Home Staging

Home Staging is a word that today is synonymous with getting your house ready to sell. It’s a buzz word we hear all the time. So I decided to ask my friend Naomi Harel of Invision Design Partners to share with me some of her thoughts on the topic.

Home Staging is the art of preparing a home for sale by maximizing its appeal to the broadest range of potential buyers and creating immediate interest for purchase.

Wow, that’s saying it pretty concisely!

As most people naturally strive to personalize their homes with meaningful decorations, artifacts and specific aesthetic tastes or styles, Home Staging on the other hand, aims at creating an impersonalized space that would make it possible for others to imagine themselves living there and making it their own.

Some of the actions necessary for achieving this goal include painting with neutral colors and de-cluttering living spaces or simply put, removing junk!. Usually, the owner’s own furniture and accessories are rearranged for greater advantage and impact. On occasion, however, these types of items are brought in on a temporary basis to maximize the marketability of the home.

A home seller would greatly benefit from accepting that they must “let go” of their own personal taste in interior decoration in return for the creation of a neutral, warm and welcoming interior style that appeals to others. A practice that could bring a higher sales price and a speedy sale of the property.

The best strategy for achieving this goal may be to hire the services of an interior decorator who has an unbiased “eye” to see the living spaces as they will appear to potential buyers. For additional information on Home Staging go to Home Staging Tips.

What do you think about Home Staging and how do you handle it as an agent?

How much is your Home Worth?

Whether you are selling or buying or refinancing or paying taxes, it’s important to know how much your home is worth.

Many people will tell me what their tax assessment is and think that it represents their home’s worth. Others will measure their home’s worth by comparing it with homes that are on the market or even worse, homes that have expired on the market.

The value your home has is never a fixed value. It is constantly changing with the economy. The interest rates affect it, the world economy affects it, the local economy affects it, and the real estate market affects.

Fortunately for us that live in Rochester, our home values have increased each year for the past 30 years that I have been in the real estate business until 2008 when they dropped slightly, about 1-3%.

What Realtors do to determine your home’s value is to do a CMA, comparative market analysis, which is a snapshot in time of your home. It is arrived at by a careful review of the recent sold homes that are similar to your home in square footage and features.

Usually we also have to make some additions or subtractions for features present or absent in the sold homes as they are compared to your home. This is a subjective valuation by the Realtor doing the CMA. Because of this subjective value, you could get different values for your home if you were to have several Realtors do a CMA for you.

This is why it is important for sellers who are interviewing several agents for listing their home that you don’t want to make your decision based on the highest price received from an agent, because they could be too high in their subjective additions. You need to look at the agent’s years in the business, experience, credentials, and marketing plan.

So if you would like to know you home’s worth, just call me or a Realtor in your area and we will be happy to meet with you and work up a CMA on your home.

Sell Before Buying??

I was reading the Saturday morning real estate section from our local paper and the lead article was about move-up or scale-down buyers. The two agents interviewed both felt that they should sell first before they made an offer on another house. The problem I had with this article was not the position the agents had but the reasons they gave for doing so.

There are many areas in our marketplace where the purchase offer with a contingency of selling a house will not make any difference and will not affect the selling price that is negotiated. This is because the sellers are so glad to see an offer that they will readily accept one even with a contingency.

Unless a neighborhood has a shortage of inventory and is in high demand, most sellers, if properly advised by their agents, will accept a contingent offer. In our area, the listing does not have to be changed to reflect a contingent offer and no one knows it has an offer on it except the seller, that buyer and the agents.

This way, the odds are in the seller’s favor, because now there are two houses on the market and if either one of them gets an offer, the seller is good.

So why wouldn’t a buyer make a contingent offer? Yes, there is the possibility that another offer could come into the picture and they would have to do a bridge loan to keep their offer or they would lose it. But generally, if they price their house properly, de-clutter it, and then stage it, the house will sell fairly quickly. To wait until you have sold your home, to then start looking, you may not find something suitable and you will have to move twice, first into temporary rental housing and then into your next house. This would far out weigh the cost of carrying two mortgages for a few months.

The Upside & Downside of Home Inspections

I was sitting in a Board of Directors meeting this past week reviewing a new addendum form to approve for our Association to use for the inspection contingency in a purchase and sale offer. There was considerable discussion as to whether the buyer should have to indicate who they were selecting to do the inspection, whether it was Uncle Harry, a licensed home inspector, an engineer, a builder, etc. After all the discussion, the final decision by the Directors was the buyer did not have to disclose who they were choosing to do the home inspection for them on the addendum form.

The reason there was so much discussion around this rather simple item, was because of the experience all of us have had the past several years with home inspections. There are the home inspections that the buyer has their Uncle Harry do for them and he either talks about the selling price and everything else except the house or he finds fault with everything in the house.

Then we have the inspections done by a builder that compares everything to a new home and nothing is to code in the older home.

It seems that features that are characteristic of an older home are overlooked during the initial visit or even second visit, but with the home inspector, suddenly they aren’t acceptable. And even though the buyer may have negotiated off the sales price to address them after he buys the house, they ping the seller again with the list of repairs and ask for a credit at closing from the home inspection.

Inspections can and are an escape route for a buyer, plain and simple. If they want out of the deal after signing, the home inspection provides the door to escape. That’s the way it is and there is no changing it!

Home inspections are part of the process now and they are here to stay with the upside and downside they bring to the home buying process!