You can search the entire Sequim MLS of over 1,500 listed homes for sale at:  Search Sequim MLS.  You can find Sequim homes for sale on this site, and get your questions answered by emailing retired real estate attorney and now real estate broker, Chuck Marunde, at chuckmarunde@gmail.com.

Offering the highest level of professional experience, putting the negotiating power in your corner, Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC is at your service.

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If you are watching Sequim real estate or Port Angeles real estate, and you want to be kept up to date on real estate prices, the market, homes for sale, lots for sale, water view property, ranches, attorney advice, tax savings, foreclosures, short sales, as well as recreational opportunities in the area, you can subscribe to my RSS feeds.

Simply click on the subscription feed at the end of any post, or you can use the RSS feed at the top or bottom of the right hand column.  When you hit the subscribe button, you will be taken through an online subscription system that will automtically notify you of updated articles or posts.

And I give you one more great option.  You can receive post updates from this blog automatically via my email newsletter, which I send out every Wednesday evening.  Simply hit the newsletter subscribe button in the right column, or go directly to:  Real Estate Email Newsletter.

Since this is the most active (content-rich) and easy-to-read real estate blog in the entire county, this is a great way to keep abrest of the Sequim and Port Angeles real estate market.  Would you like something posted here?  Just email me, and if I can do it, I certainly will.

Chuck E. Marunde, J.D.
Retired Real Estate Attorney, Owner/Founder/Realtor of Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC, Author/Speaker

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It is instructive to see what Sequim home sales have done in this first half of 2008 compared to the past seven years.  Here is the comparison.  [Click on graphic to enlarge.]

I have weighted the data in a small way to make it more accurate by eliminating homes sold under $100,000 and over $800,000.

Courtesy of Chuck Marunde, J.D. and Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC.

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Selling your own home in Sequim or in Port Angeles requires marketing knowledge, and the best marketers have been through the school of hard knocks, so they’ve learned some valuable lessons in selling a home.  It takes courage to sell your home, especially in these challenging times, and there is risk that you will fail.  Marketing is risky, because there are things that work well, things that don’t work at all, and some things that work a little.  A FSBO might be willing to take on the risk to save a commission.  This series is intended to provide guidance to help you avoid the major traps for the unwary.  Don’t be like the cat in this photograph, which is taking incredible risk when it doesn’t have to.  Risk should only be taken when it is balanced with the reward, and one should never take unnecessary risk.

In this article, Part 2 of our series on How to Advertise a Home for Sale, we talk about:

Traditional Advertising - What Works and What Doesn’t Work.

Traditional newspaper advertising as a means to sell real estate has been dramatically losing its effectiveness over the past decade.  This is common knowledge among top producing salesman in busy metropolitan areas, and many successful Realtors have testified that they have substantially reduced or even stopped using the newspapers to sell their listings. What’s interesting to me is that newspaper advertising is not only one of the least effective ways to sell real estate today, it is also one of the most expensive venues to advertise in.

Just last week I ran five large ads with photographs of five of my listings, and five “word only” ads in the classifieds.  With ten ads running on the number one day of the week, Sunday, how many phone calls or how many emails did I get?  After over $500 in advertising costs, I received . . . no calls at all.  Zero.  None.  There are other variables to consider here, too, but my point is that with good photos of pretty good properties, and with good scripts, all this print advertising produced nada.  So much for the power and effectiveness of newspaper advertising.

Why did I run these ads?  As an experiment, to broadcast my company name to the public and to other Realtors.  I also did it to encourage my clients by showing that amidst all of the other things I am doing on the Internet, I also do some traditional advertising.

If such advertising is ineffective today, why do so many brokers do it?  There are two reasons in my opinion.  First, agents do it to show their clients they are doing something.  This is big, and if the agents don’t have a lot going on in the marketing department, what else is there?  Run an ad in the newspaper.  Second, it is also probable that many agents do not know that putting their listings in the newspaper is a feeble and ineffective way to sell real estate.

Real estate magazines are also fairly ineffective.  Sorry, but it’s true.  Brokers run half page or full page ads, and often get no calls at all from those ads, and this kind of advertising is very expensive.

Consider an area like Sequim or Port Angeles, where such a large percentage of our buyers come from outside our area.  These folks are not even reading our Sunday newspaper.  They’re not subscribing to the local real estate sales magazines, and those magazines are not on the shelf at their local Safeway in Santa Barbara.

