outside Interstate 695 in Baltimore County."

East is east and west is west, but the two are meeting in the offices of three area real estate agents.Dimitry Fayer, a Ukrainian immigrant who works for Coldwell Banker Grempler Realty is introducing other immigrants from the former Soviet Union to the intricacies of U.S.-style home buying.Jack Steffey, a longtime real estate agent who learned the business from his father, is trying to help Romanians develop a real estate industry in their country.And Tonya Razumovsky, who emigrated from Russia eight years ago, is selling luxury condominiums in Laurel while wrestling with the Russian bureaucracy to sell her apartment in Moscow.

Attention, prospective home-buyers: looking for a killer deal with the real estate market up in flames? Is all this recession, recession, recession talk getting you down? For a measly $150 million, you can buy Aaron Spelling's place, a 57,000-square-foot L.A. estate called "The Manor" that has a gym, bowling alley, tasting room, gift-wrapping room, humidity-controlled silver-storage room and beauty salon. There's also a screening room where the screen rises out of the floor like a gleaming silver altar.

Despite the housing recession, there are still more than 1.5 million real estate agents in the United States. Competition is one thing good real estate agents have in common. Real estate agents are used to competing heartily against one another for market share and the same listings. They're used to competing against other agents who have comparable houses for sale in the same neighborhood. But on the World Wide Web, the nature of real estate competition is changing - particularly if you're interested in snagging Gen Y-ers, those young and future homebuyers now in their 20s. How real estate agents are finding these buyers and interacting with them require some of the same skills your teenager might have mastered, combined with a mastery of hard-core local real estate and demographic information.

With home prices sliding, interest rates falling and worried sellers looking to deal, this may be a good time to become a homeowner. But is it a good time to become a real estate agent? During the boom, young people -- and those looking for a midlife career change -- were drawn to real estate. Money magazine listed "real estate agent" among the Top 20 jobs for the "young and restless." As the market slows and competition increases, young agents are feeling the pinch, perhaps more than others.

Doug Morrison saw the snow outside his Edmonton, Alberta, bedroom window one recent morning and knew this was the time. Three hours later, he was on a plane to Palm Springs, Calif. By lunchtime, the 49-year-old Canadian bureaucrat was checking out a two-bedroom condominium on a golf course, priced to sell at $322,500. Later that afternoon, Morrison pondered the deal as he dined in shirtsleeves at a sidewalk table. "There's Christmas music and it's 70 degrees," he said as music played softly from the restaurant's speakers.

What you don't see are the trimmings from jeans in the walls of this rowhouse facing Baltimore's Riverside Park. What you do see are bits of glass in the surface of the kitchen island. It's all green, in the environmental sense, from the cotton insulation to the recycled glass and concrete counter. And it's all familiar to Amanda Lopez, the listing agent from City Life Realty, who came to the house with a working knowledge of green features, putting her on the leading edge locally of agents developing such expertise.

Selling a home can be incredibly stressful, which is why many of us can appreciate aggressive real estate agents who work hard to make a sale. That said, there is a major difference between assertive and unethical. Anita Grey wasn't quite sure what to do upon discovering that a potential buyer's real estate agent had used a butter knife to pry open a storm door to show her Odenton home while the 53-year-old retired office worker was out visiting friends. "No one had called to set up an appointment," Grey said.

When it comes to protecting consumers in the real estate market, are the wolves guarding the henhouse? That's the conclusion of provocative new research by the Consumer Federation of America into the relatively obscure state regulatory commissions that oversee residential real estate. Whereas other key industries regulated at the state level - utility and insurance commissions, for example - typically are run by professionals independent of the industries they oversee, real estate commissions are dominated and essentially run by active real estate agents and brokers.

It's the No. 1 complaint that realty agents make about the home-mortgage lending process. And it bugs their homebuyer clients as well: the failure of settlement or escrow officials to provide a copy of the final settlement sheet in advance of the actual closing. In a new nationwide survey of real estate agents, 50 percent cited the absence of "HUD-1" closing documents for review a day ahead of the settlement as their biggest gripe. Realtors told pollsters that although "required by government regulations," settlement sheets rarely arrive in advance - thereby denying homebuyers an opportunity to see an itemized list of all their charges and fees.

For $1 million, you might get a new Colonial on about 7 acres in Carroll County. But it might buy you only a two-bedroom, two-bath Cape Cod with a picket fence on less than an acre in historic Annapolis. Or an 18th-century stone cottage in Ellicott City. In a real estate market in which prices rose more than 18 percent on average in the past year, million-dollar houses are no longer just those with 7,000 square feet, six bedrooms, gyms and custom wine cellars. They've become, perish the thought, almost commonplace.

SEATTLE -- After months of intense speculation in the real estate industry, the newest company in the field, supersecretive Zillow.com, said yesterday that it is introducing a Web feature that eventually will allow anyone nearly anywhere in the nation to accurately calculate the worth of his home or almost any home they choose. Zillow is the brainchild of Rich Barton, the former Microsoft executive who created Expedia in 1994. Expedia revolutionized the travel industry by transforming it from a service-oriented business into a self-service business.