Why You Should Sell Your Home During the Holidays
Despite the fact that most shy away from listing their home during the holidays, it’s actually a great time to sell your home. Below are reasons you should deck your halls—and then sell them.
Time off. The holidays are a great time to sell! There can be people relocating before the New Year, or people who have time off to shop for a home.
Weather. It can be good for buyers, too, because in states with wet weather, buyers will see homes when it matters, not when the sun has dried everything out and made everything look pretty. After all, roofs never leak in August!
Black out dates. For sellers, avoid stress by advertising the days you DON'T want to show your home so you are not bothered. Maybe Christmas Eve/Day, New Year's Eve/Day, and Thanksgiving weekend? It causes a lot of stress on whomever maintains the home to worry about providing a happy holiday and keeping the house clean!
Decorations. Decorate to the hilt! Have fun! It will exemplify the love you have for your home. Personal holiday photos are an exception; you still want to keep the house rather "mute" as far as truly personal innuendo. That is the only thing that might turn off a buyer.
Variables. Many sellers and their agents argue about the best time to sell. The reality is that if you want to sell, the best time is usually now. A day, a week, or a month can change interest rates, the economy, the political climate, and even your health. Selling a house is hard and if you want to sell, why put it off if you can do it now.
ICYMI: 15 Things Realtors Want Builders to Know
From dirty model homes to pushy salespeople, here are the top blunders that real estate agents see builders make.
Home buyers rely on real estate agents for information about their local market that they can’t get anywhere else. In fact, real estate agents are home buyers’ most important source of information about new homes after the Internet. Last year, 33% of buyers learned about their new homes via a real estate agent.
Agents’ influence is not declining despite consumers’ use of the Web, and for most new home transactions, Americans still prefer to have a Realtor. Last year, 87% of buyers purchased their home through a real estate agent or broker—a share that has steadily increased from 69% in 2001, according to the National Association of Realtors.
In the course of helping their clients find the right house, these buyer agents meet a lot of builders and walk through an untold number of houses. This means they see where builders are making the grade and where they are slipping up. While many of them compliment builders for doing a great job even during tough economic conditions, they have also have strong opinions about what building pros could do better. Here are 15 of the top things they wish builders did differently.
Walkability: It’s Not Just for Grown-Ups
In the last 75 years, humans have done everything to keep from walking. Now, walking is cool, with "walkability" becoming a buzz word in real estate. Whodathunkit?
In today’s real estate market, adults buy homes and pay attention to a nifty analytic attached to the homes they might buy - walkability. In short, something is walkable if you can get everything you need, including food, health and physical social connection, if your car broke down for a week. It turns out that walkability may be just as important for kids, having even more profound effects.
Walkability means proximity to certain places (like a park) as well as agreeable paths to them: walkable neighborhoods should have sidewalks for safety, vegetation for aesthetic, trees for cooling effects in the summer and perceived safety. After all, what good is having a park across the street if the street is a freeway and you can’t cross it?
7 Things Everyone Should Know Before Buying Their First Home
In my 20s, the idea of buying a home or apartment was similar to how I felt about going to college when I was a tween—I knew (or hoped, anyway) that it would happen one day, but rarely thought about it or how I’d plan for it. Now that I’m 30, though, more friends and acquaintances are taking steps toward becoming homeowners—and some have actually achieved it. Impressive, right? But also intimidating as hell.
In an effort to get a little bit of education about what goes into the process of buying a home, I talked to Seattle-based broker Matt Parker, author of The Real Estate Agent Talks and Real Estate Smart: The New Home Buying Guide. I also grilled my friend Sarah who, at age 29, bit the bullet and bought an apartment in Brooklyn. Like me, she was a real estate newbie, so she learned a lot during the process.
5 Ways You're Sabotaging Your Home Sale
You'd think that with interest rates low, for-sale homes wouldn't be sitting on the market all that long - not with eager buyers waiting to snap one up with 30-year fixed mortgage rates at 3.6% this week, according to BankingMyWay.com.
But homes aren't moving as fast as one might expect.
According to Realtor.com, the average U.S. home for sale is spending 65 days on the market. That's a good number, but not a great one, and there may be an underlying reason why homes aren't selling faster.
"In a sellers' market with low interest rates for buyers, it's hard to believe there are many homes sitting for too long without an offer," states John Lazenby, president of the Orlando Regional Realtor Association. "So, if your house isn't selling in this hot market, could you be to blame?"
Specifically, homeowners can get in their own way on a home sale in multiple, deal-killing ways - and TheStreet has asked industry experts to target five of the worst.
4. Not leveraging photos and online images -Real estate sales are technology driven now, says Matt Parker, author of Real Estate Smart: The New Home Buying Guide and a real estate professional in Seattle. Professional online photos can increase your sales price from $3,400 to $11,200, according to Redfin. "If you get cheap on photos, you are gambling with the home sale," the company states.
Tiny Homes Are Making a Bigger Mark
Tiny houses are trending bigger nationwide. Interest in small-home living among the public has gained momentum since the recession, and made some Americans crave a simpler, less expensive way to live, according to U.S. News & World Report.
These small homes, often built on a trailer and portable, tend to be under 700 square feet. They tend to cost a fraction of a typical home, as low as $10,000 or up to $100,000, depending on the size.
TV shows are giving viewers a peek at this new type of living, especially on networks that HGTV that have several shows featuring small-home living such as “Tiny House Hunters,” “Tiny House Nation,” and “Tiny House, Big Living.”