All of this does not mean you should do no print media advertising.  It just means to chose carefully, and spend your money where it will get the biggest bang for the buck.  A simple classified is good, and if you pick one day per week, pick Sunday.  If you’re going to run the ad two days each week, pick Wednesday and Sunday.  These are the two most effective days for advertising real estate in local papers.  Don’t waste money running your ad six days a week.  Waste of money.

Don’t waste money in expensive real estate magazines or niche magazines.  Those ads won’t pull buyers for you, but they will drain your bank account.  If you want to, you can run a fairly cheap ad in a little regional classified, such as the Little Nickel or the Nickel Nick.

Where should your advertise?  On the Internet.  Next time:  Advertising Real Estate For Sale on the Internet.

Courtesy of Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC.

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How do you advertise a Sequim or Port Angeles Home for sale in this slow market?  That is the question.  Get the answer wrong, and two bad things can happen to you:

1.  You could sit on a house for sale for a year and still not sell it.  That is a major non-event that disrupts lives and plans.

2.  Even worse, you could actually sell your home and lose a lot of money.  Money is hard enough to earn without burning it up for lack of knowledge.

So how do you develop a powerful and effective marketing plan that will actually sell your home in this market?  This assignment is far too big to tackle in one article, so this is the first in a short series that will answer the question with solid principles that work.

Most home owners who decide to sell their home will either list it with a real estate agent or become a FSBO (pronounced “fizbo”).  The term almost sounds derogatory, but no offense is intended by the term FSBO.  It is the common nickname given to a for-sale-by-owner and has been for at least three decades.  The point is simply that either your Realtor has to be an expert in marketing to sell your home, or if you are a FSBO, you must be the expert in marketing.

In my 30 years in real estate, first as a Realtor and Associate Broker in Alaska in the mid ’70’s, then as a real estate attorney for 20 years, and now again as a Broker, I’ve seen  many Realtor’s try to sell real estate who did not understand marketing.  Remember the saying, “He knows just enough to be dangerous.”  That cliche definitely applies to those who would market real estate today.  I think most home owners understand that just because a person gets their real estate license, that does not mean they have mastered  real estate.

First, does your Realtor, or do you as a FSBO, have a marketing plan?  When it comes to marketing and advertising your home, shooting from the hip is like deciding to climb Mount Everest with no plan and without ever having trained to climb in extreme conditions.  The analogy is not perfect, I know, but the point is valid.  Selling your home is not risking your life, but it is risking all that money represented by your equity.  That seems to me to be a very substantial risk.

Second, have you laid out the advertising options, and do you know what advertising methods are effective and which ones are ineffective?  I’m constantly surprised at how many brokers are still using old advertising techniques that have long since lost their effectiveness.  Did you know that billboards were popular in the 50’s and 60’s?  This is 2008, and some are still using billboards.  More about billboards in a later edition.

It is critical to know how print media ranks today in selling real estate.  What works and doesn’t work?  Newpaper classifieds?  Newspaper listing photos in the Sunday issue?  Newpaper inserts?  Flyers?  Mass mailings?  Niche magazines, like travel and visitor guides?  Chamber of Commerce monthly newsletter inserts?  Mailings to other Realtors?  “Just Listed” postal cards?  Real estate magazines, such as Homes & Land, The Real Estate Book, or even the Little Nickel?  What about FSBO websites?  What about the local MLS?  How effective is that, and what role does it play in coordination with the other tactics used?

Third, how important is the Internet?  There are many options here, and much that 95% of Realtors do NOT know.  I would include FSBO’s in that category, too.  The world is changing, and the Internet has changed the way business is done.  There’s no doubt about that.  The National Association of Realtors’ extensive national survey concluded that over 80% of all home buyers start their search on the Internet.  There is much more to discuss on this subject.

Fourth, do you know the role that advertising plays with respect to pricing and negotiating your best price?  In real estate sales, everything you do in the beginning and all that happens until closing is related.  Without a master plan and the knowledge and experience to put it all together with the advertising plan, you have an incomplete and perhaps a disjointed effort.  Again, that could cost you dearly in the end.

Fifth, what substantive and procedural issues must be addressed in your advertising plan?  For example, once having decided where and when to advertise, what scripts will you use?  Words really matter, and how you describe your home is everything, almost.  What about photographs?  My analysis of photos in the MLS tell me that 80% of all MLS listings have terrible photographs and not enough photographs.  Everyone is visual when it comes to buying a home.  Getting outstanding photos and knowing how to use them is vital to your success.  We’ll also discuss videos and much more.

