Scott Harris has had many career passions throughout his life, starting at the age of 9 when he dreamed of becoming an architect.
The dream stemmed from watching his father work as a commercial landlord in New Orleans and his mother serve as a marketing director for a Prudential real estate franchise in the Big Easy.
But those architecture dreams faded when Harris left Louisiana and enrolled in college in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, Harris immersed himself in the music industry. He moved to Boston, where he was part of an up-and-coming a cappella group called Ball in the House.
"My band had a big record release, and we had the radio promotions and all the things that a band does," Harris told Homes.com. "We weren’t signed to a label, but we were in discussions with labels. We sold out a lot of shows. We did 250 shows a year. All things were moving in the right direction. We weren’t signed, but we had our album, and it came out on 9/11."
"The forward momentum of the band kind of stopped" at the time, Harris said.
Harris found himself at a pivotal stage in his life — faced with two choices. He could spend the next two years with the group or leave Boston and find a different career. He chose the latter — opting to move to New York City and soon thereafter earn his real estate license.
Moving to New York eventually led Harris, now 51, to start his own brokerage, Magnetic Real Estate. The marathon runner and father of three has sold more than $2 billion in residential real estate in the past 20 years. More recently, he published a book, "The Pursuit of Home: A Real Estate Guide to Achieving the American Dream," that explores the emotional journey Americans go through when buying a home.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Many homebuyers say underwriting is the most stressful part of the process. Why?
A buyer may have spent months or years saving money to purchase a home, and, during underwriting, some faceless person with an email will ultimately determine whether the deal will go through.
Somewhere along that process, homebuyers often start to question internally whether they're worthy of getting a home that they saw and fell in love with, adding even more emotional baggage as the buyers await approval.
In underwriting, you're submitting all your financial documents and are out of power. You're giving it to some underwriter in Kentucky or Iowa, and they're deciding whether you're enough. It's triggering for people.
There are a few things a buyer can do to ease the underwriting stress. First, keep your closest friends on standby so one of them can keep you level-headed. Have two or three people on speed dial who will make you laugh or hug you when you're crying. If that's not possible, focus on what you can control. Consider decorating, plan your open house party or focus on your work. Do anything to feel productive so you don't have to think about the underwriting.
For sellers with properties that need work, should they make the upgrades or let buyers launch their own makeovers?
I'm against sellers completing an entire renovation, but the homeowner should do the minimum amount of work to prepare the property for potential buyers.
Sellers should aim to do renovation work that is "satisficing" — a business management term that blends satisfying and sufficient.
You want to do enough work so that people [buyers] can see themselves in it, but the issues are not distracting. There are some basic things — like you don't want to have a leaking roof necessarily — but you also don't want to do a top-to-bottom renovation in a kitchen because, most of the time, your taste may not align with the people who are buying.
When a buyer is going through the home inspection process, what questions should they ask?
Ask the inspector to point out which fixtures in the house are at, or close to, the end of their life cycle. Let the inspector finish the walkthrough, then ask:
- What are the things I should really worry about?
- How long is it likely to be before I have to fix this thing and that — like the roof?
- Can you put together a budget of what might go wrong — not to freak me out — but just to plan ahead?
How would a homebuyer know if they have picked the wrong agent?
Most times, the pairing is off when the broker and the client have different personality types and communication styles. Buyers typically fall into five personality types: someone who's data-driven, someone who just wants information in bullet points, someone who sees a home as security for a family, and more.
When people don't have a good connection to their agents, it's because the agents are speaking in the language of data and risk management and the clients are more conceptual and feelings-based. That's a real disconnect. If you don't have that connection, you know it because it just feels like there's this constant headbutting.
I encourage homebuyers to pick an agent that makes them feel seen and delivers information in the form they prefer.
People spend more time planning their vacations than they do finding an agent who's going to help them make one of the most important decisions of their lives. Slow it down and make an intelligent decision.