The Real Estate Blog

There are all of these “awesome” free e-mail services out there to choose from. Some are provided by your internet service provider (Comcast, BellSouth, SBC, AOL, etc…). Others are provided—free of charge—as part of a web portal’s business plan (GMail, Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, etc.) Some are even provided by your brokerage or franchise (kw.com, remax.com, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc…).

The biggest problem with using these e-mail services can be summed up in a phrase: lock-in.

Internet service providers give us MANY different ways to import our old e-mail into their e-mail systems, but I have yet to find a single one who bothers to provide even a single way for us to export our e-mail archive in their system into another e-mail system!

For example: If you switch from AOL to BellSouth, I can guarantee that AOL’s support representative will certainly not entertain forwarding your AOL e-mail to a BellSouth account. Same thing applies if you’re moving from any internet service provider to any other internet service provider.

Brokerage provided e-mail accounts are just as bad. See what happens when you ask your Prudential broker if he’d be willing to forward your old Prudential mail to your new RE/MAX e-mail address. I think his answer will involve something freezing over…

Another issue is privacy. Google’s highly regarded G-Mail system reserves the right to statistically analyze the content of your incoming and outgoing e-mail and use that information to improve the targeting of their internet-wide advertising colossus.

Two steps to avoid having your e-mail address held hostage:

1. Reserve a domain name. ($8 to $12 a year)
2. Buy POP3 or IMAP e-mail service for your domain name from a hosting company. ($20 - $100 a year)

It’s not free, but domain name ownership is an extremely affordable way to have equity in our own e-mail address, and spares us the greater expense of having our on-line identities held hostage by sub-par internet service providers, unsatisfactory franchises, snooping corporations, and the like.

I mostly work within the city, but a few times a year I show property out in the country.

Generally, people perceive the country to be simpler, idyllic, and peaceful, but personal experience does not agree with the public perception.

Things to look out for in the country:

• Rural residents usually keep many pets—especially dogs! Some are friendly puppies, others are bloodthirsty hounds. Rule #1 when you encounter the latter: show no fear and maintain eye contact. Stare them down! Running is pointless. Dogs run faster. If you can’t stare it down, mace or pepper spray could come in handy…
• Squatters. Vacant country homes with no immediate neighbors have a tendency to attract hobos and the like. Just like the dogs, some are harmless, others… not so much.  Don’t just breeze in they way you would with a suburban home. Lord only knows who’s around the corner.  Again, mace or pepper spray may come in handy…
• Ornery neighbors. People who live close together in rural areas tend to watch out for each other. This is a good thing for the residents, but not such a good thing for an unknown real estate agent fumbling around another person’s home. If you see a neighbor out in his yard, announce your intentions and give him a card. Not only is this a good way to create business, it may also save you from being held at gun point while trying to explain why you were snooping around Mrs. Johnson’s house.
• Gnats. Many rural areas do not use sprayer trucks for municipal pest control. Blood-sucking insects are common. Give yourself a good spraying of pest repellent before heading out.

If you have additional tips for showing rural property, please post them in the comments section. If it’s a good one, I’ll incorporate it into the original post (giving due credit of course).

From time to time, I get buyers who have a very limited monthly budget which absolutely cannot be exceeded. For these buyers, providing a solid estimate of what their monthly payment will be is crucial to a successful transaction.

Property taxes can be a real “gotcha” in the estimation process, since taxes on a specific property can vary greatly depending on land usage, appraised value, the owner’s age and/or disability status, and assessed value. Another complicating factor is that the property tax year starts October 1^st.

For example:

You have a client closing on a former rental property to use as his personal residence at the end of February. A rental property without the homestead exemption is assessed at 20% of appraised value for tax purposes, whereas with a personal residence, the buyer can claim the homestead exemption and only pay taxes on 10% of the appraised value. Since the tax year doesn’t start again until October 1^st, your client will be stuck paying double taxes for seven months until his homestead exemption kicks in on October 1^st. Some people just can’t swing double-taxes for that long…

When you do have a client on a really tight budget, be sure to check the current Assessed Value on the tax records to determine if it is either 10% or 20% of fair market value.

You can search property tax records for Mobile County here: http://mobilerevenue.siteonestudio.com/TaxBill/search.asp