A New Home Seller Resource

Wow! Today’s market is crazy. Homes are going under contract within days of being listed and are generally being sold for more than what fair market price was a mere month ago. It is a Seller’s Market for sure.

Values continue to rise

I want to talk about a few things.

• Why do people hesitate to sell?
• You’ve Got an Offer – How to be sure the Buyer is going to be able to buy?
• What is your home worth right now?
• What are things to consider when selling a home?

Some people are hesitant to sell because they have nowhere to go. As a Realtor, I can make several recommendations to help you with that. Let’s say we are out looking at new homes for you because you have decided to downsize a bit and pull your equity out of your current home while it is so high right now. While you are looking, someone makes an excellent offer on your home – one you don’t want to pass up. What to do? Well, we can write in a contingency to the contract that says the closing date will be determined by the purchase of your yet-to-find home. So, when you go do find a home and close on it, we also close on the sale of your home. It takes coordination, but that is one thing your Realtor is there for. Let’s say you just aren’t finding what you want – but you don’t want to pass up the excellent offer you have received. We could ask for a later closing date or you could consider temporarily storing your household goods and renting a small home or apartment until the right forever home comes available. If you decided to buy a new construction home, this is definitely a consideration because they are taking four to six months from start to finish on the new homes.

Another option would be to close on time, bank the money, and then rent your current home until you find something to buy. There are some buyers out there who would gladly accept this option, especially if they planned to buy your home as a rental investment property anyway. It gives them an instant reliable tenant and saves you money on storage fees. There are other options to consider as well and I would be happy to discuss them with you.

We are living in a time of historically low mortgage interest rates. As a Seller, when you receive an offer, I would recommend you require the buyer to get a second opinion on their loan. There are loan companies out there that are giving pre-approval letters out without verifying the financial ability of the buyer to actually buy. Prosperity Home Mortgage is a Berkshire Hathaway affiliated company that has instituted reliable pre-qualification procedures that almost guarantee the buyer will be able to close. Most lenders do a quick credit check, ask for income and liability information and print out a pre-approval letter. Then they being the process of gathering supporting information. Even then, they don’t run the file past an underwriter until a contract has been signed and the appraisal conducted. So, at the nth hour, the buyer could be turned down. With Prosperity’s Home Buyer Advantage Program, they underwrite the person (now, doesn’t that make more sense?) and then you just have the appraisal to deal with, but the buyer’s ability to borrow is guaranteed at that point. And with the Second Opinion Guarantee program, Prosperity can normally beat the rates of other companies, thereby saving the buyer money in the long run, so there is no downside them getting a second opinion.

How Much Can You Expect to Sell Your Home For? Using some powerful algorithms. our automated system can give you a pretty good estimate of your current value. However, it can result in a wide range of values because it doesn’t take into account any upgrades you may have made to your home. It only knows who has sold a home similar to yours, near yours, within the last few months. But it gives you a starting point to work from. Then you can call either myself 404-903-7653 or Greta 908-303-0136 to get a personalized market valuation.

What Is Your Home Worth?

Thank you reading my Blog. Since you hung in here with me for this long, please accept a digital copy of my new book, Secrets Every Home Seller Should Know. See you next time.

So You Are Moving into Something Smaller – Good Grief! Where will you put everything?

There is nothing that can done about it. Demographics in America are such that the bulk of the Baby Boomer Generation is nearing retirement. The kids have grown and have families of their own. That big house with all those stairs is no longer your dream home. You find you live in only a quarter of the house. Your bedroom/bathroom, living room, kitchen and breakfast area. Oh! And you use the laundry room and garage….But the rest? Not necessary anymore and pain to keep clean. What’s more, the house seems to have grown more stairs that are steeper than they seemed a few years ago when you were running up and down keeping up with the little ones. So it is finally time to downsize. I found a great 12-Step Guide that I want to share with you. No reason for me to draft something new when someone else has covered the topic so well.

But what they don’t cover is the emotional dynamics of downsizing. I just want you to be prepared.

Mom, Dad, as you know, starting about the time they become teenagers, your children start finding their friends more interesting to spend time with than you. You start to see them less and less. Then they grow up, get married and have children of their own. You have kept all their old memoirs in safekeeping for the day they have their own home and can come get everything. But they don’t. Their first home is either too small, or their jobs have forced them to move away or move often. The day comes that you want to sell and move into something smaller.

One of two things will happen with regards to those memoirs. They will either come get them or they will tell you that they really don’t want all that junk from their childhood. They have moved past that….. It saddens you and as you go through things you must make tough decisions of what to keep and what to get rid of. My advice? Sell it all and set the funds aside for your grandchildren – or spend it on your next vacation.

The next emotional dynamic? Half the kids want you to sell and move into a ranch style home in a nice 55+ Community where you will be able to enjoy friends your own age. The other half doesn’t want you to sell the home they grew up in and hoped to raise their own children in someday. (Well, not really, but for some reason they feel impelled to say so.) Don’t let them make you feel guilty. Take lots of pictures and give them to them. Don’t forget to include pictures of all their old memoirs they didn’t bother to come get and you subsequently sold at the yard sale.

