Major Updates from Enjoy Realty!

Greetings friends,
First and foremost, Erickson Realty is now Enjoy Realty! As you can imagine, rebranding a business involves a lot of work and a considerable amount of second guessing. I won’t delve into the myriad reasons behind the name change (you can read more about it here) but here’s the short version: Among the finalists was Ethos Realty, which I still really like. However, after a few people asked what it meant, it became clear that it would be more useful to simply state what our company’s ethos actually IS. Thus Enjoy Realty was born. 

As part of the rebranding, we’ll be overhauling the website and mobile app. The new logo is an evolution of the Erickson Realty logo because it seemed fitting to evolve rather than completely reinvent. Also, there are quite a few people who vibed with the Erickson Realty name and brand so I have faith that even more people will love Enjoy Realty.

We are once again sponsoring the Horsetooth Half Marathon, which is taking place April 14th. We have a bundle of free tickets for our clients, so if you’d like to run with team Enjoy, please ping me and I’ll get you a code. Our first Enjoy swag will be featured as part of the race bag too! 

Next, you have probably encountered some sensational headlines about the NAR (National Association of REALTORs) lawsuits and the current pending settlement, which was largely the subject of my November market update. In a nutshell: Rather than deal with a growing number of copycat lawsuits, NAR (and some other - but not all - plaintiffs) and NAR members would be released from liability from any wrongdoing in exchange for some changes to transactional activity…and $418m over four years. They’ve already released a bunch of details on the settlement but it has to be approved by the court. 

The changes to the transactional stuff are pretty minor to consumers (at least in Colorado) but one key change to the MLS is already freaking out some agents: Commission fields will be removed. Some headlines would have you believe commissions have just disappeared completely. Sorry, not true since, believe it or not, most people don’t like to work for free. Will they be drastically reduced? That remains to be seen. Will we lose a bunch of mediocre agents? You can pretty much bet on that.

Ironically, one of the proposed solutions years ago (at the start of the class action lawsuits) was making the commission fields visible on all public sites as well as the client side of any MLS. Pretty much everyone was totally happy with this and so the change was implemented, at least around here. Apparently it had the opposite effect…?

As is already the case, there will potentially be even more sellers that won’t want to pay outside agents, leaving buyers to cough up more dough or deal directly with the listing agents, hoping for the inside track. My boring prediction is agents will simply need to add another step to the offer process which, interestingly, could be one I’ve already discussed with a couple of sellers. It concerns negotiating the commission as part of the offer process, for better or worse. This will likely be the case as of “mid-July, 2024” (per NAR’s settlement outline) but all we can do is speculate. The Colorado Association of REALTORs does an amazing job navigating stuff like this and they have yet to release any info, mostly because A) We’re four months away, and B) The settlement has yet to be approved anyway.

Yesterday morning the New York Times published an article with an alarming amount of false information in it. My thoughts in short: Although I think the National Association of REALTORs is guilty of many things (albeit not illegal ones), setting prices and commission rates are not among them, at all. The memes and headlines I’m seeing are ridiculous, and I’m happy to field and respond to any you find alarming or particularly sensational. Listen, I can speculate all day about what the future holds, but I’m fairly certain the people that will suffer the most from some of the changes discussed are first time home buyers. 

Market-wise, we’re starting to see (perhaps a little later than prior years) the start of the spring season. The photographers are busy! February 2024 saw 140 sales of single family homes and attached dwellings in Fort Collins at an average price of $593k, with average days on market of 76. In 2023 those same fields were 130 sales, $588k average, 85 days on market. That is about as flat year over year as I can recall, but I would argue it’s still pretty darn good considering rates are currently 6.625% on a 30 yr conventional. Sure they’ve dropped a bit, but not nearly as much as people hoped, or predicted last year. Doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot though - things are still moving. It’s just that people are really grumpy about the prices (and, apparently, those darn commissions, too.)

Finally in much more fun news, yours truly will be behind the drum kit for LoveFest V at Washington’s March 30th, which is a double header concert with Mama Lenny and the Remedy and The Patti Fiasco. We’ll have a photo booth like years past and several surprises on stage. Should be a fun night so please come out and support me and the bands! Get your tickets here please:
https://washingtonsfoco.com/event/patti-fiasco-and-mama-lenny-the-remedy-lovefest/washingtons/fort-collins-colorado/

Thanks so much for reading and please let us know if we can help with any real estate needs and of course we’d love to know what you think of the new name! Cheers, Crip

​