Curb Appeal Can Get Buyers in the Door
When it comes to purchasing a home, buyers do indeed judge a book by its cover, according to a new nationwide survey of real estate agents commissioned by JELD-WEN® Windows & Doors.
Curb appeal has traditionally been an important part of the sales process; however, the recently released Real Estate Agent Community Trends (REACT) survey found that it is absolutely essential to getting buyers in the door and fostering a sale. Specifically, 82 percent of agent respondents said they have had potential buyers decline to look at the interior of a home based on the exterior appearance.
Time For Spring Cleaning For Spring Sales
It’s winter, time to hang the “For Sale” sign.
Homeowners shouldn’t dally if they want to sell their houses in spring, the peak season for real-estate transactions, real-estate agents say.
“If they know they want to move by summer, now is not too early to bring somebody in,” said Barbara Nowak, an agent with Long & Foster in Burke, Va.
Now — not when the tulips are in bloom — is the time to start decluttering, cleaning, making repairs, getting paperwork together and interviewing real-estate agents.
10 Reasons Why Your House Is Unsellable
O.K. maybe your house isn’t next to a cemetery but here’s a list of the big no-no’s, the relics that make a house unsellable:
Small houses
Small is not the new big I’m afraid, at least not yet anyway. People like to have space to live in and a very small house can deal a serious blow to your possible asking price. If you can’t afford to physically increase the size of your house, you need to do everything possible to make it look bigger.
8 Smart Moves for Home Buyers, Sellers in ‘08
Heading into 2008, the market just isn’t turning around as so many predicted. The industry, it seems, has been caught up in a game of “projecting.” Meanwhile, this pesky subprime headache lingers on as we start to draw a clearer picture of how recklessly this shaky housing-market foundation was laid. It’s a hangover that will last well beyond New Year’s Day.
In contrast to the billions in risky ARM loans that were advanced to questionable borrowers toward the end of the boom years, many credit-worthy buyers are now getting a different kind of arm — a straight-arm — when they seek out mortgages amidst a backdrop of spiraling foreclosures and plummeting prices.
7 Tips for Selling a Home Faster
1. Don’t overprice your property. According to a 2002 academic study of 3,490 California listings, homes without a price reduction sold for 97 percent of the initial list price, whereas homes with a price reduction sold for 88 percent of the initial list price.
2. Set your price to show up in Web searches. A September 2007 Redfin study analyzed how online search filters affect traffic to a listing. Because real estate sites filter on price in $25,000 or $50,000 increments, listings priced at or below these thresholds — $250,000 rather than $251,000, or $325,000 rather than $326,000 — get as much as 7.1 percent more online visits.