Don’t let the past hold you up. Even though you may now be considered a Senior Citizen, you are vibrant, have a whole lot of living to do and not quite as much time ahead of you as behind you to do everything, so you better get crackin’!  Sell the old place, move into the newer, smaller, less cluttered and easier to keep clean homestead and invite the kids over for dinner. And order pizza so you don’t have to cook!

Oh! And those of you who are downsizing and don’t have children to deal with? Here’s that link again for the 12-Steps to downsizing.

That’s it for this blog. Hope you found entertaining as well as helpful.

 

Why You Shouldn’t Try to Sell Your Home Yourself

FOR SALE BY OWNER?

Everyone knows the market is slowly recovering. The Fed has even hiked interest rates (well, hiked may be a bit of an exaggeration) as an indicator that the US housing market, among other economic factors, is on the mend. As a result,  some homeowners might consider trying to sell their home on their own, a phenomena known in the industry as a For Sale by Owner (FSBO). There are a lot of on-line marketing schemes which have been set up to help FSBO participants. All you need is to put a sign out front and an ad on a FSBO website and you are good to go, right? How hard can it be?

Well, Tom Ferry, a well known Real Estate guru recently tweeted, “Studies have shown that the typical house sold by the homeowner sells for less than when it’s sold by an agent http://bit.ly/1QLUFbK

It’s a great article I would encourage anyone thinking of selling by themselves to read it.  I want to emphasize a couple key items. This is not like selling your car. You cannot pull out the registration, flip it over and sign it over to the new owner. It doesn’t work that way. Especially when there is a mortgage in place which must be paid off and the buyer is getting a new mortgage.

The paperwork involved in selling and buying a home is quite extensive. I counted the number of times one of my buyers had to sign his name during a closing ceremony and he signed it 68 times. Now granted, some of those forms were copies, but the majority of them were unique documents. I closed on a cash purchase home and although there were not 68 signatures required, there were still more than 31.

The Real Estate contracts and forms are designed to protect both the seller and the buyer, so you want to use good ones. Most Real Estate Agents have access to good contracts. I recommend you find one that is member of the Georgia Association of REALTORS®, as the GAR has some of the best copyrighted contracts available. A non-member can also pay a fee to have access to the forms.

And really! Why do most people want to sell their homes themselves? They don’t want to pay a commission to an agent. Think of your agent as a temp hire – you are the boss. You are hiring them to represent you and assist in completing a complex task. If they do a good job, you are likely to make more money from the sale of your home than you would if you didn’t use them, so where is the risk?

 

Open House or For Sale Ready?

For Sale by Susan Carroll with BHHS

This particular home was the property of Stanley and Kim, that was sold by Susan Carroll just a few months ago. They particularly viewed the declutter stage of their home as a nuisance and a very stressful process. While this may be the case, there are steps we can take to make the process easier and less stressful than this couple made it out to be. The biggest mistake that Stanley and Kim made is that they looked at their entire house in all of its chaos. That is what we want to do if we want to become stressed. To combat this stress, get out a wall calendar and begin planning what room will be tackled when. Create a plan and go day by day. The more little things you begin to do, the less big things you have left to do. Now is also a great time for you and your family to go through all of your belongings and decide what you are getting rid of and what is coming with you to your new home. This can allow you to slowly start packing as well.

Selling your home, whether you are having an open house or not, is a mind change. You are transitioning from having a home, to selling it, to buying a new one. So the first major transition is one of the mind and heart, transitioning them from your current home to being just a house. So, walk around your home as it currently is. Yes get up and walk around, reminisce all the memories that were made, all the laughter and tears that occurred there. We know your home has emotional and intrinsic value to you. Now your value has to shift to somewhere new. So from this day forward you need to say goodbye. If you sell this home like it is your own flesh the process will be so much harder to let it go. So this is no longer your home, this is the property you have up for sale. With this being said, the declutter process that is essential for open house and the selling process is going around and taking all personal items down and out. Whether that is family pictures, kid’s artwork on the fridge, memorabilia from graduations, weddings, anniversaries etc., anything that says anything about you, your personal beliefs, or political beliefs. This is because you need to allow potential buyers to be able to see themselves in the home as they are walking around, not you and your family in it.

Ask yourself: what stage of your life did you buy this house in? Have you outgrown it? What type of lifestyle does the house you are selling cater to? What kind of lifestyle does the neighborhood cater to? Identify who you are selling your house to and see what changes you need to make to update it to fit that generation or type of potential buyers.

The main thing about selling your house is transferring from “mine and ours” to “your and theirs.” The Buyers need room to “move in” mentally and emotionally before they do physically. Do not do as Stanley and Kim did and get overwhelmed. Set up a plan, get organized, and begin. The process goes a lot smoother if you have a checklist that you can see things getting done as you mark them off.