In this series, you can comment or ask questions.  By all means, do that.  It would be my pleasure to help answer or clarify what I write about.

Next in this series:  Traditional Advertising - What Works and Doesn’t Work

Courtesy of Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC

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The Sequim real estate market and the Port Angeles real estate market are hurting badly.  The real estate market and the American economy have taken some pretty good hits for quite a while now, but these things are cyclical and happen all the time in our history.  The big news here is that this slowdown has taken on new meaning as time drags on without recovery.  Having a headache for a few hours or even a couple of days is a pain, but when the headache doesn’t go away for months, it brings entirely new health implications that are deep and wide.

That’s what time without recovery is doing to us now for homes and land sales in Sequim and Port Angeles.  There’s no doubt that sales and inventory outside our little peninsula effects our market and our home sellers right here.

From a national perspective, here is look at existing homes sales and inventory:

[Click on image to enlarge]

“The national median existing-home price fell to $208,600 in May, down 6.3 percent from a year ago when the median was $222,700. Home prices have fallen most in the West, down 16.0 percent over the last year, followed by a 4.3 percent decline in the Northeast. . . . An astonishing one-third of all existing homes sold last month were reportedly either foreclosure sales or short-sales and this figure likely understates the actual percentage of distressed home sales as some of these properties do not involve realtors and hence, are not included in the monthly data from the realtors’ trade group.”  [Quotes and charts by Tim Iacono, View his full article here.]

“On a year-over-year basis, sales are currently down a whopping 40.3 percent and, from the peak in July of 2005, sales volume has declined 64 percent. . . . The most important piece of information in this report is that sales continue to decline faster than inventory, resulting in an uptick in the “months of supply” statistic, from 10.7 in April to 10.9 months in May. Until there is a significant reduction in inventory relative to sales volume, look for prices to continue to fall.”

While the Sequim and Port Angeles’ real estate markets have fared better than most, the cumulative effects of the declining real estate markets all around us are taking a heavy toll on home sellers here.  It is more critical than ever that a home seller have a very effective marketing plan in order to connect with the smaller number of qualified buyers out there, and that requires much more than guess work or inexperience on the part of a Realtor.  Now is not the time for trial and error in selling a home. For FSBO’s in this market, they are up against greater challenges than FSBO’s have ever faced, including increased inventory, expensive advertising techniques that are not producing results, the requirement that technology and the Internet play a major role in connecting with potential buyers, and a level of competition never seen before from existing FSBO’s and existing listed homes with Realtors.  The MLS and the for-sale-by-owner websites are a dime a dozen, and they are not the panacea many hoped they would be.

I strongly recommend careful planning when selling a home in this market, and I strongly urge home sellers to retain the services of only the most experienced Realtor.  Be careful.  It’s dangerous out there.

Courtesy Chuck Marunde, J.D. and Sequim & Port Angeles Homes, LLC

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The Bounty of the 18th Century arrived in Port Angeles.  We were fortunate to have visitors from sea, replicas of 300 year old ships.

Click on the photo for a beautiful enlargement.

In 1787, the Deptford Naval Yard in England was commissioned to re-fit the Bethia, a collier built in 1784 (in Hull), for a voyage to Tahiti.  Tahiti was the source for the breadfruit plant, which was to be used as a cheap source of food for the workers on the sugar cane and indigo plantations in the West Indies.

The Bounty’s voyage was to last 18 months.  Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, enlisted David Nelson, who was the botanist and gardener at Kew, and William Bligh to oversee her refitting as a floating garden.  This set the stage for the Mutiny on the Bounty.

The Bounty was built in 1960 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, from the keel up by the shipwrights of Smith & Rhuland Shipyard, following the original plans in the British Naval maritime Museum.  Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer studios commissioned the ship to be built at a cost of $750,000 to star in the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlin Brando (Fletcher Christian) and Trevor Howard (Captain Bligh).  Work began in February of 1960 and on august 27 of that year the ship set sail to begin primary filming in Tahiti.

The Bounty displaces 412 tons, includes 400,000 board feet of lumber (American Oak from New Jersey for the frames, Nova Scotia Black Spruce for the hull, and British Columbia Fir for the masts, yards and decks), 112 tons of screw bolts, 14 tons of bar iron, 2 1/2 tons of spikes, 1200 pounds of putty, 10 miles of line for rigging, 192 blocks for mechanical advantage, and over 10,000 square feet of hand-sewn canvas for the sails.  Bounty is 120 feet on deck, 180 feet overall, 114 feet off the water.  She has a 30-foot beam, a 13 foot draft, and 13 feet of freeboard.

