Whiteboard Topics: How Can a Lake-Focused Real Estate Agent Protect a Buyer?

Having a lake-focused real estate as a buyer will make all the difference. Lake Homes Realty’s CEO, Glenn Phillips, shares variables about lake home buying that make a lake expert crucial.

  1. Water is Not All Equal: Where you want to be on the water can have a considerable effect on lake activity, home price, etc.
  2. Leased Lots: This transaction type is extremely common on the lake, and is nothing to fear. The length of your lease can be up to 100 years and is transferable when you’re ready to move.
  3. Financing is Different: The average lender may not be familiar with lake-specific transactions like leased lots. A lake-focused agent can connect you with a lake-focused lender to help prevent confusion.
  4. Unexpected Regulations: Don’t find out about lake restrictions after you’ve bought your home. A lake expert can help you navigate your lake’s regulations during your home search.
  5. Lake-Induced Price Variables: Two identical homes on a lake can have vastly different price tags depending on their relation to the lake. 
  6. Different Types of Sellers: Traditional sellers are bound to a timeframe when trying to move. Lake home sellers don’t have the same haste, as this is a discretionary purchase. 

Don’t settle for a real estate agent with minimal knowledge of the lake, when you can find a lake expert at LakeHomes.com!

Lay Lake Agent Named Best Real Estate Agent 2019

Lake Homes Realty agent Stephanie Millard has been named this year’s Best Real Estate Agent in Hoover’s Magazine’s 2019 list of bests.

“I’m honored to have been selected by the community as Hoover’s Best Realtor,” Millard said. “I’m only here because I have the BEST clients, colleagues and support staff!”

Millard also attributes her recent “best” designation to her “client-first” philosophy.

“I’m not just selling homes or helping people buy pieces of property,” she explained. “I’m selling a lifestyle and helping clients invest in their futures. My client-first philosophy not only keeps me accessible and responsive to my buyers and sellers, but also allows me to build relationships with them that last long after closing.”

It’s these relationships and her clients’ happiness, Millard says, that gives her her deepest sense of satisfaction as a real estate agent.

This is the first year Millard has received a Hoover’s “Best” award; however, it is not the first recognition she has received for her work in the industry.

In 2018, Millard was named a Lake Homes Realty premier agent and Aqua Award winner for having closed more than $5 million in transaction volume for the year.

“Stephanie’s recent accomplishments are a testament to her work ethic and dedication to her clients,” said Lake Homes Realty CEO Glenn S. Phillips. “We are proud to have her as part of our Lake Homes Realty family and to see her hard work pay off.”  

Finalists for the 2019 Best Real Estate Agent designation included Renee Hamilton, Jennifer Harris, Gwen Vinzant, Amy Wingo.

For a full list of this year’s winners, visit http://www.hooversmagazine.com/hoovers-best-winners-2019/.

Client Spotlight: How LakeHomes.com Helps Buyers Find Lake Homes

When Amy Knight-Roberts and her husband Lindsey put their Walnut Hill, Florida, farm on the market, they were unsure of where their next move would take them.

Lake Martin Home featured on LakeHomes.com

“We looked at a lot of different places, all over,” Knight-Roberts remembered. “We knew we wanted to go somewhere, we just didn’t know where.”

In 2017, after 12 years of searching, the retired veterinarians finally found what they were looking for: a home on Lake Martin.

“I was tired of hurricanes, and tired of the high insurance payments,” explained Knight-Roberts about what sparked the couple’s interest in selling their home of 20 years. “We were ready to downsize. I love the beach, but I can always just rent a beach house.”

The Search

Like many modern buyers, the couple took to the web in to begin their search for lake property.

There are countless online listing sites available to buyers today, all of which compile a wide variety of listings from MLSs across the U. S. to present an all-encompassing view of an area’s real estate, including both multi-tenant and single-family homes.

For those looking specifically for lake property, the biggest player online is Birmingham-based LakeHomes.com, the nation’s largest lake-focused real estate company. Unlike other listing sites, it uses proprietary algorithms to filter out off-lake properties to provide the most comprehensive database of lake listings available.

Knight-Roberts and her husband viewed hundreds of active listings across east-central Alabama’s Lake Mitchell, Lay Lake and Lake Martin, comparing water depths, miles of shoreline, fishing and boating regulations, and various amenities.

“Our friends bought a house on Lake Martin the year before, and we wanted to be able to spend more time with them,” said Knight-Roberts. “Lake Martin also brings us closer to family; my sister lives on Lake Mitchell, and my father lives on Lay Lake.”

The couple searched through pages of online listings to narrow down where exactly they wanted to buy, noting the convenience of being able to view hundreds of homes via the web.

“The listings told us everything we needed to know,” Knight-Roberts said. “There were adequate pictures, and we could see all the different angles of the lakes.”

As a result, the couple was able to rule out Lay Lake and Lake Mitchell, ultimately deciding Lake Martin best suited their aesthetic needs and offered more choices of level lots, a crucial detail for the aging couple.

In addition to the convenience online home shopping provided them, filtering options also benefited the buyers by allowing them to further refine their search results by location and price range.

“We started looking at homes for around $450,000, but most of the houses were fixer-uppers or out of the way [of town],” Knight-Roberts explained.

According to the LakeHomes.com 2018 Winter Lake Market Report, the average home price on Lake Martin is about $580,000 at the time, a little more than $100,000 over the couple’s original budget.

“We ended up looking in the $600,000 range, and we began to see places we were more comfortable with,” said Knight-Roberts.

The Agent

After redefining their budget and choosing the lake on which they would buy, the couple needed to connect with an agent with expert experience selling lake real estate.

