August 09, 2010 | By LORETTA WALDMAN, Special to The Courant

Finding the right house can be a challenge, even for a family accustomed to moving a lot. Take John Rugel and his wife, Melissa Romeo, a 40-something couple in the insurance business who were being transferred from Houston, Texas, to Connecticut.

First came the sticker shock, said Rugel, an executive with Met Life. Comparable homes in Connecticut cost roughly double what they would in Texas, he said. Then there was the question of where to live. With a second baby on the way, the couple wanted a quiet community but not so quiet that getting to work and shopping would be inconvenient.

After looking at 35 to 40 homes in close to a dozen towns, Rugel and Romeo, a home-based risk assessment specialist, found a property that fit. The 3,332-square-foot colonial perched on a hill has an expansive view of the Farmington Valley and a basement, which their house in Texas lacked. The master bedroom is a spacious at 20 feet by 26 feet and has two walk-in closets, a fireplace and room enough for a couch and television. The children's rooms also are bigger, and the house, built in 2002, has an office and basement play-area, both of which topped the couple's list of must-haves, Rugel said. It also has a sunroom with "a ton" of windows.

The couple closed on July 1, paying $473,000, $16,900 less than the asking price and nearly $27,000 less than the price at which it originally was listed. Settled in now for over a month, Rugel said they are happy with their choice.

"A lot of people with kids are starting to say hello," he said. "The cool mornings are great. When I'm out walking the dog, I can see the sun coming up over the mountain on the other side of the valley. We absolutely love it."

Rob Giuffria, a Broker and relocation specialist with Prudential Premier Homes, Farmington, CT, helped ease their transition with his patience and special services, Rugel said. Finding the right house took four or five house-hunting junkets to far-flung towns that included Middletown, Bristol and Marlborough. To accommodate Romeo — seven months pregnant and unable to fly — Giuffria took videos of each house they visited and sent them to her on YouTube.

The move was Rugel's sixth in 15 years, most of which were not as smooth.

"This experience was such a pleasant surprise for me," he said. "It really helped ease things for us."

— Loretta Waldman, Special to The Courant

HOUSE PARTICULARS

BURLINGTON FACTS

Population (2009): 9,073

Median single-family home price (Jan.-May 2010): $300,000

Single-family home sales (2007): 129

Less than $100,000: 1

$100,000-$199,000: 14

$200,000-$299,000: 29

$300,000-$399,000: 39

$400,000 or more: 46

New housing permits:

2008: 21

2007: 11

2006: 28

2005: 23

2004:35

2003: 54

Housing stock: 3,246 units, 95 percent single-family

Owner-occupied: 93 percent

Housing stock built pre-1950: 9 percent

SOURCES: Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development; Connecticut Economic Resources Center; The Warren Group

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March 28, 2010

For people looking to buy homes, the Internet has become the first stop of choice. A 2008 profile of home buyers and sellers conducted by the National Association of Realtors found cyberspace was the top source of home-search information 87 percent of the time. That's 2 percent more than real estate agents ranked in the survey, more than 20 percent more than yard signs and better than 40 percent more than open houses and newspaper ads.

Consumers are the big winners in this technology-driven paradigm shift. With hundreds of real estate sites to choose from, there's more information available than ever, some of it once accessible to agents only. With pictures, videos and satellite-generated bird's-eye views, buyers can compare homes without leaving their homes or offices, and that leaves more time and energy for the most promising properties when the comes time to do the legwork.

The sites have been a boon for agents, too. The ones surviving, and even thriving, in this tenuous real estate market are those that are tapping into technology to enhance their services and connect with would-be clients. Which sites they recommend to house hunters depends on the agent.

Rob Giuffria, vice president and broker with Premier Prudential Homes, named Realtor.com, Zillow.com and Bing.com as his top three picks.

Realtor.com, the official site of the National Association of Realtors, has listings for millions of homes in regions across the United States and Canada. The site is also "broker agnostic," Giuffria says, meaning no broker gets better placement than any other. Information includes the type of house, pictures and listing agent. But the home-value feature is not as accurate as others, he said.

Zillow.com is a Seattle-based website that, among other information, provides estimated home values. The company pulls data for a variety of pools and, using algorithms, determines the approximate value, or Zestimate, of the house. Giuffria maintains that the Hartford-area data is accurate within plus or minus 8 percent. While he said the majority of agents might disagree, "it's very defensible data."

Bing.com, a search engine powered by Microsoft, takes Zillow's trademark satellite images of homes a step further, giving users a closer bird's-eye view roughly 200 feet from above the property. The images also can be manipulated and viewed from four sides, a handy feature for assessing surrounding terrain or determining whether the house borders a commercial site, busy road or a house in disrepair.

"So, when a [client] says, 'I want to see this house,' they already know what's around it and how the land is situated," says Giuffria. "Is it on the side of a mountain or is it next to a river? It does not replace seeing the house, but if you can exclude this or that home, you can spend more time on the houses that meet your criteria."

