Let’s think about the way a typical buyer or seller finds their agent. Someone knows someone who knows someone they should call. This referral might be based on some sort of prior experience or it might be based on nothing at all. But the moment someone says this other someone is the person to call, the agent is seemingly vetted, even if there’s no vetting taking place. This is because referrals are asked for and given loosely. Do you know someone this person might call? Sure I do, her name is whatever and she worked with my cousin. That’s the standard and that’s the referral and now the agent from the cousin deal is your new agent. Congratulations, you have a Lake Geneva agent.
Maybe that agent is good enough. Maybe they know the MLS and they know the lake, sorta, and they know how to tell you where the kitchen is and what the house next door sold for last summer. They return your calls and they have a nice car and they smile when they tell you that fall is the best time of year at the lake. This has long been the extent of the litmus test for agents, and it dawned on me recently just how terribly incomplete this test really is. Any agent can have access to the MLS to see the listings and the sales, this is no feat. But the real value of an agent is in knowing now only what’s available and what’s selling off market, but in knowing the activity surrounding the market that has no public record. Allow me to explain.
If a house is listed in the MLS for $1M and it sells for $970k, this is an easy bit of data for anyone to see and apply to their real estate maneuvering, whether the interested party is a buyer or a seller. But what if that house lists for $1M and sells for $1.1M? Is the buyer or seller to assume that there were multiple bids and that the $1.1M price was a hard fought, winner take all battle between buyers that results in one buyer just barely out-bidding the throng of other buyers? Or did a buyer pay $1.1M in the face of a single competing offer, which generated a Multiple Counter Offer to both buyers? Was the other bid $1M and the winning bid $1.1M? Or was the other bid $850k, and the winning bidder assumed it was much higher so they bid themselves up to $1.1M? When pricing the next similar property, are we to assume the $1.1M price is where the market is now, or do we know that the other buyer wasn’t even going to pay $900k, let alone $1M?
If a property is sitting on market at $5M, any agent can bring you, the buyer, to that listing and tell you that the property has been on market for 88 days. And that the original list price was $5.249M. They can tell you that the pier holds a single boat and that in the summer the sun probably sets over there (they point sort of to the west). But do they know that the other agents who toured the home prior to listing told the seller the property should be listed at $4.175M and that the seller is merely fishing for buyer at $5M? Does that agent know that the home next door sold off market one year earlier for $3.8M and that it was likely a neighborly deal that represented a discount to market of perhaps 10%? Does the agent know that the seller had an offer four months ago for $4M and that the seller indicated they’d take something around there but not something quite that low? Or does the agent simply know what they see in the MLS and assume that if they were able to negotiate the deal to $4.75M then their buyer would be getting a “great deal”? Or what about a listing that came to market for $11M and was slowly dropped in price to $8M? Is that a deal if it sells for $7.7M, because of that massive price drop that the MLS shows? Or was the home originally worth $7M and the new buyer paying $7.7M still overpaid by 10% because they fell for the Overton Window Pricing Scheme?
The reality of representation in a niche market is that it is not a game for all of the participants. Yes, anyone can see the MLS and know the details of a listing or a sale. But what of the rest? What about the backstory that matters so much as to the buy or sell side representation? What about the interpretation of prior interest and failed offers and a mortgage that was just pulled on the property three months ago because the seller needed a down payment for another home they just purchased on the other side of the lake? What about the three houses that are available on the water right now that the MLS doesn’t know about? This is where the value is found, and this doesn’t even take into account the macro of whether or not the market is currently hot, or cold, or appreciating or treading water or depreciating. This is why your choice in representation matters. And this is why, if you’re looking to buy or sell Lake Geneva, I’m probably your guy.
Above, one of the lakefronts I sold off market TWICE over the last several years.