With listings lingering in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey — a hotbed of deals earlier in the pandemic — real estate agents Yvette Miranda-Lee and Lamont Byrd are trying new strategies to unlock sales. They’ve convinced a couple sellers to act as a bank for their buyers, providing cheap, short-term financing to make the homes affordable.
“We’re helping sellers come to terms that they have lost out,” Miranda-Lee said. “They came to the party a little bit late.”
Knocking on Doors
Six months ago, the agents were flooded with business. Now they’re on a door-knocking campaign, searching for the most motivated of sellers: those on the cusp of losing their properties to foreclosure.
It was the dinner hour in Teaneck, a middle-class commuter town close to Manhattan — a good time to catch people at home, Miranda-Lee said as she sat in the passenger seat of a white Kia SUV. She and Byrd were driving around, working down a list of eight homes earmarked for foreclosure sale.
They approached one with a light on the front porch. A middle-aged woman opened the door just a crack.
“We found someone who bought my home,” the woman told them. “The auction thing isn’t happening because otherwise, I’d be sitting on a bunch of boxes.”
Back at the car, Byrd said that while they didn’t get the sale, they’re not going home empty-handed. The woman had asked for their cards, saying she needed to find a cheaper place quickly.
“We have business partners that are in upstate New York that we can connect her with,” Byrd said. “We’ll still get some sort of a referral fee, but we can at least help this woman relocate.”
In Las Vegas, the market has softened so much that Trish Williams, a Realtor with Keller Williams, has had to turn down some sellers who weren’t realistic about the price they could get. She has upfront marketing costs for every listing and can’t afford to have them just sit.
“The last couple of price cuts haven’t moved the bar at all,” Williams said. “We had an open house where one person showed up — just a nosy neighbor looking around.”
Dustin Holindrake, a Realtor with My Home Group, said half the agents renting space in his building in Chandler, Arizona, have left because they can no longer afford it.
Most Realtors now have side hustles to get by, he said. One is a schoolteacher, another is pedaling security systems — jobs that give them some flexibility to also show houses. Holindrake, who hasn’t sold a house in a few months, has started selling solar installations and plans to get his insurance license.
“I had a big fat savings account at the beginning of year but now I’m getting to the point of getting nervous,” he said. “The income has stopped coming in.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.