Margaret Wilcox, an agent and broker with Coldwell Banker Real Estate, ranks Realtor.com as her second-favorite website. She said the time lag in posting information to the site can render information about the status of a particular property inaccurate. First choice for Wilcox and her team of top-selling Glastonbury-area associates is their company's site CBMoves.com, which connects users to more than 200,000 listings in the tri-state area and links to everything from school-district data and agent bios to support with financing and getting the phone and electricity connected. Other major real estate companies and agencies also have sites.

Wilcox said Zillow.com can be valuable but must be used with caution. Property values on the site rely on town assessment information and recent sales, which led to a mistake in the value of a property she was involved with.

"The property was located on the town line and [the site] didn't differentiate from the house in one town and a house a street over in the other town," Wilcox said. "It can just be very misleading."

Mobile Technology

Driving the rise in reliance on the Internet is the evolution of smart phone and other mobile technology, experts say. The Internet consumer "inhales information, often works on their own and demands timely responses," Spencer Raskoff, Zillow.com's chief operating officer, told attendees at a Pacific Northwest Housing Summit last week. There is no such thing as too much information for these users, who routinely want data on historical asking prices, days on the market, seller's mortgage amount, what the seller paid for the property, the value of nearby homes, he said.

"In the last six months, there has been a revolution of these devices," said Raskoff, whose company recently unveiled a GPS-enabled Zillow app for Google's Android smart phone. Using it, prospective buyers can call up information on a given property by tapping in the street address as they drive by.

"It's an information bonanza for home buyers," he said.

Such developments, of course, have radically transformed the way agents and brokers conduct business and their relationship with the buying and selling public. Cynthia Burke, an agent with Keller Williams Real Estate, pays for an upgraded version of Realtor.com that feeds any new listings she gets to dozens of real estate and social-networking sites, including Zillow.com, Trulia.com, Facebook, Twitter and even Craigslist.

"It's crucial to get information everywhere possible," she said.

Michael Marsden, an agent and broker with the River To Shore Group of Page Taft GMAC Real Estate, says he invests from $1,200 to $1,500 a month to maintain his presence on the Internet, which includes websites he created to reach home buyers (CTHomesByEmail.com) and sellers (ValueMyCThome.com) and an iPhone app.

"You have to spend a lot of money to get a bigger piece of a smaller pie," Marsden said.

CTReal.com is another option for consumers looking to purchase property in Connecticut, Marsden said. The site of the statewide multiple listing service, CTReal.com is essentially a free, public portal to the same database he as a Realtor uses, Marsden said.

Burke, of Keller Williams, notes that traditional means of marketing real estate, particularly newspapers, still play an important role.

"Not only for people not online but because people like to carry the paper with them when they go to open houses," she said. "It's nice to have the information all on one piece of paper and be able to look at the pictures."

Agents also remain an important part of the process, said Susan Brine, an agent with Coldwell Banker. "There is still a lot of hand-holding," Brine said. "Even with all the information on the Internet, buyers still need that personal touch they get with an agent."

• Contact Loretta Waldman at lorettafwaldman@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2010, The Hartford Courant

December 13, 2009

When David Chzaszcz put his family's four-bedroom Tolland house up for sale in September, he took his real estate agent's advice and listed it at $449,000, even though he was hoping it would sell for a higher price.

"Our house was listed for, technically, less than a week and a half," Chzaszcz says. "We had eight or nine people come through. ... Four made offers."

After a bidding war that drove the price ever higher, the Chzaszczs closed on their house in November for a final sale price of $470,000.

If it seems like a risky strategy, it's not, according to several real estate agents who have used it recently. What people forget, agents say, is that a seller isn't required to accept an offer, even if it's for the full asking price.

Chzaszcz's agent, Rob Giuffria of Prudential Premier Homes in Farmington, tells clients that pricing slightly below market value will generate the kind of traffic that creates a flurry of interest among buyers in the crucial early days that the house is on the market.

"You have the most amount of leverage as the seller in the first 15 days," he says. "When you have people looking at your house, they have to believe that if they don't buy the house, someone else will."

Too often, Giuffria says, a house is listed at the price the homeowner wants to get, which is usually on the hopeful side. Sometimes, that's the result of real estate agents' telling a homeowner what they want to hear to get the listing.

"If I came in and said your home is worth $500,000, you're going to be pretty receptive," he says. "There's an inherent bias in agents' overpricing homes to get listings."

But an overly optimistic listing price may leave a house languishing on the market, which often results in a drop in price, Giuffria says. That puts the advantage with the buyer and may result in a final sale significantly below the lowered list price.

Reluctant Homeowners

Raymond Romero, who is based in West Hartford and works for William Raveis Real Estate, says that agents have to know the market and how many buyers might be interested in a particular property before they recommend a particular listing price.

"Most people want to know: How long is it going to take to sell?" Romero says. "I tell them, 'I have a price where I can sell it in one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year.' ... You try to find out from an owner's perspective their time frame."

