How2 Do a Simple CMA

The Simple CMA utility is a simple program.  Start by going into Randcenter.com, selecting Presentation Center, selecting the “Simple CMA” from the choices, and then selecting “Standard Search.” Then go through the following steps:

Step One: Select a County
Select a county for your search.  Once you select a county, the town and school districts will be displayed in Steps Two and Three.

Step Two: Select a Town
Select a town for your search.  You can select multiple towns, but it’s unlikely that you’ll ever want to do that for a CMA unless you have such a high end property that you find it difficult to locate good comparables.

Step Three: Select a School District
You can select a school district if you want to, but you don’t need to.  This step is here in case the town you’re searching is serviced by two different school districts (i.e., Clarkstown is serviced by Clarkstown and East Ramapo schools, and an agent might want to restrict the search to only properties in the town and in one of the school districts).  If the school district is not an issue, you do not need to choose one.

 Step Four: Select Additional Criteria
Here is the heart of the CMA process, with a couple of important selections.

First, you need to select property types.  You can choose whether you are looking for residential properties, multi-family, condos and townhouses, cooperative apartments, or land.  You can only search one database at a time.

Second, you need to select your time period for comparables.  The program defaults to six months worth of sold and expired comps, which is usually enough, but if you limit the other aspect of your search (or discover that you don’t have enough solds), you can pull in older comps.

Third, you need to select minimum bedrooms and bathrooms.  Note that the selections are minimums, and that you will pull up comps that have more bedrooms and bathrooms.

Fourth, you can select a “style.”  Be very careful with this, though.  In many MLS systems, the style is inputted manually by the agent, and agents have a way of mis-describing, and sometimes mis-spelling, property types.  So you might be looking for a “high ranch,” but if you only select “high ranch” as your style, then you’ll miss all the properties that were categorized by their agent as “hi-ranch,” “high-ranch,” “raised ranch,” “bilevel ranch” and the like.  So either leave this empty and just screen the comps when they come out, OR go through the whole list to get all the choices by hitting “control-click” for each one.

Fifth, you can limit your search to a price range.   That will sometimes help you if you have a general idea of property values in the area.

Finally, you can restrict the search by zip code.  That might be important to you if the town has two zip codes and they should be treated differently for comps.

If you discover after you run your search that you don’t have enough comps, you can back out of the screen (by hitting the “back” button on your browser) and change some of the criteria to pull in more properties.

When you are done, hit Submit

Simple CMA Selection Page
The selection page is where you choose up to six active listings and up to six sold listings for your comparative market analysis.  The program will not let you choose more than six, but if you choose fewer than six you can still generate the CMA.

The selection displays for both active and sold listings is very helpful, giving you a thumbnail picture, the listed/sold date, house style, bedroom and bathroom info, the price, the square footage (if available), and a short textual description from the MLS entry.  If you ever want to see more information on the property, you can click on the button saying “Click for more information” and you’ll open up a new window that will display the full details on the property.  Note that the active listings are ordered by price, and the sold listings by sold date.

To select a property in the window, just check the box to the left of the thumbnail picture.  You can track how many properties you’ve selected at the bottom right of the selection window, and you can see how many total properties came up in your search at the bottom right of the selection window.  Remember to use the scroll bar or your arrow keys to move up and down within the display window for both the active and sold listings.

Note that if you did not generate enough comparable properties, you can just hit “back” on your browser and recalibrate your search.

When you are done selecting properties, hit Submit.

 The Simple CMA Letter Page
The next step of the CMA is generating a letter for your clients.  You can edit the letter in any way you wish, including deleting the whole thing and replacing it with text from your own word processor.

The Simple CMA default letter is designed for clients in your sphere of influence, the idea being that you’re sending them this CMA as a service to help them track their property values.  If you’re going to be using the Simple CMA for prospecting – sending copies of the CMA to a neighborhood – you should not use this letter, but instead use the Prospecting CMA letter in the Contact Manager Letter Writer.

Note that the letter will print out with your own contact information and letterhead, including your picture, so you don’t need to type in that information into the letter text box.

When you are done editing the letter, hit Create CMA.

The CMA PDF
Once you hit Create CMA, your computer will open a new window with Adobe Acrobat Reader, and create a PDF with your cover letter, two-page CMA, and market stats report. Note that you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer to open the CMA.

Note that the Simple CMA includes the following:

• A cover letter.  You’ll see that the cover letter includes letterhead with your office address, all your contact information, and your picture.  If any of the information is incorrect, it means that corporate administration has incorrect or dated information on you, and you should fix that.
• Up to six active listings.  The display page for the active listings includes all the pertinent information, and also is imprinted with your picture and contact information.
• Up to six sold listings. The display page for the sold listings includes all the pertinent information, and also is imprinted with your picture and contact information.
• A market stats report.  The program also creates a market stats report for the most recent closed quarter for the town and for the county.  It’s a nice add-on to the CMA, but be careful that the client doesn’t read too much into the market stats as a whole (particularly the average sale prices).  The market stats might have little value if the town is so small that very few houses sell in a particular quarter.

We made the Simple CMA only four pages because that’s how many pages you can mail out with a standard first-class stamp.  Be careful adding material to the mailing, because the post office might return it.

Once the CMA is open, you can save it to your hard drive as a PDF and/or print it.  Always preview your CMA before you print it, to make sure it’s what you want.  If you want to make any changes, you can simply go to the browser window that contains the Simple CMA program, hit “back” on your browser, and fix the CMA.  Then just go through the process again to generate a new PDF.