I’m no pirate, but as a photographer, this was a great tour.

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The Sequim Real Estate Blog and Port Angeles Real Estate Blog take a new step today with a major upgrade to our blogging platform, and for one purpose:  so you can find us easier and navigate quickly to precisely what you are looking for.

Chuck Marunde, J.D. is please to announce as Broker/Owner of Sequim and Port Angeles Real estate, LLC, that the company continues to be on the cutting edge of providing the best Internet services to clients and the public.

No one has the massive Internet presence that we have built.  We reach more people, potential buyers, in California, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, Montana, the Seattle area, and all the way to Florida and Massachusetts than any other broker in all of Clallam County.  Period.  This is why buyers find us, and it is also why sellers want to work with us to list their properties for sale. Today’s market is all about connecting with buyers.  That’s what we do.

Chuck can be reached by email at chuckmarunde.com or at his cell phone, (360) 775-5424.  We love what we do, and so do our clients.

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Sequim lots sold for the first 5 months of 2007 compared to 2008 will tell us something about out-of-state buyers and the comparative pace of new home construction. Here’s what the first five months of 2007 looked like for lots sold in the Sequim area.

And here’s what the first 5 months of 2008 look like in Sequim lot sales.

When you compare DOM, the number of days the lots were on the market until they sold, and the average listing and selling prices, there isn’t much of a difference this year, except in the number of total lots sold, 49 this year verses 68 the first 5 months of last year. Interesting.

Courtesy Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC

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Finding a Sequim home for sale in the price range of $200,000 to $250,000 is very difficult. It’s been hard to find what most clients are looking for in that price range. But here is a complete list of the 31 Sequim homes for sale in this price range.

Sequim homes for sale $200,000 to $250,000:
Click Here to View Listings

There are 66 Sequim homes for sale in the price range of $250,000 to $300,000, and here is the list:
Click Here to View Listings

You can also search the Entire Sequim MLS here.

Courtesy Chuck Marunde, J.D. and Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC.

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Buying or selling Sequim real estate or Port Angeles real estate? How you negotiate can mean $10,000 more or less in your pocket when the dust settles. Imagine two card players. One has spent a lifetime learning how to play cards, has become an expert on mathematics and statistical calculations, on human behavior and psychology, and has studied and practiced for decades. The other is a school teacher, a good and honest person, who has taught 3rd grade for 22 years, but has never played cards, and has had no interest in the technical skills required to be a good card player.

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Are Sequim home builders and Port Angeles home builders all the same? What about the low ball prices listed in advertisements? Can a builder really build a home at the same prices that were being quoted a decade ago?

1. Writing articles about how to find and interview a builder;
2. What questions to ask a builder;
3. How to compare apples with apples when interviewing more than one builder; and
4. How to research a builder today with powerful Internet tools.

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The Port of Port Angeles with ships under the setting sun. Photo by Chuck Marunde taken 6/7/08.

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Bristol Marunde of Sequim dominated his opponent, Will Courchaine, at the Emerald Queen Casino June 7, 2008 in another MMA (mixed martial arts) battle. The fight ended at the close of the first round (4:51) when Bristol submitted his opponent with a Kimura arm lock.

Bristol controlled the fight, and when Courchaine tried to kick, Bristol took him down and dominated him with strikes to the head and stomach in a north-south position. The fight ended quickly when Bristol locked his opponent’s arm in a painful Kimura.

For more photos of Bristol’s fight, go to Northwest FightScene.

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Sequim real estate prices are reasonable but not as low as some areas of the Midwest United States. I often receive email requests or telephone requests for a stick built home with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, and a garage under $125,000. The average price of homes sold in Sequim in the first five months of this year was $324,450.

I’ve talked with many builders in the area, and they all express the same sentiment. They cannot build a home and sell it for less than $279,000, and with a few upgrades most people want in their homes, that boosts the price of a new home to above $300,000. That’s pretty much rock bottom pricing.

Most new homes, including the price of the land, site preparation, and home construction are $350,000 to $450,000. A significant number of retirees to the area are spending a total of $550,000 to $750,000 on land and construction. Those are not even luxury homes. Luxury homes are much higher.

You can find an older stick built home for less, but you can’t replace it today at that price. Homes that are inhabitable and listed under $225,000 are gone. In a heartbeat.

