The Most Important Time in Selling Your Home – Week One

September 11, 2010 Leave a comment

OK – so you’ve decided to sell your home and buy one that suits your lifestyle better than your present one. You may want a house with more bedrooms for your growing family or perhaps a condominium to get away from shoveling snow during Central PA’s winters. Whatever the circumstances, perhaps the most important decision you’ll have to make in determining how successful you will be is setting the price on your home, and in most cases, this is where sellers end up shooting themselves in the foot.

It’s human nature to want to price a home high to attract that one buyer that will magically appear and fall all over themselves to give a seller anything they want, but we all know that these buyers are a figment of the imagination. In other instances, sellers set their price too high anticipating that buyers will automatically try to offer something lower. For some reason, sellers have it in their mind that every home ever offered for sale has sold for something less than the original list price.

In the past, when a seller put their home up for sale, all they considered were what comparable properties similar to theirs sold for in the market. While this is certainly a good idea, it is by no means the only thing to consider in this hyper-competitive market we’re in today. Read more of this post

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Considering Selling Your Home as a FSBO? Hmmm – - maybe not.

June 3, 2010 2 Comments

Hmm! This isn't as easy as I thought it would be.

So you’re thinking about putting your home on the market and moving to that condo/farm/new build/quiet neighborhood/high-rise/bigger home/smaller home (select one).  Even though prices on homes seem to be stagnant and you won’t be able to get as much for your home as you could just three years ago, the deals you can get as a buyer after you sell your home seem too good to pass up.

Your natural inclination is to save the commission and try to sell your home yourself which will leave extra cash to put toward your next home.  Simple math says that if you don’t pay a REALTOR® a commission to sell your home, you’ll have more left over to buy your new home.  You may want to reconsider your strategy.

In a recent article posted on FORBES.com, they make the case that going it alone has drawbacks that most potential ‘For Sale By Owners’ don’t even consider.

Here is the article posted in its entirety:

Five Reasons Why You Still Need a Real Estate Agent ¹

The proliferation of services that help homebuyers and sellers complete their own real estate transactions is relatively recent, and it may have you wondering whether using a real estate agent is becoming a relic of a bygone era. While doing the work yourself can save you the significant commission rates many real estate agents command, for many, flying solo may not be the way to go–and could end up being more costly than a realtor’s commission in the long run. Buying or selling a home is a major financial (and emotional) undertaking. Find out why you shouldn’t discard the notion of hiring an agent just yet.

1. Better Access/More Convenience

A real estate agent’s full-time job is to act as a liaison between buyers and sellers. This means that he or she will have easy access to all other properties listed by other agents. Both the buyer’s and seller’s agent work full time as real estate agents and they know what needs to be done to get a deal together. For example, if you are looking to buy a home, a real estate agent will track down homes that meet your criteria, get in touch with sellers’ agents and make appointments for you to view the homes. If you are buying on your own, you will have to play this telephone tag yourself. This may be especially difficult if you’re shopping for homes that are for sale by owner.

Similarly, if you are looking to sell your home yourself, you will have to solicit calls from interested parties, answer questions and make appointments. Keep in mind that potential buyers are likely to move on if you tend to be busy or don’t respond quickly enough. Alternatively, you may find yourself making an appointment and rushing home, only to find that no one shows up.

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“It’s in the Dirt” – The Low-Ball Offer

June 9, 2009 1 Comment

"And the payoff pitch is - - in the dirt!

Image courtesy of Flickr

I consider myself a ‘casual’ baseball fan.  I watch a couple of games a year on TV and maybe take in a minor league game every once in awhile.  While most guys attend games to watch balls fly out of the ballpark (“Chicks dig the long ball!”), I’m more cerebral and love a good pitcher’s duel.  There is nothing like watching a pitcher that has total control over his pitches as he nibbles at the corners of the strike zone trying to get a batter to swing at a bad pitch, or if they make contact, will weakly dribble it into an infielder’s glove for an easy out at first base.  However, there is a fine line between nibbling at the corners and just throwing a pitch away.  It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.  The same applies to submitting an offer on a listing.  There are some offers that cause the seller to take a good hard look at (and occasionally take a swing at) while there are others that are real head-scratchers.  As in baseball, the low-ball offer that is a waste of everyone’s time is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

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