THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!

Home Safe, Smart Home Buyer Seminars
Presented by Tom Corbett of Tomacor Incorporated

What: A free, fast paced seminar with (pending) ASHI continuing education credit that is jam packed with information for anyone interested in buying residential, commercial, or industrial properties. Get all of the information you need to negotiate prices and reap financial rewards! 27 year veteran building inspector, Tom Corbett is renowned for his no nonsense, straight forward style and you won’t believe how much you can learn in just one hour! Tom will cover topics such as “Choosing a Team of Advocates” and “Negotiating Strategies”. If you’ve ever thought about purchasing property, this is a seminar you don’t want to miss!

When/Where:
Buying Foreclosed Property Without the Pitfalls
Saturday, October 22, 2011 12:00pm-1:30pm
Chicago Public Library – Logan Square Branch
3030 W. Fullerton Avenue
Chicago, Illinois, 60647

Thursday, November 10, 2011 6:00pm-7:30pm
Chicago Public Library – Roden Branch
6083 N. Northwest Highway
Chicago, Illinois 60631

Become a Home Detective: Ten Distinctions to Avoid When Buying a Property
Thursday, December 1, 2011 6:00pm-7:30pm
Chicago Public Library – Roden Branch
6083 N. Northwest Highway
Chicago, Illinois 60631

Space is Limited! Please email coco@tomacor.com to RSVP today!

Why: The market is down but YOU should be up! Tom Corbett is committed to educating the public about the myriad of issues which can arise when buying, living in, owning, or selling a home. This education, in turn, empowers people to make educated decisions regarding their property.

During this economic crisis the housing market is suffering, and many are pessimistic about buying and selling properties. After 27 years Tom Corbett has learned all that you need to know to get quality property at affordable prices. He would like to share this wealth of information with the public, empowering them to purchase property and, in turn, stimulate the market.

How: Tom Corbett of Tomacor, Inc. will speak at a one-hour seminars on topics relating to buying properties. His goal is to empower the consumer by giving them the education and the tools needed to make informed decisions about purchasing within the real estate market.

Dear Mr. Smith,
I appreciate you taking the time to review my blog and follow up with your comments. My comments and opinions are not based in my real estate sales or brokerage degree, but simply on my 27 years of experience in the field watching how this game is played out. As a managing broker, I understand how your interests are to represent one side or another of a deal, yet they are also best served by “making the deal happen”. It is this dynamic I am witnessing today more than ever. I readily admit I am not familiar with “Cap Rates” or “ROI” Illinois brokerage licensing laws, yet I am deeply steeped in the sales tactics so commonly used in the real estate profession.

Your comments appear to assume that the real estate market is complete but static, simply waiting for banks to loosen their criteria for lending for the market to be active. I could not more completely disagree. There has been a fundamental loss of faith and serious breach of trust in the market which is causing a new paradigm to emerge. Here it is:

1. Real Estate agents often work very hard to “outlast” their buyers. When a committed, qualified buyer comes to the market and I get a chance to meet them, they usually complain of their agent’s failure to listen to what they want, and being pushed into a transaction. A significant percentage of my buyers simply drop out of the market due to real estate buyer’s exhaustion (REBE). The new real estate paradigm will listen to and serve buyer’s needs, not frustrate them.

2. It is common knowledge that real estate attorneys in the Chicago marketplace who serve the industry are referred by real estate agents and they are stuck to a flat fee. Have you heard their complaints? After long conversations with these attorneys, and at least one presentation for the Chicago BAR association Real Property Committee, I have learned that the attorneys are frustrated. They want out of the market and far away from taking instructions given by agents who refer them work. These attorneys feel obligated to help their referring agents and obligated to help their clients. They are left in dual agency. Attorneys will begin to charge hourly rates for their services.

3. The 11,000 or so clients I’ve met are not concerned with whether the house has two or four bedrooms. They want a good location, a good school district and a house free of major structural, electrical, mechanical and plumbing problems. The market is shifting from location, location, location to condition, condition, condition. Buyers deserve this.

4. Home buyers don’t know their rights, and this is changing. All you’ve got to do is look at what’s happened in the real estate market in the last six years to understand that. We recommend that you and all professionals in the field teach buyers their rights. Ninety percent of the condominiums that I’ve inspected are represented either on the buyer or seller side by real estate agents who refuse to provide access to the common areas or roof. These are areas that belong to the homeowners and must be inspected. Tomacor says teach your buyers about how important the common areas are. Will you take that on?

