About Reilly Realtors, Austin TX

Source: http://www.austinhomelistings.com/about-reilly-realtors.php

The Experts in Austin Real Estate 

Founded in 2005, Reilly Realtors is a full service, Austin based real estate brokerage made up of expert agents who have demonstrated a commitment to outstanding customer service, personal integrity and sales success.

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Our Clients Come First

At Reilly Realtors, we promise to put you first. Whether you're buying or selling a home, you can trust our expert agents to listen, work hard and focus on helping you achieve your real estate goals. We hire only experienced agents who are committed to placing their client's best interests above their own.

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A Full Service Real Estate Company

Located in the west Austin area known as Bee Cave, in the beautiful Hill Country Galleria, our team of experienced agents serve buyers and sellers all over Austin and the surrounding areas. From East Austin to Lakeway, up to Round Rock and down to Buda, or right in middle of Central Austin and downtown, we've got you covered. When you are buying a home or selling a home, Reilly Realtors offers full service real estate solutions backed by 42 full-time, experienced agents dedicated to helping our clients achieve their real estate goals.
Buying a Home: Our expert buyer agents can help you find the perfect property, negotiate the best deal and oversee a smooth closing. We've successfully represented thousands of buyers all over the Austin area in every price range. Whether it's a starter home in a new suburban community or luxury estate on the lake, we have the local knowledge and experience to help you succeed.
Selling a Home: Our expert listing agents combine innovative internet marketing tools with timeless sales skills to help you sell your property quickly and for the highest possible price. With today's buyers doing their own online home searches, we employ best in class internet marketing techniques to ensure your property is found online and generates the highest turnout of potential buyers.

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Reilly Realtors: Our History

When Michael and Shae Reilly started their own real estate brokerage in 2006, their vision was to create a company that provided unparalleled service to their clients. As part of that effort, Michael and Shae created one of Austin's first easy to use, map based Austin home search tools at AustinHomeListings.com. Along with the new map search, the original site also offered one of the first comprehensive reviews of all Austin areas and neighborhoods, known as the Austin Neighborhood Guide. The original site was one of the first local real estate websites designed to truly empower a consumer's online home search. In fact, early clients loved the powerful new site so much that they shared it with friends and family, causing the site, and the business, to take off in a way that Michael and Shae could have never imagined.
Within a very short time, hundreds of new users were visiting AustinHomeListings.com every day. The immediate popularity and interest in the new website produced so many leads that it propelled Michael Reilly, who had been an agent since 2002, to immediately join the elite ranks of agents who sell more than $15 million each year.  "It was a very exciting time and incredible way to start a new business - to be blessed with so many opportunities right out of the gate," said Michael Reilly.  Since that time, Michael has continued to perform as a top agent with over $100 million in career sales.
As website visits continued to grow, Michael saw the need to add additional agents to help with the amazing overflow in leads, but he was wary of growth at the expense of great service.

Michael's goal was to find only experienced agents who would maintain the professionalism and integrity that Michael set out to achieve from the beginning. "We interviewed a lot of agents to find high quality professionals, and to this day, we still maintain one of the highest bars in the business as we evaluate candidates to join our firm," commented Shae Reilly.

Today, Reilly Realtors is made of 40+ top producing agents and 3 full-time employees and our website is still one of the top destinations online for searching homes and information about the Austin area. We make continual investments in training, technology and tools that help our agents better serve our clients and achieve success. We are fortunate to serve clients in a town that rewards our commitment to customer service. While we continue to grow, the vision for Reilly Realtors and AustinHomeListings.com is - and will remain - a steadfast focus on providing unparalleled service to our clients.

What Palm trees in Texas? Yes Austin is the place that intrigues and surprises people from all over the world. We have an amazing country side, away from the Capital of Texas, that even amazes and mesmerizes Texans1 this is an overlook of one of the many lakes in the lake region to the west of Austin.

Keep you eyes open for more beautiful photos of the area...

Let m know if you want a view like this!

Bob Kenney,
Realtor
®
 Email: bobkenney@reillyrealtors.com
  

How come some of the listings I see on public search sites do not reflect current status or correct pricing?

Hi Jason,

Good question and one that has, depending on who you ask, fingers pointing in every direction! The advent of such sites as Zillow and Trulia (the 2 best known but not the only 2 search sites for real estate) has been the development of local MLS (Multiple Listing services).

These services act as the bulletin board for realtors to post (list) their listings and leases in a given market area. These listing are pretty complete and comes with a set of rules the users need to follow in order to use the service. Like reporting all price changes, changes of status and sold information once a transaction if closed. There are usually fines associated with violations of these things and the separate entities do best to police themselves and their members. Accuracy is probably 95%

At some point in town these 3^rd party sites , Such as Zillow/Trulia, came into being and the MLS's communities saw this as an opportunity to broadcast their members information onto a wider national platform. I most cases costs of sharing the information was minimal because there platforms do not typically charge to list the properties.

How can they do that? Because they do charge advertisers that are attracted by volume of visitors to their site. So for these companies the more listings they have the larger number of audience they attract. They also can tap the Realtor® market by selling placement services on each property landing page. Ever see the “Neighborhood expert” spot? Well I can tell you from experience they are not experts in the neighborhood they appear next to. They have just paid to be placed there as the expert..Never mind going down that path but it is a little misleading to say the least..

So now you have all of this information posted on sites not under the same guidelines as the original host site. Some of these sites data fields don’t match up the same, sometimes the data is corrupted, sometimes the changes to status and price to not make it to the 3^rd party site, some times the changes make it but the site reads it as a duplicate and does not publish the changes. I ave hear a lot of excuses from various 3^rd party sites over the years.

