Susan Bolz is a Realtor Associate for Weichert Realtors-Wayne Murray Properties in Southwest Houston.
Every week, we ask a Houston real estate professional for their thoughts on the top three stories from the week before.
This week, we talked with Susan Bolz, a Realtor Associate with Weichert Realtors-Wayne Murray Properties. She has been in real estate for around seven years, and worked as a lawyer prior to that. She works with buyers and sellers and specializes in the Inner City and Southwest Houston areas. Last year, Bolz was honored as the Top Overall Sales Associate for Weichert Realtors-Wayne Murray Properties. She is a member of the Houston Association of Realtors (HAR), the Texas Association of Realtors (TAR), the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the Houston Black Real Estate Association (HBREA).
Houston Agent (HA): Real estate technology is constantly changing. What are some of the best and most effective ways you keep up with it?
Susan Bolz (SB): I pretty much learn just by “doing.” When technology changes or is updated, I just go ahead and teach myself whatever it is I need to know. I know how to do a MLS search app for a particular client a lot easier than I used to, just by doing it. More often, you learn things by repetition.
Our company also has meetings once a week about things like this. If somebody is having a problem or found something new, we discuss it and we all learn how to do it together. We help each other, in that regard.
HA: Where do you see the Houston market heading in the next six months or so?
SB: It looks like it’s going to continue to gradually rise up. Even though the interest rates are also gradually rising, we haven’t seen any slowdown in the number of buyers that are contacting us. And with all the media attention to more buyers, then I think the sellers who are thinking about selling (but aren’t sure when) are going to jump in also, so they can get their homes sold when there’s a lot of buyers out there. I think it’s going to continue on the same trend of upward.
HA: Compared to last year, has demand from foreign homebuyers gone up, down or stayed consistent?
SB: I’m not positive on the state as a whole, because I don’t have an overall view, but we personally do a lot of relocation-type work and a lot of those buyers are coming here from another country and they’re usually somehow connected with the oil and gas industry. They’re either with an oil and gas bank, a big oil and gas company or the oil services company. So they’re all transferring employees into the Houston area.
Some of them buy in the central part of town, some of them buy in The Woodlands or out in Sugar Land or Katy, but the general are is getting a lot of those people coming in. It’s probably going up because a lot of these are being headquartered here.