5. Buyers are rethinking their notion of what a “good experienced agent” is. Of course their agent should know the market and the value that an inspector brings. Professional inspectors always include budget figures for repairs. We know this kind of information will be helpful to buyers. After 27 years in the inspection business and 10 years in the construction business, I know, and certainly you do too, that contractors’ proposals are all over the market, and buyers don’t have time to get bids. Repair budgets are available from any home inspector that is interested. Simply look up R.S. Means or Neighborhood Housing for budgets. Tradesmen do not provide accurate budgets or contract figures for homeowners and they shouldn’t. They don’t know what’s behind the walls. That’s why R.S. Means is helpful. Home inspectors are licensed and follow a code of ethics. Our opinions are professional. Buyers will demand budget figures.

6. You mention my desire to stereotype agents. They stereotype themselves. Restoring faith and integrity in real estate includes “raising the bar”. This means going to work for home buyers and sellers to provide the best possible service with the clearest information to help them make a choice, without sending them an inspector, a mortgage broker, or telling them they can’t go on the roof. This cannot be done when we hide behind the notion, as you have, that “numerous others have helped cause the real estate meltdown.” What are you going to do? Responsibility needs to be taken. Buyers want commitment from their agents. They’re looking for a commitment that exceeds the law because they demand it. Buyers are looking for agents who can spot problems that are major and suggest that they look at another property. At Tomacor we are committed to working with buyers who are treated fairly and humanely in the business marketplace, not just another check.

Of course there are good real estate agents out there; of course there are good inspectors. We do respect agents as human beings that work hard. Given what we’ve been through as a country it’s time to raise the bar and hold real estate agents accountable on both the buyer’s side and the seller’s side for their honesty, their ethics and their integrity to provide a high quality, informed, practical service for their clients.

Here’s Mr. Smith’s original comment:

Just like all professions there are good and bad agents as well as inspectors. I only hope that you find a way to respect those agents that are hard-working, honest, knowledgeable and provide a valued service to their clients.

Most people don’t understand that the City of Chicago utilizes a “combined sewer system” to deal with our human waste and the storm water which collects in the streets. This means there’s a 12 inch diameter sewer line outside of your house which is expected to be big enough to carry away your entire block’s toilet waste and the excess rain water that enters the sewer from the curbside catch basins and the downspouts off your roof.

A lot of you have experienced basement flooding in the last month when water came up through the floor drain in your basement. Here’s where it gets gross: that floor drain is connected directly to the 12 inch combined sewer system in the street. When excess rain water backs up the sewer, the only place it has to go is up through your drain, and the human waste it’s been mixing with backs up into your building with it.

Appetizing? I think not.

Especially for those of you who have remodeled your basement into a playroom for your kids. Here’s the key: if your basement floor drain backs up into the carpet, it’s NOT water and should NOT be addressed by being dried out. Take the damaged carpet (and all the fecal matter that’s now in it) and throw it in the alley. At this point if you want a safe place for your kids to play, you need a new surface in the basement. Don’t forget it won’t stay safe for very long, Chicago has had three or more 100 year floods in the last four years. Go figure.

So what should you do? Some people install cleanable ceramic or linoleum tile in their basement. The linoleum tile should be thrown away after flooding because the fecal matter collects below its surface. A ceramic tile, however, can be cleaned and bleached. This is actually a good floor for your basement and a floor that you could place large rubber backed throw rugs on for continued use by your children after the flooding.

Another reason carpet isn’t good for your basement is mold. Carpet is never a good product for a basement floor, furnished or not. Plain and simple, carpet holds water (whereas ceramic tile doesn’t). Any product that holds water evaporates water slowly, which automatically means mold in the basement area. Basements are always colder than the rest of the house, and usually the air in the basement is not warm enough to hold a lot of humidity. If humidity can’t be held in the air, it will nestle in the carpet, insulation and drywall, all perfect places for mold to form.

Replace your basement carpet and save yourself the health risks.

Today I received a complaint about Tomacor’s service. “Oh my god,” I thought—Then, I read further into the complaint. Okay, now I get it. Another unhappy home seller who chooses to cover asbestos piping with tape and then explain to the home inspector that the brown water mark throughout the basement did not represent a flood line but “the remnants of her Irish Wolf hound’s shaking after a bath.”