Matt Parker, a real estate broker in Seattle, says some of his clients are finding such small spaces can even be more functional than a large floorplan that was built 30 years ago. However, zoning requirements are limiting new construction of smaller homes and still favoring larger bigger builds. He says supply may be the bigger issue with small-home living than demand.
Millennial Mini Mansions: An Untapped Gold Mine
Millennials and Gen-X’ers, who make up well over half of the buying public (according to the National Association of Realtors, 59%), are getting married later, earning dual incomes and delaying parenthood. Most importantly, they aren’t at home, they are enjoying life and they want tiny houses!
"If I had 100 of those built today, I could sell 100 of them, today, at a huge profit. But, I can’t build them, nor can you get a loan for one, because neither of us can get loans for them."
The residential builder I was speaking with last week owns a family business that has successfully built homes all over Seattle for over one hundred years. I assumed, at this point, he could get a loan for just about anything with a furnace and a refrigerator. Sounds like he won’t be able to go near the Tiny Homes trend.
At this Quebec condo, you won’t have to hide your Airbnb rentals
The Way Home is a series looking at the issues and challenges for people who are in the market for a home.
Airbnb's rise to prominence in Canada shows no signs of abating.
A report this year, by the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto and HLT Advisory Inc., revealed that the number of Airbnb listings in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary has grown by 140 per cent since early 2015.
But while owners of detached, semi-detached and townhouses in areas zoned for residential and mixed use have happily cashed in, most condominium owners have been left out in the cold, or in the shadows. That's not to say condo owners haven't put their homes up for short-term rentals, but condominium bylaws generally prevent such rentals.
However, a new condo development in Quebec City may be about to change all that. Condos LB9, which is yet to break ground and started selling its units last June, is located in the Lebourgneuf area of the Quebec capital, about a two-minute walk from the Vidéotron Centre, which would be the home of the city's hockey team if the National Hockey League decides to return.
The units range in price from $159,000 to $660,000, and so far 40 to 50 units have been sold, with the developers looking to break ground later this year.
"I think it's really interesting because I've sold a couple places in the last year where people had this specific request but it couldn't work for them," says Matt Parker, a realtor with Keller Williams in Puget Sound, Wash., and author of Real Estate Smart: The New Home Buying Guide.
Grab these home and garden and real estate titles for the end of your summer reading
"The Real Estate Agent Talks: So New Agents Can Succeed in the Tough Conversations" by Matt Parker (Smith Publicity) should be mandatory reading for any new real estate agent. It's also a great book for homebuyers and sellers who want to understand how the real estate business really works. The book is filled with easy-to-read, personal anecdotes, practical advice and written in a casual style which makes us suspect the author would someday like to become a fiction writer. It also makes us more empathetic towards those honest, hard-working agents.
Five Questions to Ask Before Buying a Summer Home
It all begins with an idea.
My brother’s favorite summer car game was table tennis. Off the back of my head in a minivan, with a rubber bouncy ball on a string.
Now, as adults, we all play a different game in summer car rides. It’s called: “Hey, we should all chip in buy a cabin together.” Done well, this is a generational dream come true.
Done poorly, you will actually be daydreaming of feeding a family member into a chipper. Perhaps no summer decision could have more lasting effects than the purchase of a summer home.
Keep Vacation Homes from Splintering Your Family Tree
It all begins with an idea.
Matt Parker, a Seattle real estate agent and author of "Real Estate Smart," offers tips on how relatives can share a vacation house without putting a strain on the family:
People I've known have had diabolical family fights based on summer cabins. The second most difficult type of real estate transaction to navigate is one where there's multiple siblings trying to decide what to do with a property they've inherited. If four names are on a property, you need four signatures to sell [it].
In most cases, there is a family that clearly likes the cabin more and can handle the responsibility. A lot of times, it would be as simple as the person who's passing the cabin on to just say: "Hey look, brother Johnny clearly likes it more than anyone else. Is it OK if we give it to him and subtract it from his inheritance?" And then you still have a friendly agreement that the rest of you can use it several weekends a year. You need a chain of command and a rotating schedule of who gets [certain] holidays.
Home Prices on the Rise
It all begins with an idea.
A tight supply of homes for sale and lower mortgage rates are pushing up home values. Sellers and homeowners are reaping the rewards.
Kaushik Mukerjee and Preeti Vasishtha faced stiff competition when they set out to buy a home last spring. The couple, who live in Northern Virginia and have an 8-year-old son, were looking for a home in a good school district, but they lost out to other bidders on two houses before their offer on a townhouse stuck. "In one case we competed against 10 other offers, and the home sold for $20,000 above list price," Mukerjee says. Ultimately, the couple paid $502,000—slightly above list price—for a 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom townhouse in Burke, Va.
Furthermore, a large cohort of baby boomers are buying and selling, as many boomers downsize for retirement. Adding to the big squeeze on buyers is a huge housing shortage: The number of homes in the U.S. listed for sale on Zillow in December was down 7.5% from the previous year and is at the lowest level ever recorded by the company. The U.S. housing market is facing an undersupply of homes for sale of 3.8 million, which is driving up home prices and putting pressure on housing affordability, says George Ratiu, Realtor.com's senior economist.
For about one in four home buyers in 2019, the home-search process took more than a year, Realtor.com found. "The housing shortage is brutal," says Matt Parker, a Seattle real estate agent and author of Real Estate Smart: The New Home Buying Guide. "Buyers can go months without looking at any new properties."