How to And How Not to Sell Your Home: Part Four
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of How to And How Not to Sell Your Home!
DO:
4. Get rid of your clutter! While things like furniture and lawn chairs are ok, a potential buyer doesn’t want to see pictures of your dogs and cats, family mementos and other bits and pieces you leave around your house. They would much rather picture their things in your house, and your child’s stuffed animal collection could be preventing them from doing so.
DON’T:
4. Limit yourself to your broker. Two out of three buyers start their search online, so put yourself out there! Put your home on yahoo.com, craigslist.com, trulia.com, zillow.com, homes.com. You can even sell your house on ebay (it costs $150, and it’s noncommittal, so you can back out even if someone bids.) Many a good house has gone unnoticed because no-one knew about it. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t necessarily sell through a broker, it just means you have many other options instead of or alongside with.
Good luck and happy selling!
How to And How Not to Sell Your Home: Part Three
Welcome to the third installment of How to And How Not to Sell Your Home.
DO:
3. Add curb appeal. Not only is a house with a nice garden attractive to the eye, its attractive to the buyers interest– a house that comes with a nice yard means less work for the buyer if they buy the house, whereas a house with a trashed yard can not only hide or push aside the other (better) qualities of your house, it makes the buyer think of spending hours weeding the garden, mowing the lawn, planting flowers/hedges/trees. You don’t need to spend a lot of time or money in the garden to get this desired curb appeal: simply keeping the lawn mowed, the weeds at bay and adding a couple of flowers or other foliage here and there can do wonders.
DON’T:
3. Not take the first bid. Many homeowners will get a bid right away and not accept it. Because someone was so interested in your house right away, that means there must be loads of other people who will make a bid. Wrong. Chances are, the buyer has been looking for a while and your home happened to fit the bill. That does not mean that there will be a bidding war over your home. If that first offer is good, then don’t be so quick to reject it: if you do, you might have your house on the market for hundreds and hundreds of days. Of course, if the offer isn’t right then you don’t have to accept it just in case no one else bids. But if the offer is what you were looking for, then why wait?
Good luck and happy selling!
Local Real Estate Market Cycles. What Is Really Going On?
Real estate is local. The CBS evening news isn’t going to tell you what the market is doing in Hailey, Idaho. Individual markets vary and they vary a lot. So what is really happening on the little real estate island we call the Wood River Valley? What is really going on in our hyper local real estate community? How do we see the big picture?
Well, in order to see the local picture, sometimes we have to look at the big picture first. Even though real estate is local, and often hyper local, each market will still follow a general series of market stages. All real estate markets essentially follow the same cycle, they just do it at different times and at their own pace. Historically, Read the rest of this entry »
Chilali Lodge Auctions
If advertising and local buzz has anything to do with it, all of the 11 units up for auction in the Chilali Lodge in Ketchum should sell like hot cakes. The auction, which is scheduled for February 19th has been highly publicized by the auction company who will be holding the sale.
Accelerated Marketing Partners has created quite a local buzz by widely publicizing the acution in local newspapers and through online media as well as through the local Read the rest of this entry »
Featured Real Estate Listing…420 Juniper Road Elkhorn at Sun Valley, Idaho
Enjoy this dramatic & magnificent log home in the Twin Creeks area of Elkhorn. This property offers stunning views of the Boulder Mountains. Surrounded on all sides by thousands of acres of open space and other estate lots. Private, yet only five minutes to Baldy and Ketchum. Ski & hike out your back door and rarely run into anyone. Four suites with full baths in each. Thirty foot ceilings in great room, separate private apartment, master bedroom w/ steam room, wine storage, and access to all Elkhorn amenities.
This home s one of the lowest price luxury homes per square foot in the Sun Valley area. This home sits on an impressive 4.76 acres and the seller owns adjacent 3.68 acre lot which is currently listed separately for $995,000. Purchase together for a total of 8.44 acres of privacy. Exceptional location, classic log styling and custom features throughout. Offered for $2,795,000.
