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Can anyone recommend a really good buyer’s agent for a first time homebuyer? I have a mortgage representative and a pre-approval. I am looking in the Morris/Sussex area, within a price range of $100,000-150,000. I know that this is low, but there are still listings in this price range in the area I am looking. I just need to find an agent that can show me some properties, work with me, and help me negotiate. I understand that home prices may not be as low as they were a few months ago, but I still need to find a serious, no nonsense agent who won't waste my time, before prices and the interest rate continue to rise. Thanks so much!
We have been with him for a few months now and we find him to be a very upfront knowledgeable agent w/ 20+ years in the business. He also does home appraisals. I am sure there are many good realtors but out of the ones we have delt with so far he is the best. Not a salesman type or pushy. Good luck finding your 1st home....
CENTURY 21 Joe Tekula Realtors
Mark Paolella
201 Route 10 East, Suite 101
Succasunna, NJ 07876
We have been with him for a few months now and we find him to be a very upfront knowledgeable agent w/ 20+ years in the business. He also does home appraisals. I am sure there are many good realtors but out of the ones we have delt with so far he is the best. Not a salesman type or pushy. Good luck finding your 1st home....
CENTURY 21 Joe Tekula Realtors
Mark Paolella
201 Route 10 East, Suite 101
Succasunna, NJ 07876
I understand that home prices may not be as low as they were a few months ago, but I still need to find a serious, no nonsense agent who won't waste my time, before prices and the interest rate continue to rise. Thanks so much!
Out of curiosity, where did you get the idea that prices are rising? That seems to contradict the available evidence for these areas. There's the spring season sales bounce, but prices continue to decline...
Hummm.....I have been looking in Morris county for over a year and all I see are price declines....I literally look on the website every week just to see what has dropped into my price range. Warren county forget it....huge price declines and fast ones to. The only place I look that I see lesser and slower price declines is Essex county. I am pretty sure there will be more before the summer ends. Interesting to see that the new HGTV show on Sunday nights is Real Estate Intervention....where they take a home seller with an overpriced unrealistic home on the market and give them a dose of reality...what their house is really worth and what it should be listed for. It's unbelievable how far up in the clouds these sellers heads are floating. Not trying to be mean...just stating honestly what I am experiencing.
Originally Posted by LCMT Mark Paolella Century 21
We have been with him for a few months now and we find him to be a very upfront knowledgeable agent w/ 20+ years in the business. He also does home appraisals. I am sure there are many good realtors but out of the ones we have delt with so far he is the best. Not a salesman type or pushy. Good luck finding your 1st home....
CENTURY 21 Joe Tekula Realtors
Mark Paolella
201 Route 10 East, Suite 101
Succasunna, NJ 07876
JG: I don't cite Zillow at all. It's been so wrong in specific cases too often for me to trust whatever algorithm they use to price houses. Watching the house my parents sold in 1996 for 140k go up to 700k - a year after a sale for 350k - doesn't inspire confidence. I also wonder what makes you think there's two different worlds - Case-Schiller reports on real sale prices, which of course take place in the real world, yet you seem to think that there is some other, different real world out there. Odd.
In any case, trolling me doesn't actually answer the question I posed to the OP, which is what gave them the impression that prices had gone up over the past few months and that they would continue to rise along with interest rates rising (an odd prediction barring hyperinflation).
edit: I realize I should offer something other than "Zillow is wrong" as my rebuttal to JG. Simply put, I have a hard time trusting most "official" statistical aggregations and prefer to look at all of them along with whatever I can cobble together myself from the raw data. Here are the graphs you get going YOY for Sussex and Morris county, based on their public deed records available online:
Notes:
- Number of sales is number of sales * 10 so that it will show up on the graph.
- Sussex doesn't have many records prior to 2002 - only ~80 sales in 2002 and then far less for a few years prior. Morris has strong records starting in 1993, but almost none prior.
- Morris had a few years (2006,2007) with obvious outliers or errors (sales at ~$200 million) which lead to very high average sales for those years (over $1 million) which skewed the graph. I normalized those years to the same averages as the years prior and after. Median sales I left untouched.
- Oops! I mislabeled the Morris Graph. Yellow should be "median" and pink should be "average". Apologies!
I probably should do the work to tease out the monthly numbers, but the yearly numbers are pretty clear.
Last edited by pfwnj; 06-15-2009 at 04:24 PM..
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