Romero agrees with Giuffria that agents often compete for listings by telling homeowners that their homes can sell for a price that may reflect wishful thinking more than the actual market.

"As an agent, I have to be prepared to walk away from a listing price that I don't believe will sell the property," Romero says.

He also agrees that listing a house below market value can be a great strategy, but one that can be a tough sell to clients, even when it may be in their best interest.

"Once you get people interested in the property, it becomes a pride issue. ... I've noticed that it really does work," Romero says. "But on the listing side, it's a much harder discussion to have: 'How am I going to put it below to get a higher price?'"

Romero says he tells his clients that the lower price will generate more interest in the property and trigger competition among buyers.

"You have to use psychology in this business," he says.

Take It Or Leave It

While Giuffria is sold on the general principle of listing a house at about 98 percent of market value, he says only about 20 percent of his clients will try the strategy.

"Most sellers view agents as just wanting to sell a house at any price," he says. "So you have to have a high degree of trust with the seller and the listing broker."

In the case of a buyer offering full price with no other offers, the seller can choose to take the offer or not.

"Most sellers are under the mistaken belief that if someone offers them list price, they have to sell their home," Giuffria says. "You can just say, 'I don't accept your offer.'"

Romero agrees.

"No one can force you to accept it," he says.

A Long-Term View

Joseph Stafford of Joseph Stafford Associates in West Hartford has been in the real estate business for 42 years.

"I've been up and down this roller coaster a few times," he says.

In this market, Stafford says, it's more important than ever to price competitively. Sellers have a short window to generate interest among the small group of buyers waiting to see whatever comes on the market.

"Once something stays on the market for a couple of months," he says, "no one is going to pay the list price."

Stafford recently listed a house near West Hartford Center, for example, for $369,900 and quickly sold it for $385,000 after a bidding war. If the house had been overpriced, he says, the bidding war never would have happened.

"There's not a lot of competition for good listings," he says. "In the first five or six days, if you're going to have a bidding war, that's usually when it happens."

Stafford also recently listed a house in the Elmwood section of West Hartford for $199,900 and sold it for $204,900. If the sellers had listed it at the price they wanted, he says, the house may have sold for a lot less.

"There's an old saying," Stafford says: "The one that expects the most usually ends up with the least."

Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant

Following the closing of our house at 25 Strawfield Rd in Farmington, I wanted to write this note of appreciation and recommendation.

The sale of our house was a critical aspect of our relocation to Texas.  Helping us navigate through our relocation package and maximize our benefits was a top priority.  Despite a low demand in our price range in Farmington, we were able to get a contract within 60 days. 

Throughout the process, I never doubted your ability to close, and in the end, you found the buyer and got it done.  From contract signing to closing day, everything was smooth.  Your knowledge and foresight were critical throughout the process.  I would highly recommend your services to anybody considering selling or buying in the Farmington Valley or anywhere in Connecticut.

Please feel free to share this note with potential clients and don’t hesitate to list me as a reference should the need arise.

Please do stay in touch.

Best regards,

Martin Balleux
Flower Mound, TX

martinballeux@hotmail.com

"This is my fifth home and I've worked with a different realtor each time. Quite simply, Rob is a superstar, far and away the best I've retained. He knows his craft and he's absolutely dogged -- one example of many, he actually brought potential buyers into the home of folks who had wanted to make an offer on my house but were having trouble getting theirs sold through their own realtor. Rob has also been extremely diligent and helpful with all the details, like getting repair folks in and out of the house, etc., that other realtors wouldn't do or would do badly. I credit entirely his tenacity with getting my house under contract in this very difficult market. I generally do not give endorsements, but I have no hesitation in recommending Rob to you. Good luck and feel free to call me tonight if you have additional questions. David."
David, Attorney in West Hartford 

Dear Rob:

Hope all is well with you. I wanted to take a few minutes to send a quick note of appreciation to you and summarize why I was so pleased with your representation of Stacy I in the sale of our house.

As you know, we had listed our house with a major regional firm here in West Hartford for over 5 months. Despite numerous showings and supposedly terrific feedback on what a great home we had, we were unable to get the house sold. When I came to you to discuss our situation, we were worn down by the countless showings (we have a two and four year old) and the disruption to our lives. With your guidance on selling process and how to position the house for sale (including the terrific staging report you had prepared for us), we had a bid in the first week of your listing agreement and we closed the sale exactly 30 days after your representation began. I fully believe that your analytic approach to real estate is substantially different from all of the other agents I interviewed to sell our house. I am 100% confident this was the major factor for why we had such a successful outcome in what was an otherwise very difficult market. Please know that both Stacy and I will forever be grateful for your work in helping us move on with our lives and enjoy our wonderful new home.

Please feel free to share this note on with potential clients and don’t hesitate to offer me up as a reference should the need arise.

Hope the summer is going well and please do stay in touch.

Best regards,

Lenny Mazlish

17 Chestnut Hill

West Hartford, CT 06107