Although we are sympathetic to every building owner and have rarely seen any community work as hard for its money as real estate agents do, confusing the facts, belittling the information and hiding the evidence are not good ways to sell property. In fact, they are tactics which lead us into this real estate recession in the first place. Frankly, I think it is time to restore the integrity of the marketplace.

“Location, location, location” usurped by “condition, condition, condition.”

The problem in the real estate business is its basic lack of integrity. The problem in the real estate industry is too many people have been sold poor quality overpriced homes. The industry has left hundreds of thousands of people in bankruptcy or foreclosure based upon ignorant and short sided sales practices for quick profits in a short term economy.

Qualified professional home inspectors intent on full disclosure will bring the real estate economy back full circle to the vitality it once enjoyed. Now is the time for home inspectors to work their hardest to represent their buyer’s interests. People are buying homes for their families. They aren’t simply investing. Buyers everywhere are at risk for the possibility of a further declining market especially if significant repairs are missed during the inspection. Every home needs repairs and if those repairs are misdiagnosed or not seen, the result will be to encourage the downward economic spiral which we are already in. Homebuyers deserve a good deal.

If you are in the market to buy a home or income property, spend the money to get a professional property inspector who quotes budgets for repairs. Hire someone your real estate agent doesn’t know or is upset about. Check his/her credentials thoroughly. All Illinois home inspections are visual in nature. Better inspectors are more experienced, the best inspectors include budget figures for repairs. Make sure you can afford to repair the property before purchasing it. The property’s condition can be more important than its location. At Tomacor, we have 27+ years of experience and include pricing for all of the repairs needed.

Ten minutes later, we were in the room, the walls were covered with fresh drywall and paint. With the agent out of the room, and not able to see the small amount of damage I inflicted on the new wood trim, I stuck my screwdriver inside the door jam and pulled the trim away from it. With the assistance of my 100 watt flashlight, I found thousands of little white insects crawling over each other. The seller had earlier failed to sell the “termite house” and was now covering up the problems that were disclosed. The buyer and I left the house. The deal was dead; again. Another lucky buyer bought it.

Carpenter ants and termites do tremendous damage to buildings in the United States yearly. Millions of dollars are spent trying to eradicate their destructive behavior while we attempt to kill the colony. In almost all cases, the treatment is unsuccessful over a five to ten year period. This is because the insects are so pervasive and adapt well to changing environmental conditions and toxic chemicals; They know how to survive.

Termites are moisture dependent so they create their own habitat with mud roofs. If you enter a building with wood framing, you can check for termites by looking for mud tunnels on the wooden structural walls or on the surface of the wood. These mud tunnels look like half round cigarette ashes and they usually begin at the ground level and work their way up over the building’s foundation and wood assembly. When the termites inside the tunnels find an area that they want to eat, they go into the lumber and devour the soft summer wood grain.

If you have seen lots of insects flying around the inside or outside a building within the past weeks, you probably have a termite infestation. If you treat it right away, you can remove the insects and the colony before they do major damage to your building.

When working with the selling or buying agent “I don’t know” doesn’t mean I don’t know. This is particularly true after a contract is signed and the clock is ticking and every minute reduces the buyer’s strength in the deal. “I don’t know” usually means “You better go find this yourself and take a lot of time to do it”. It is the agents job to serve you the buyer, not become totally ignorant and run out of town on vacation the minute you sign the contract. Some people do not understand what service means. Its your money! Demand it!

• If your inspector is a butt kicker, the agents envision the hours of negotiation and lost money from their own commission to hold the deal together. They simply don’t want to do the work. Some agents become impossible to reach for a showing or unavailable for any possible inspection time other than after the sun goes down or before the sun comes up. Some agents pull the inspector aside and tell them there is no roof access. This practice leaves the naive inspector without access to the roof, which usually has some leaks, which then become his liability or obligation. With condominium purchases, inspectors are almost never granted access to roof and other common areas without a fight. The Illinois home inspector licensing law states that we must find all significant deficiencies, not just those in the condominium. Good inspectors will fight for you, and they will win!

• It is routine for some agents to challenge the inspectors opinion during the inspection or to down play the significant deficiencies disclosed in front of the inspector while they routinely expect the inspector to go climb in a hole and withdraw their disclosure. National statistics illustrate that some place between 60 and 80 of all home inspections come out of the roll-a-dex or contact sheets prepared by the broker, owners, or agents in each real estate office. After reviewing more than 100 competitor’s inspection reports while Chair of the Ethical Practices Committee of a national home inspection trade association, I realized that many of my remodeling/ contractor friends suddenly became deaf, dumb, and blind when asked for a simple budget to repair or replace a furnace or an air conditioner that was broken. Remember the inspector gets his work from the agent and glib experienced inspectors loose all of their real estate agent referrals when they become too verbal.