These sites have different ways of advising the public on what estimates are for home values although usually those values have noting to do with market activity in a given market place more to do with public tax evaluations and other public information. In Texas sale information is not made public, the 3^rd parties respond well if you want more accurate information to be given by us release the sold information to us. By law it just does not work that way so they go ahead and publish information that is inaccurate and helps create this market confusion over prices.

It is a nasty spiral and one that is about to change. A lot of MLS's around the country are not sending the information to these 3^rd party companies anymore. This will leave them looking for other ways to generate traffic to their sites. In that past they have down played the accuracy of the information saying it is not our data we just show what is given to us. Being a realtor and have data misrepresented on these sites and trying to get the information changed is not an easy task.

I actually had one client call and started crying on the phone that she had just gone on and done an estimate on one of the 2 biggest sites and they told her she had lost value in her home over a 4 year period and lost all of her equity. I of course panicked because I knew that was not even remotely possible because of the property she purchased. The comps showed her not only was her equity protected but she had actually realized a a nice appreciation. We sold her home and she now does not visit those sites anymore.

So there are many reasons the data may be different. The feed with the updates not working, service agreement that bought original data to the 3^rd party site is out of contract and they just not updating stale info. Duplicate listings from different sources some being updated some not being updated. Agent has not updated the info on the original MLS site.

The best solution would be to contact the listing agent (If you can find their name since even that information is blocked by 3^rd parties sometimes so they direct you to a paying advertising agent) and ask what the status is. Anytime you are looking at real estate it is a good idea to verify all information before you act.

Hope this helps.

Please feel free to visit: http://www.austinhomelistings.com/agents/robert-kenney/

For real estate information in the Austin and surrounding areas.

Regards

Bob Kenney, Realtor®

Mobile/Text: 512-922-4922

I am not sure the home in Houston is the right home for us. We are supposed to sign contract tomorrow. What do I do?

Hi Eva,

Not sure of the whole story but in Texas you have most likely negotiated a Termination option on page 8, section 23 of your contract. This option gives you the UNRESTRICTED right to terminate the contract by giving written notice with in the # of days negotiated after the effective date.

So you you and your partner go under contract and you decide you don’t like something about the home you can terminate the contract and let the seller keep the $$$ you paid for the option. This includes anything from structural to cosmetics to just the way the sky looks in the evening. You do not need an excuse.

Talk with your real estate agent, Realtor® but this option period is on every contract for resale homes in state of Texas. New home contracts are different but talk with the sales rep at if new home and make sure you get in writing any option period they provide after signing an intent to purchase. It is not always called the same thing but most builders do have a period of time after signing that they will release you from your obligation.

I hope it all works out for you in the end. I know it can be a stressful process but every real estate search has a situation behind it that started the process and sometimes it is good to go back and remember that reason and see if the goals are being met with each decision that is made.

Let me know if I can assist any further. Please feel free to call or text : 512-922-4922

Bob Kenney, Realtor®

Reilly Realtors

My friend told me that if I listed my own home, Realtors with buyers will do all the work and I wont have to pay them? Is that true? It doesn’t sound right.

Thanks Bill for email.

“If it sounds too good to be true than it is”. I a homeowner lists their own home we refer to that in the industry as a FSBO (for sale by owner) 90% of the time a FSBO will offer to work with buyers agents. This means if and agent brings a buyer, the seller will agree to pay a compensation in the form of a commission to the buyers agent. In the case of the other 10% they say they will not work with an agent and compensation is between the buyer and their client.

It doesn’t sound right because, the FSBO who does not want to work with the buyers agent, puts all of the exposure on performance on the buyers agent who is now obligated to represent their clients interests and be fair to the FSBO making sure that contracts are explained and understood, procedures are followed, time lines met and that the seller complies with any additional addendum or requirements of the sale (such as repairs etc.) As a professional real estate agent, Realtor®, I would make sure all of this is done and have an agreement with my client that they pay me compensation for my representation.

At the end of the day the compensation is being generated by what they are willing to pay for the home so in the end the seller is ultimately paying for the compensation depending on sales price because his net proceeds is a reflection of what the buyer is willing to pay GROSS. Hope that makes sense!

Look Realtors® are like all professionals. They need to work to provide for their families. A commission is a % of transactions proceeds. Much like the sales of any item you purchase has some accommodation for profit over and above the cost of goods that a vendor is selling. From the “profit” there is a “gross profit” and a net “profit”. If a Realtor® generates $1000 in commission, they need to set aside federal and state taxes, deduct expenses directly related to that transaction & deduct brokerage fees (each broker has a fee schedule that they charge each agent on each transaction) so their net is going to much less than that of the whole amount.

As a Realtors® business and volume grow they also have an increase in expenses for advertising, infrastructure, assistance, office/storage space, travel, advertising for a realtor is working and marketing 7 days a week.

If you get buyers agents that don’t want to coordinate a deal if a FSBO is not working with agents don’t think of them bad agents. It is a lot of exposure legally if something is to go wrong and a lit of pressure treating all parties fairly while maintaining the fiduciary relation ship of their client. If everyone works with one another the trans action will be smoother and chances are there will be less issues resulting from unmet expectations or lack of understanding of the contract and its terms.

I strongly suggest if you are selling your own home that you spend a little money having an experienced real estate attorney look at any contract that is presented for you to sign.

Hope this answers your question Bill. I hope that you have a successful transaction. Don t forget to consult with an reputable full service real estate broker in your area to see all of the services that they can provide for you as your listing agents, Realtor® representative.

Let me know if you need a referral or have any further questions.

Regards

Bob Kenney, Realtor®

Reilly Realtors

Mobile/Text: 512-922-4922