Offered by Coulter Properties.
Blunt Objects and Real Estate Photos
I read a great blog post the other day by a fellow Realtor about real estate photos. Here’s how she photographs her listings for the MLS and other marketing material:
1) Gather your camera, a towel, a cell phone and a blunt object.
2) Lay out towel on a hard surface.
3) Place camera on towel and wrap towel around camera.
3) Take blunt object and smash camera into tiny bits.
4) Use cell phone to call professional photographer.
I got a good laugh Read the rest of this entry »
Are you a 7?
Say you are considering selling your real estate. Say I asked you to rank yourself on a motivation scale from one to ten. One being low motivation and ten being high.
Unless you tell me you are a 7 or higher, I wouldn’t suggest you sell right now. At least for the time being. Why?
Well because in a nut shell, we’re in a buyer’s market. We have a large inventory of properties for sale in most locations and most price points in the valley. This is driving prices down. Many are distressed properties which further drives down values. Others still are bank owned foreclosures which really drives prices down.
The challenge I am finding is that when a seller who is not a 7 or higher lists thier property , it tends to not sell. So what does this Read the rest of this entry »
How to And How Not to Sell Your Home: Part One
Everyone wants to sell their house quickly and for the best price, yet many people keep making fundamental mistakes when putting their house on the market. Here is a series outlining what you, as a seller, should do and not do to ensure your home gets sold for the best possible price and in the best possible time.
DO:
1. List it for a price that is attractive to buyers while in the range of the house’s value. It may not be the price you personally think it is worth, or anywhere near the price you paid for it 5 years ago, but this is a buyer’s market– why would buyers pay a lot of money for a house when there are plenty of other houses that are worth as much but are listed for a far cheaper price? Chances are you won’t sell the house for as much as you paid for it, but if you are looking to sell your home quickly, list your house for a price that is closer to what it is worth today, not how much it was worth a couple of years ago.
DON’T:
1. Reduce your price over and over again. While that reducing your price may attract buyers, if you repeatedly lower your price, you are actually discouraging a buyer from making an offer for two reasons. A) why should they agree to your current listed price if there’s a chance you’ll lower it again? and B) if you keep lowering the price, they might assume something is wrong with the house, that a lot of people have seen the house and rejected it, and thus you keep having to lower the price to compensate for whatever was wrong with it. Slashing your price once is ok, but small repeated reductions may actually scare off buyers.
Good luck and happy selling!
New Listing…Elk Creek Ranch in Camas County.
Hot off the presses….I just listed a package of building lots for sale in Camas County. At give away pricing. These particular lots are the majority from a development called Elk Creek Ranch. The lots are being offered for sale by the bank that originally financed the development.
Elk Creek Ranch is located in rural Camas County approximately eight miles east of Fairfield, Idaho. Several lots are approximately ten acres each and the others are approximately five acres each.
This is a great chance to make a buy on a rural building lot at prices that we have not seen in years. Elk Creek Ranch is located in beautiful country with wide open spaces, views and easy access to unlimited recreation opportunites including hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, skiing at Soldier Mountain Resort (Owned by Bruce Willis) Read the rest of this entry »
5 Strategies to Imporve Your Credit Score…And Why You Want To
Here’s an interesting article from guest blogger Shanna Wroten-Tucker Shanna.Tucker@Benchmark.US
It seems that as consumers we are increasingly held hostage by our credit scores. Most people know that lenders offer better loan terms to those with higher scores, but there are other ramifications as well. An insurance agent once told me that credit scores more highly correlate with insurance claims than does a person’s driving record. As a result, our insurance premiums are impacted by our credit scores. More and more frequently employers and government licensing agencies are using credit in their evaluation of prospective workers. And, I’ve even heard rumors that the I.R.S. uses credit scores to pre-screen for income tax audits. All good reasons to actively manage your credit scores. Here are some tips that will help you: Read the rest of this entry »
