If you’re planning to sell your home, chances are good that you’re seeking a lifestyle level-up: you want to bring your home’s size, shape, features, location, maintenance and financial obligations into better alignment with your life – or your future. Making sure that you execute a home sale that actually does align your home with your life requires a lot of prep work.
Since the housing crisis began in 2008, approximately 4.6 million homes were lost to foreclosure, according to CoreLogic. The vast majority of those homeowners became renters. Even as housing recovered, credit tightened, pushing even more potential buyers out of homeownership and into rentals, both apartments and single-family rental homes.
There are now 43 million renter households, or 35 percent of all U.S. households, the highest rate in over a decade for all age groups, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies; 4 million more renters today than there were in 2007. For those aged 25 to 54, rental rates are the highest since the center began record keeping in the early 1970s.
As a result, rental vacancies have fallen dramatically, and rents have skyrocketed.
Real estate agents see it all.
From the unmade beds to the overstuffed garages to the “What were they thinking?” decor. Over the years, they learn a thing or two: Why some houses sell, while others linger on the market. Why some promising buyers never make it to the closing table. How to get a better deal on the mortgage. Even just how much the other agents stand to make on your home. And the good news is, they want to share. Whether you’re a buyer, seller or both, here are six things real estate agents wish you already knew.
With the holidays approaching, sellers often wonder if they should keep their properties on the market or take them off? Or if they haven’t listed their homes yet, should they wait until after the first of the year? Maybe hold off until spring?
Conventional wisdom used to be that you shouldn’t even try to sell your home during the busy holiday season. Potential homebuyers were too preoccupied with attending parties, cooking meals, buying presents or planning vacations. With all that going on, there just wasn’t time to ride around with a real estate agent, looking at properties.
But with the Internet, smartphones, tablets and our always-on lifestyle, that conventional wisdom isn’t relevant anymore. The reality is, the homebuying season is now year-round. Here’s why you should consider listing your home during the holidays, or even in January.
Selling your first home can feel like a real estate roller coaster: it has lots of twists and turns — and even some points where you just hold your breath and wait to see how things turn out. However, you have more control over this wild ride than you may realize. Here are a few facts that can minimize the anxiety and maximize the outcome of your first home-selling experience.
You found the perfect agent, your list price is dead on, and your property is pristine. Now what? If you’re committed to doing everything within your power to sell your home, but it’s not coming as easily as you’d hoped, it’s time to get innovative. Here are a few outside-the-box strategies for getting your home sold.
A recent study of real estate agents in Ontario, Canada, found that smoking can reduce a home’s resale value by 20 percent. The study was commissioned by Pfizer Canada, a pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Selling the home can pose quite the challenge too. Eighty-eight percent of the agents surveyed say that it’s more difficult to sell a home where the residents were smokers.
Selling your home isn’t easy. In fact, it’s one of those experiences that can cause even the most stable, calm human being to feel panic, outrage, and anxiety — and sometimes all of the above, at the same time. We get it. Even worse, these volatile emotions can lead you to say silly things that affect your home selling strategy. Here are five ridiculous refrains we’ve heard from sellers over the years, along with some insights to keep them from infiltrating your actual home selling decisions.
If your home has gorgeous ocean views, sits on acres of land, or is in the most prestigious neighborhood in town, it’s pretty easy to know what to lead with in your marketing. But if you have a normal house in a normal neighborhood, it can be hard to know where to start. Some features that you take for granted might have major appeal to home buyers. Here are seven often overlooked home features to make your listing shine.
In the dramatic world of the theater, they say “it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings.“ In the dramatic world of the real estate market, headlines touting multiple offers and appreciating home values can feel like a premature declaration that the recession is over to some homeowners.
As you’ve probably heard a million times, real estate is hyperlocal. And it’s true – in many, many markets across the country, a mood of exuberant recovery has eclipsed the recession era’s stagnation, doom and gloom. But the fat lady hasn’t sung for the 10 million homeowners who are still upside down on their mortgages, according to CoreLogic, or for sellers whose homes aren’t following the national trend of flying off the market after receiving dozens of contingency-free, cash offers.
Here are a few multiple personality market musts for smart sellers…
