Summer 2020 REALTOR Life Adventures

Holy mackerel!! It’s been a crazy market since mid-June. It got so incredibly crazy that if your buyer wanted to see a house, and then buy that house…you’d have to show it the day it went into Bright. And then you had to get the Agreement of Sale done right away, a pre-approval to go with it, the SDS and lead paint form, everything signed/initialed/dated. And, in some price ranges, the offer price had to be well over the listed price. And your buyer would have a way better chance of success with conventional, 80% LTV, no inspections. And cash would almost always be the winner, if there was cash. Yikes.
The request for “highest and best” used to be rare. Now it is common. I’m wondering if we could get some statistics for the past month or two…and still ongoing as I write this. I bet some of you have heard some numbers in your offices, so please let me know and, for the next issue, we can publish some Berks County records for home-selling in the summer of 2020:
Two questions
1. What’s the highest number of showings in a 24-hour period
for a listing?
and
2. What’s the record number of agreements received on one
listing?
These don’t have to be verifiable, and no addresses given, and no agent names if you want to be anonymous. Just send me some numbers, if you think that there’s some incredibly high numbers in your office. It would be great if we’d have an idea of how wild and crazy this market was (still is?). And of course,
there were those “sight-unseen” sales…when the buyer wanted a property and couldn’t make an appt. to see it in the early COVID weeks, so they made an offer anyhow. These are not usually common experiences for Realtors, but we seemed to be living in the wild, wild west of real estate. Our title officers have been amazing while they are handling settlements. With some of the buyers and sellers in their cars, or sitting outside at tables, on in lobbies and foyers and separate rooms…these title officers have had to run outside and back in,  others rooms in the building, to their laptops, to the copiers, & back to the parties wherever they are. And doing this some days in 90+-degree heat, wearing masks. And waiting, in some cases, for mortgage docs to arrive, waiting for wires, waiting for buyers and sellers to show up. Keeping track of all of the files they are handling has to be so difficult because some people came in early to sign…the day before, or morning of, or after. We have to give a lot of credit to these title people. Seriously! Many of them have been doing settlements for years, but never had to deal with this kind of craziness. And yet, somehow, they’re getting these settlements completed. Hooray for all of you title people.
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Any good COVID stories? Like, at listing appointments, or during showings soon after the shutdown was lifted? This one is probably not a unique story, but it was not a good day for me… my first face-to-face business after we could actually show properties. 5 showings, pouring rain on that day, holding my dripping umbrella, wearing a mask, the MLS data sheets getting wet, dropping the hand sanitizer spray bottle, wiping the doorknobs, feet/shoes soaking wet, and  ondering why I don’t just get a job at a Wendy’s drive-up window. Anybody else have an adventure you want to tell us? Please send it to me. It will be fun to read your stories. Good luck to all, stay well, and remember the words of wisdom that Bill McLain once said to me in my early days of real estate…
now more true than ever: “Nothing is easy.”