Posted by Brent_IL on August 16, 2003 at 21:40:47:
This is a reference to one of those things I learned as an undergraduate and never used again. Oh, wait, that was my undergraduate degree.
When a good sample is taken for a statistical grouping and they are arranged in order and graphed, the connected points look like a bell. When people talk about a bell curve they are speaking about this kind of graph. Just like a drawing of a bell, the sample points will start out with a thin line and quickly rise upward. They round into a plateau and then drop to complete the other side of the bell. They points taper off again like the rim of a bell.
Little attention is paid to the beginning and ending parts of the bell graph because it?s more practical to ignore the relatively low percentage of the whole. All of the action takes place in the large part of the bell because it represents the most and the most significant points.
The parallel in real estate is that everyone who wants to be a real estate investor is trying to do the same thing that everyone else is doing. There’s a lot of competition because they are all in the middle part of the bell curve. Even within the creative real estate investing subset, it gets to be cutthroat.
In contrast, there is no competition at the fringes of the curve. No one wants to deal with these people. No one wants to talk to them. When agents come around, they use their property to sell someone else?s house. They sit there until someone is willing to put up with the flaws that took them and their house out of the mainstream. It could be legal flaws like title problems, or it could be property challenges like mold, or it could be seller irrationalities such as overpricing or terms that aren?t realistic and sometimes not possible.
Legal and property problems require diligence to reach a solution. Seller-based problems require a thick-skinned creative real estate practitioner. Most sellers want to sell. If those of us who search the fringes learn how to make our offers palatable to sellers, and they are the only offers they will see, ours will be accepted and the big bucks are ours.