Again, the couple turned to the web, where they were connected with Lake Home Realty’s Angela Van Houten, whose expertise made the buying process, as Knight-Roberts deemed it, “an overall pretty great experience.”

“She was nice, and organized, very proactive and with us through each step,” Knight-Roberts said. “Everything just flowed. It was all unusually easy.”

Within three months, the couple made an offer on a home only two houses down from their friends’. Thirty days later, the lake home was theirs.

The Tools

Roger and Bonnie Spear, an architect and retired UAB professor from Birmingham, turned to the internet’s vast inventory of homes two years ago, idly looking for a possible vacation home close to family and their alma mater.

“We had wanted a lake house for many years, and of course it had to be next to Auburn,” recalled Bonnie Spear. “We wanted to go to a place with an infrastructure that was close to amenities, and we kept coming across Lake Martin.”

The couple utilized online map tools, like the one featured on LakeHomes.com, to see how close homes were to the water, how far the bodies of water were from the nearest towns and, perhaps more important to them, how close they were to Auburn.

“The map showed all the different areas of the lake, which allowed us to narrow down the areas we were most interested in,” Spear said. “We ruled out Lake Mitchell and Yates Lake because they just weren’t as developed as Martin.”

Shopping online also allowed the Spears to virtually tour homes on Lake Martin from the convenience of their Birmingham residence. The more comprehensive the database of listings, the more specific the pair could be in their search.

“I had three criteria when we were looking for a house,” Spear explained. “I wanted a beautiful view, very few steps down to the water, and I wanted a screened-in porch, or at least the space to build one.”

Spear noted listing photos allowed she and her husband to see homes they liked from different angles and the views of the lake from different rooms, as well as helped to show how far each property was from the water.

As a result, the couple was able to rule out a number of homes without ever actually visiting them.

Local Expertise

Spear commented that working with an agent who knew the lake was “invaluable.”

“Our agent listened to what we wanted, showed us only homes that fit our criteria, and she knew important details about the lake we would have had no other way of knowing if it hadn’t been for her,” Spear said.

Over the course of nine months of active shopping, the couple visited Lake Martin eight times and physically visited barely more than a dozen homes.

They quickly fell in love with one of the first homes they visited, but negotiations on their offer fell through. Ironically, eight months after their first visit, the Spears got a second chance at buying the property.

This time, their offer was accepted.

Six weeks later, years after first searching for property online, Spear and her husband were lake home owners.

“Look a lot and do your research,” Spear advises others who are in the market for a lake home.

Facebook Advertising for Agents: Anti-Discrimination Policies

There’s no argument that Facebook advertising has become an essential marketing tool for businesses, real estate included — just ask the more than 1.45 million people who log on to the social media platform each day.

Not only is advertising on social media an easy way to reach potential clients, it’s also relatively inexpensive.

Ad content may vary in type and desired audience, but the basic principles of organizing a successful Facebook ad campaign are the same.

The following is Part I of a three-part series designed to help real estate agents navigate Facebook’s ad policies.

These polices are constantly changing and cover a wide range of restricted, prohibited and acceptable content.

While we cannot detail each of these, we can point out a handful of common mistakes many real estate agents make.

Facebook Advertising Policies

When it comes to advertising for real estate, agents should take all measures to prevent violating Facebook’s anti-discrimination policies.

Most often, this occurs when agents exclude certain classes of people in an ad’s target audience or verbiage. Many times the agent isn’t even aware he has done anything wrong.

If an agent has ever used the term “family home” to market a listing, used the age range “30-45” in his verbiage or targeted “married women only” in his audience demographics, it’s likely the agent has broken at least one fair housing law, be it state or federal.

In the example above, the qualifiers “family” home and “married” women exclude any potential clients who are divorced, engaged, single, childless or otherwise. This characteristic is called “familial status” and is one of the classes protected under the Federal Fair Housing Act.

Additionally, the agent has specified a particular age group in his target audience. Use of this qualifier violates Facebook’s personal attributes restrictions.

Protected Classes

According to the Federal Fair Housing Act, there are seven classes against whom it is illegal to discriminate. These include color, religion, national origin, sex, disability and familial status.

Facebook policies currently state the platform prohibits advertisers from “using audience selection tools to wrongfully target specific groups of people for advertising or wrongfully exclude specific groups of people from seeing their ads.”

Facebook no longer allows advertisers to filter audience demographics by multicultural affinities such as ethnicity and race; however, agents can still filter for a number of Fair Housing-protected classes, sex and relationship (familial) status included.

Personal Attributes Restrictions

Beyond these, Facebook policies restrict the use of personal attributes in ad language.

Such attributes are a person’s philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation or practices and medical or physical condition. Others include financial status, criminal records and gender identity.

The platform’s policies state that an ad’s content can neither directly nor indirectly assert or imply any of these personal attributes.

To simplify, an ad for a retirement community cannot read “join other seniors at Green Acres.”Instead, it should read “join the seniors at Green Acres.” The first implies intended audience members are senior citizens. The second simply states there are senior citizens living at Green Acres.

Another example may target upper-class audience members, but the ad’s language cannot explicitly state so.

An ad that reads “Rich and looking for a lake home?” will probably go unpublished. However, if the ad were to read “Looking for luxury lake real estate?” it has a better chance of being approved because the wording does not imply the audience member is of a certain financial status. Instead the latter sentence implies the property itself is luxurious, not that it is available to wealthy people exclusively.

Though these policies create a fine line between what can and cannot be in an agent’s advertising, this line is navigable with careful attention and planning.

 

For a full list of Facebook’s advertising policies and guidelines, please click here. And be sure to check out Part II, “Facebook Advertising for Agents: Words to Avoid.”