Elizabeth Newlin – Arizona Real Estate Agent

Holiday Cards: 448

Trips To Various Post Offices: 4

Seinfeld Episodes I Lived In The Last Week: 2

Percentage of Cards That Will Actually Be Looked At And Appreciated, Thus Rendering This Whole Debacle Worthwhile: 5ish? Maybe?

My business partner (whose name is also Elizabeth, and we’re the same age, but she’s not short and brunette, she’s tall and blond. She’s like the bizarro-Elizabeth Newlin) and I have been mailing to a subdivision in Chandler for three years now. It doesn’t net us a ton of business, but the occasional listing and referral are generally worth the sporadic marketing energy and money we put into it. Unfortunately, this year our marketing efforts have been even more sporadic than usual for the all too common ‘economic recession issues’ and also the other Elizabeth had a baby this year, so she is no longer able to complete her duties as the more organized and  motivated force on the team, as she now has traded in her mind and sanity for a child (which I did many years ago).

So the point is, our big, consistent mailer of the year for this subdivision is our Holiday Mailer With Calendar. We also send this one out to our friends, family and past clients. Last year (because Lizzie was still gestating and totally ‘on it’) we had these cards and calendars on fridges December 6, I swear. This year went a little differently.

The cards are a multi-step process. First off, we order calendars in the fall. Then, in October or November at some point we take pictures and compose a card:

The next part of the process involves affixing business cards to the calendars, stuffing everything into envelopes, printing and affixing labels and sealing the cards. Finally, everything is taken down to the post office and bulk mailed out. So, yes, even at it’s best, the whole thing is a bit of a circus.

This year, however, every little detail turned into the disaster that ate the Christmas cards. To begin with, the date we had on the calendar to do the photo-shoots for the cards, I was actually in the middle of a four day hospital stay with my middle son and his nasty case of valley fever. So we started out about a month late on that. I ended up begging the photographer from my brother’s wedding over email to send me whatever picture she had with my entire family in it because if I had to dress my whole family up and get us to a photo-friendly location with a photographer again this year, I was going to have to throw myself into oncoming traffic. I’m a woman on the brink! I told her. Clearly, my plea was successful, even though the bride and groom haven’t received their pictures yet. Sometimes a little desperation is all it takes.

The next hurdle wasn’t due to poor timing or family illness, just general idiocy on my part. When I went to attach my business cards to the sticky portion of my calendars, I realized about 100 in to my 500 that I was going to run out of business cards by about number 200. This was December 7. So I spent the entire day reordering cards, paying huge amounts extra for faster shipping, waiving proofs and just generally begging on the phone. Unfortunately, this time desperation wasn’t enough. I was promised the cards in hand by December 11 and they didn’t actually arrive (after days of screamy, hand wringing, hair-tearing out frustration) until December 18.

So, of course, I enlisted my poor, long-suffering Realtor-assistant/husband to help me finish assembling, labeling and sealing all of the cards in one night. By 10PM Sunday night all we had left to do was seal them all. We watched Episodes 3 and 4 of True Blood (season 1) while we licked 448 envelopes. When we got to the point where there were about 30 left, I literally couldn’t lick another one without likely vomiting. Jason got it done, and I went to bed and had nightmares where I was marrying George from Seinfeld and I died from envelope-licking poisoning, but Stephen Moyer brought me back as a vampire and made me drink foul-tasting synthetic blood that tasted like envelope paste. And I woke up the next morning with my mouth glued shut.

By that point, poor Lizzie had all of her stuff totally assembled for a week and was just waiting me and my daily proclamations that “Worst case scenario, we’ll mail by Friday, I swear.”  But she has a life too, and was headed out to California to visit family for the holidays, so I was tasked with facing the dreaded bulk mail czar alone.

If you can believe it, the thing we dread most about mailing is not everything that I’d already been through, no, this is all unpleasant and time-consuming, but the worst, most stressful part about mailing is going to see the Bulk Mail Nazi (ding, ding! Seinfeld episode reference number 2!). Basically, bulk mail is insanely financially worth the hassle (25.6 cents each instead of 44 cents each, so instead of $197.12, $114.69 for my 448 cards), but it’s such a super-secret, complicated process that almost no one does it. There are all these rules (you must have at least 200 pieces going to the same general area, you must wear a yellow hat when you show up to the post office, only come between, 1pm and 1:03pm on the third Thursday of the month, the secret password is Green Eggs and Ham) and even though we’ve done it several times a year for the past three years, we never know if it’s going to work or if there’s going to be some kind of ‘NO BULK MAIL FOR YOU!!’ incident at the post office (Jeff, the bulk mail czar has told us before, ‘you know, we’re going to start charging extra fees when we have to help people because they’re not doing it exactly right,’).