• Confused and naive buyers are the bread and butter of some unscrupulous agents. During one home inspection, I met with a polite single mom buying a house in Chicago. I could see the buyer becoming confused and disoriented as the four (yes four) real estate agents were sent over to the inspection to keep her focused on them and not the disclosure. I had to literally, take her hand, then her arm, and pull her away from the group of hounds who were committed to keep her confused. The Post and Beam foundation with major termite infestation did not kill the deal, but probably should have.

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Agents know that most buyers are naïve and willing to accept the notion that it takes a week or more to get your contract to the seller. What’s really going on is that the perceived desirability of a house with a contract on it is significantly higher than one with no activity and the agent can play the trump card claiming that you can’t negotiate latent defects because there is another contract pending on the premises. In fact its not pending at all, it’s in their pocket. In this way, a higher purchase price and commission can be squeezed out of the deal by the agent who wishes to manipulate the process.

A separate but equally likely scenario is that your broker may be holding your contract while hustling all the actual or potential buyers in his office so that he can get both the buyers and sellers commission. After all, why should he split the commission with anyone else if he can get the full seven percent?

Sellers must be clear with their brokers that you want to be informed of all offers or you may be leaving your broker to make decisions that you should be making. The obligation to disclose all offers should be explicitly stated in the real estate contract.

After the disastrous failure of the real estate market and the anemic attempts by some to convince the populous that prices are again rising and stabilizing, Tomacor is committed to pointing out the real estate practices that MUST change in order for the real estate community to adequately, efficiently, and ethically serve consumers. Our recommendations are designed to help foster solid business practices while providing clear ethical practices for real estate agents and others.

*Avoid an Open House like the plague!

25 plus years in the business and we have attended dozens of open houses. They are often lavish and full of inebriated real estate agents, mortgage hustlers, and office help from local real estate offices. Tomacor used to get a lot of its business from these open houses as we spent time “smoozing” the real estate agents who had too much to drink. Who pays for this? You do, and in today’s market, its not worth it!

Often times your real estate agent won’t tell you, but the open house is nothing more than a party for them. If your agent knows how to hustle, work the internet, and perform tirelessly for you, they’ll get buyers to come through your home. Open houses are promoted as a great way of finding a buyer but even the National Association of Realtors© found that the success rate of these open houses is someplace below 5%. So save the money that you’d spend on red wine and cold cuts and invest in internet advertising.

*Please Note: This Blog was inspired by an article in Smart Money

• When you go out in the cold weather you wear a scarf, jacket, boots, and maybe thermal underwear and wool socks. Your home would appreciate the same concern for its health and well being. It’s never too late to insulate the pipes or the attic in order to keep the home warm and the pipes from freezing. The good news is that the President of the United States is willing to help pay for the extra layers of clothing that your house wants. Go For It!
• Over working and becoming stressed out is bad for the body and its an experience that many people are familiar with during the holiday season and winter months. Over extending your electrical circuits with portable space heaters that can overheat the wiring, stresses out your building and can lead to fire. I know Chicagoans have the best firemen in the world, but why go there? Avoid the use of multiple extension cords and don’t place them under carpets where they will generate more heat or possibly spark. If you have to use electric space heaters, avoid long extension cords and plug them into outlets that don’t get hot or cause the lights to dim when the space heater is turned on.
• Keep doors and windows locked and tightly closed and consider rope caulk along the inside of the windows and other drafty areas. It is too cold for regular caulk. Rope caulk is purchased in a big wheel and looks a little like clay. This can be used to effectively stop the drafts.
• Never use your oven to heat the home! My first case as an expert witness involved a family that was heating their home with the oven to full tilt with all of the burners on and a pot of water on the stove to maintain the humidity. When the six year old daughter stepped on the open oven door to see what was going on with the water, the pot and its boiling contents fell on her and created burns that she will have to deal with for the rest of her life. The City of Chicago remains interested and committed to helping tenets make their landlords turn on the heat. Simply call 311 for the service and tell them what’s going on. Finally, the produced Carbon Monoxide from the stove could be enough to kill a family.