Here is some real data in the form of listings that you can view in the Sequim market for homes priced under $200,000. In fact, here is a complete list as of this date of all homes listed for sale in Sequim for $200,000 and under. There are only seven, and you can click on this link and view these listings. There maybe one in here that is ideal for you, and if there is, you can email me or call me. I’d be glad to either get you more information or show you this house at your convenience.

These listings are best viewed in Internet Explorer, so if you are using Firefox, click on the link below but then switch to Internet Explorer if all your images are not showing correctly.

Click Here to View Listings

Courtesy Chuck Marunde and Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC

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The Sequim MLS and Port Angeles MLS consists of the Olympic Listing Service (OLS) and for some the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS). All local brokers and agents are members of the OLS, but not all are members of the NWMLS.

I’ve been meditating on this issue in light of the great conflict that stirs quietly behind the scenes among brokers. Mediation is a good thing. It reduces stress and sometimes gives us answers that seem to drop down out of the heavens.

While I was meditating on the relative merits of these two competing listing services, I had a revelation, and suddenly something hit me on the head pretty good. I thought God’s messenger had miraculously tapped me with wisdom. When I got up, I realized it was just the book on my computer monitor that fell. Fortunately, my head cushioned its fall. Unfortunately, my revelation probably found its roots in terra firma rather than the heavens.

By now, you’re probably thinking, “So, what is the revelation?” Perhaps it’s more of a reflection, rather than a revelation. Okay, here it is. Since us local agents are all members of the OLS but not all members of the NWMLS, that makes the NWMLS pretty much useless. Let me explain.

When an agent does a search of the listing database of all homes and land for sale in Sequim and Port Angeles, he needs a complete database. If the database is incomplete, he cannot expect to pull together a decent set of comps to determine price or make accurate comparisons. Since not all local brokers are members of the NWMLS, that database is incomplete, and any data used to arrive at price comparisons will also be less than complete.

Some brokers or agents like to make the argument that having a listing in both systems gets exposure to Seattle side agents and buyers, but no agent I know in Sequim or Port Angeles has been able to tell me that they have sold a listed property that way. Local agents use the OLS, not the NWMLS to search for local properties and to email clients reports.

I have used both listing services, and there’s no question at all which is better–it is the NWMLS. The NWMLS has much better technology, and it has much better content with the statewide forms. Unfortunately, because many brokers refuse to be part of the NWMLS but all are members of the OLS, that means only the OLS is a complete database. Why don’t all agents and brokers simply agree to be part of the NWMLS? I have no idea.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll meditate some more on this subject, but this time in the middle of the room far from my computer monitor and the book shelf. Perhaps the MLS is not the only way to promote a property on the Internet. Perhaps I know the deep secrets of Internet marketing that could sell your property for the highest price within a reasonably short period of time. May I suggest you meditate on that?

Courtesy Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC

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Sequim and Port Angeles mortgage default online help is now available, and homeowners who are struggling to make loan payments can work directly with their lending institution, and this new system has the capacity to get very quick responses through this well connected database network.

Homeowners who use the system are able to get responses from the banks in as little as one week. That’s practically unheard of. This is cutting edge technology, and it’s a business model desperately needed now. I believe this could be an answer for thousands of people across the country. I have been authorized by the owners to make this exclusive news announcement, and I am the first to announce this new system for homeowners in Washington state. I urge you to take advantage of this help, if you need help with your current mortgage.

We are in challenging times, and a loss of job or reduction in hours can be the cause of a default, but there are many other legitimate reasons a person might find themselves in trouble. Divorce, death of a spouse, injury, or other circumstances can cause a person to get behind on their mortgage payments.

As a retired real estate attorney and now as a Broker/Owner/Realtor, I’ve spent time interviewing the founders and owners of this company, and I am greatly impressed with what they’ve put together. I highly recommend this site if you need to communicate with your lender to seek a modification of your loan, a forbearance, or a refinance.

If you are in foreclosure on a local level in Sequim or Port Angeles, be proactive to find solutions. Don’t wait until the 11th hour of the Trustee’s sale when it may be too late. Having been a real estate attorney, I understand the process inside and out and what can be done. I also have a site where buyers can look at listed foreclosure properties: SequimForeclosures.com or PortAngelesForeclosures.com.

To modify your loan or to communicate with your lender for other requests, go to this site: Resolving Your Loan Default Now. You’ll be glad you did. Email me and let me know how they were able to help you.

Courtesy Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC

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