So this week, I showed up at the post office we’ve been doing this at for the past three years (my company has our specific bulk mail imprint that only works at the right Gilbert post office) and got in line. Of course, because it was December 21st, the line was out the door. So I waited. and waited. When I finally got to the front of the line, and said to Jeff, “OK, I need three long bulk mail boxes,”  he said, “Oh, we don’t do bulk mail any more. It was all transferred to the Val Vista office months ago. We sent out a letter of notification.” Awesome. So I drove over to the Val Vista office (the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach growing ever larger) and got into the back of that 40 person line. When I got to the front, I was told to drive around back with my mail and park in the bulk mail spot and wait for Mary (see, it’s like Davinci Code of mailing). Mary came out and was actually super nice and helpful (The bulk mail king is dead!! Long live the Queen!!) and got all of my paperwork together and my boxes all worked out and weighed and we were good to go. I was so relieved. It was like a Christmas Miracle. Of course I had to go back and wait in line AGAIN to pay, but whatever, I was happy: IT WAS DONE.

You know, until 6:30PM that day when I got a voicemail from Mary that our order was at least 110 pieces more than we had counted and it wasn’t going out and I needed to come back in and recount the next day. So the next day (after frantically figuring and re-figuring how our count could have been that far off and finally determining that GODDAMN IT, IT’S NOT THAT FAR OFF) I went back down. And stood outside and waited for 30 minutes for Mary before being told she was in a meeting and wouldn’t be out for at least another half an hour and that she would call me. Which she did not. I finally called and called her until I got her on the phone and she told me to come back down. I went back down AGAIN and was ushered back to a little room in the back of the giant warehouse post office and was shown my boxes of mail and told to count them. I got 3/4 of the way through (with the numbers still tracking with my original count) and opened a small box only to find it stuffed with someone elses mailers. When I took them over to Mary she said, “OH! Well that’s the problem, I must have mixed them in with yours. You’re fine! You can go! I’ll send them out.”

So… at this point here’s the big question: Was it actually worth the $82.43 I saved? Excuse me, I’ve got some traffic that needs throwing of me in front of.

Houses Seen: 11
Closets I Coveted: 2
Golf Cart Rides I Wasn’t Convinced I Would Walk Away From: 3
Farm Animals That Made My Clients Reconsider Their Decision To Purchase: 1

It’s kind of been a year of new builds for me. My husband and I, of course, build a new house out in North East Mesa almost exactly a year ago, four of my clients have actually purchased a new build property in the last year, and almost all of the buyers I worked with considered building at some point in the buying process.

The builders have had to drop prices like Oprah dropping weight on a juice fast to stay in business with all of the short sale and foreclosure prices dragging the market down the last few years. This push for competitive pricing has really made buying new attractive to a lot of people; especially those who are willing to live closer to the outskirts of town where new houses are still being constructed.

Checking out new build communities is always a fun experience, but it’s amazing how time consuming and informationally overwhelming the process can be. First you have to hear the builder speil about why their home construction saves baby seals and causes redwood forests to grow back, will give you money back on utilities instead of you having to pay for them, and grows rainbows in your master bathroom. Then there’s the tour through the model homes. If you really want to have fun, bring the builder’s agent with as you walk through, point out everything you LOVE and think is amazing about the house, ask, ‘is this standard or an upgrade?’ and watch him squirm as it becomes increasingly apparent the model was build with $100K in upgrades. And finally, you tour the spec homes that have already been constructed and are ready for purchase. This is where it all really starts to makes sense. “Oh, now I get it! The solid gold bidet in the master bath is EXTRA.” One decent new build community will time-suck an entire afternoon and you’ll often leave more confused that when you got there.

About a month ago, I spent a weekend with a couple of old friends who are moving back to Arizona after almost four years in California. We started with resale homes but eventually moved on to a Fulton Homes community in South Gilbert called Freeman Farms. Apparently Fulton is working hard at making the process of home buying out in the farmland of Gilbert a more authentic experience because this is who greeted us when we pulled up:

That little guy may not look like a big deal, but I have to tell you, he was a bit of an impediment to the process. In general, I am pro-animal. I’m not a vegetarian or anything, but I feel pretty strongly that people should be nice to other living creatures and if there’s a kitty within reach, I will happily pet him (with a couple of exceptions… there was once a cat in a house I was holding open who would not let me enter the room he was in without hissing violently. I also think he may have had acid for saliva. Additionally, my sister has a cat that is bigger than most medium-sized dogs. He freaks me out a little bit.). However, any kind of jumpy, loud animals sort of make me a bit hysterical. Barking dogs? Make me twitch and sometimes pee my pants a little. Flapping birds with sharp beaks and claws? I’m just going to climb into the trunk of my own car and hide for a little bit, ok? 

Unfortunately, my client felt this way also, only more strongly and apparently chickens can sense fear (you know, like dogs). So this chicken jumped on top of the golf cart we were riding in and flapped at our faces as we toured the spec homes. 

The builder agent kept assuring us that if ignored him, the bird would go away. Apparently he was drawn to our hysterical screams and frantic giggles.

Miles Driven: 52.5

People Actually Fooled by Exterior-Only Shots Taken By Listing Agent: 1, Oh wait, that guy was just kidding, he wasn’t fooled either: 0

How Glad I Was On A Scale of 1-10 The Sellers Weren’t Home When I Was Videoing Their House: 12

An out-of-state buyer I’ve been working with for a couple of years emailed me yesterday with a new property that had popped up on her search she wanted me to preview. She lives in Albuquerque, but has adult children here in the Phoenix area. She and her husband are looking in the Tempe/Chandler area for a house on a little bit more land with a huge garage. Because it isn’t really the normal property we see out here, we’ve just been watching and waiting for the right house to come on the market.

The house that appeared on the auto-search I have this client set up on seemed almost perfect on paper. It’s in a great South Tempe neighborhood, on a third of an acre of land, with a nice big four car garage and enough interior square footage that it should be a comfortable size for my clients. It just had one big glaring red flag flying from the rooftop: it is only listed with two photos (both front exterior shots taken from different angles).

In this digital day and age, where it takes more effort to play Wii Tennis than it does to slap eight photos up on the MLS showcasing all of the features of a house, what this says to me (and everyone with half a brain and an Internet connection) is that something is so horribly, hideously, mind-scaringly wrong with the rest of the house (infestation of giant hairy desert scorpions? quicksand in the kitchen? rare, toxic, red mold climbing the walls of the master bedroom? meth lab in the bottom of the empty swimming pool in back?) that it’s actually BETTER for the potential buyer just to imagine the potential horror that awaits than to capture it on film and release it to the general public.

So this morning I headed over to the house, with long pants and bug-squashing tennis shoes on, and my trusty video camera in hand to record all of the possible mayhem that I’m going to encounter, and of course, the house is a lot less disgusting, scary and horrible, and a lot more, messy, outdated and generally cluttered (with a bit of ‘poorly designed and constructed additions’ thrown in). My point here, to the listing agent is: DUDE. Suck it up and post some pictures. No, it’s not the most photogenic house I’ve ever seen, but you might have a chance of getting a buyer in the door who could potentially want to purchase the house, if you did.

Regardless of all of the lack-of-photos drama, I did learn an important lesson at this house today. Houses built in the 1980s tend to have tile step-ups and step-downs in weird place you (ok, I guess I should say ‘I’ here) don’t expect; which can cause incidents like the following when you (and by you, again, I mean ‘I’) are attempting to video, walk AND talk:

It’s a good thing I wasn’t attempting to chew gum also. Sigh.

I have a new listing that is an anomaly in this market. It’s a ‘normal sale’; which is kind of an ironic name for the least likely type of property you’re going to run across right now. What is a ‘normal sale’, you ask? A normal sale, is a property that is not owned by the bank or a relocation company and is not owned by a seller who has negative equity in the property. It’s just a regular person who owns a house, has equity and has it listed for sale.

Lately, if I have a buyer who marks 10 properties he wants to see, when I pull them up to research, five will be short sales, three foreclosures (bank owned properties), one will be owned by a relocation company and one will have a normal seller with equity (in certain price ranges and areas you can swap out one of the those foreclosures for a new build or a fix’n’flip).

So this new listing I have is kind of a gem. No, it’s not super upgraded and new, but it IS adorable, CLEAN and completely MOVE-IN READY. In this financial climate, those are some magic words right there. There is just something to be said for walking into a home smells like a human being could actually live there without wearing a gas mask.

This property is a townhouse in Northwest Phoenix. It was built in 1997, is 1542 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms and has a two car garage. The subdivision has a community pool and tennis courts and is close to the I-17 (which is great for commuters).

I know what you’re wondering: Does it have granite counters and stainless steel appliances?

No, it has original laminate counters and cabinets and white appliances, clean and mold-free.

But it also doesn’t have a window sill covered in bee carcasses.

(I didn’t bring my camera the day I showed this house because I thought to myself as I was running out the door, ‘I won’t see anything super weird today,’ and then the very first house we walked into was a monstrosity with a bees-living-in-the-walls problem. So my client snapped these with her camera phone.)

Does it have an enormous backyard with a pool?

Nope, a cute little patio with pavers and rocks.

But it also doesn’t have a swampy death-trap of a former pool just waiting to suck the neighborhood kids in and put you in litigation before you’ve even moved in.

Are the floors ecologically friendly hardwood bamboo?

Nah, more like a pretty pergo knock-off.

But hey, it doesn’t have holes dug into the walls where an animal was obviously locked into one of the bedrooms (which is good, because it’s bad business to report your own clients to PETA).

And what is the odor like in the house? Is it roses and perfumed candles?

No, more like cookies and green cleaning products; nothing like the short sale I showed about three weeks ago that smelled just like it looks (yes, look close, those are hundreds of cigarette butts mixed in with the rock; it’s like some kind of new decorative landscaping element designed by prison inmates):

All of this loveliness is available for under $100,000. ($1 under, to be exact.) Feel free to check out the details and give me a call when you decide you’d rather your home buying process be less Horror Show, more Home and Garden Show.