4 things not to do when putting your house on the market

RIS Media re-posted an older blog recently, and its advice still rings true. There are plenty of things you SHOULD do when putting your house on the market. But what about the things you shouldn’t do? Read on for more:

So you’ve decided to put your home on the market. Congratulations! Hopefully, you’ve brought a rockin’ realtor on board to help list your home and together you’ve done your due diligence on what to ask for. As you start checking things off your to-do list, it’s also important to pay mind of what not to do. Below are a handful of things to get you started.

Don’t over-improve.
As you ready your home for sale, you may realize you will get a great return on your investment if you make a couple of changes. Updating the appliances or replacing that cracked cabinet in the bathroom are all great ideas. However, it’s important not to over-improve, or make improvements that are hyper-specific to your tastes. For example, not everyone wants a pimped out finished basement equipped with a wet bar and lifted stage for their rock and roll buds to jam out on. (Okay, everyone should want that.) What if your buyers are family-oriented and want a basement space for their kids to play in? That rock-and-roll room may look to them like a huge project to un-do. Make any needed fixes to your space, but don’t go above and beyond—you may lose money doing so.

Don’t over-decorate.
Over-decorating is just as bad as over-improving. You may love the look of lace and lavender, but your potential buyer may enter your home and cringe. When prepping for sale, neutralize your decorating scheme so it’s more universally palatable.

Image result for interior decoration house

Don’t hang around.
Your agent calls to let you know they will be bringing buyers by this afternoon. Great! You rally your whole family, Fluffy the dog included, to be waiting at the door with fresh baked cookies and big smiles. Right? Wrong. Buyers want to imagine themselves in your space, not be confronted by you in your space. Trust, it’s awkward for them to go about judging your home while you stand in the corner smiling like a maniac. Get out of the house, take the kids with you, and if you can’t leave for whatever reason, at least go sit in the backyard. (On the other hand, if you’re buying a home and not selling, then making it personal is the way to go, especially when writing your offer letter. Pull those heartstrings!)

Don’t take things personally.
Real estate is a business, but buying and selling homes is very, very emotional. However, when selling your homes, try your very best not to take things personally. When a buyer lowballs you or says they will need to replace your prized 1970s vintage shag carpet with something “more modern,” try not to raise your hackles.

And all of this is sage advice, choosing the right realtor to work with will streamline that process, talk you off the ledge and help you navigate the offer(s) and in the end if you hired right, will give you peace of mind.

Landscaping tips to improve home value

I wanted to go back to a blog I saw a few weeks ago. It’s an RIS Media blog about landscaping and how you can make the most out of your yards when trying to sell. Read below:

Landscaping is one of the most important ways to increase your property’s value quickly. In fact, a gorgeous landscape design can increase the value of your home by at least 5 to 11 percent—and maybe more. The best part about landscaping is that even though it’s one of the most valuable home improvements you can make, it’s also one of the easiest. If you’re wondering how to turn your landscape into one of your home’s most valuable assets, here are some tips to get you started.

1. Match Landscape to Your Home’s Style

The best way to get an excellent return on investment with landscaping is to make sure it fits with your home’s style. For instance, if you own a Victorian home, a Japanese garden will be sorely out of place and may even lower your home’s value rather than add to it. In this instance, you’re much better off with a country or cottage-style landscape that blends in with the old-fashioned formality of your home.

The same holds true for more modern home styles, such as the prairie or industrial style. If your home falls into one of these categories, you’ll want to stay away from square, formal gardens or a profusion of airy blooms. Instead, create a more modern landscape by relying on plenty of greenery and natural-looking beds that fit the contours of your property.

2. Design With a Strategy in Mind

You’ll need to have a good strategy. That means you shouldn’t clutter the entire yard with various high-maintenance plantings, but you also shouldn’t have plain grass with no landscaping. A study by the Virginia Tech Department of Horticulture found that a good foundation planting along with a couple of well-designed points of interest can increase your home’s value by up to 42 percent.

By that same token, you should encourage diversity among your plantings without taking it too far. The ideal landscape has a good mixture of shrubs and perennials, but it doesn’t have one of every kind of plant that you can find at the garden center. Instead, it has a uniform look with just enough diversity to make it interesting, but not so little that it becomes boring.

3. Achieve Seasonal Balance

A profusion of spring blooms won’t interest potential buyers who look at your home during other parts of the year. Think about ways to make your landscape attractive all year — blooming bulbs for spring, annual beds around the house during the summer, shrubs with brightly colored leaves in the fall, and evergreens for the winter. Even though most buyers will be looking at your home during one season, they’ll notice the balance you’ve created and they’ll think about how beautiful the home will be as the seasons change.

4. Plant Trees

A few simple trees can make an enormous difference to the sale price of your home. In one study, simply living on a tree-lined street added between 10 to 15 percent to the sale price compared to neighborhoods with fewer trees. So why are trees worth so much? Trees remove carbon dioxide and pollution from the air, so people view them as an eco-friendly option. The shade helps keep neighborhoods and homes cooler and more pleasant, which in turn cuts air conditioning costs. Trees are also a stress reliever — people enjoy relaxing in their shade or gazing at the leafy view.

5. Edge Your Lawn

Few things look nicer than a healthy, vibrant, carefully maintained lawn — except for a lawn that is all of those things and neatly edged. The confined look of an edged lawn gives it an easy-to-maintain look. In other words, no weed whipping or weeding required.

Edging along driveways, sidewalks and garden beds also shows prospective buyers how meticulous you have been concerning the property’s upkeep. They’ll know that if you’re willing to keep the edges of your yard looking nice, the rest of the property is likely in pristine condition, too.

Of all improvements to boost home value, landscape is one that will get you the largest return on your investment. Just make sure that you design your landscape with a plan, and don’t let that design become so complex that the mere thought of all the maintenance chases away your buyers.

A quick comment: I heard Jay Vorhees at JVM Lending telling me this after I made a comment on one of his blogs. The neighbor down the street had a bunch of Juniper bushes, which did not give great curb appeal and the house sat on the market. Had they removed those bushes and done some generic landscaping, that house would have probably sold for $100k more as a similar one did come on the market with a nicely landscaped front yard and sold in less time and for about $100k more!

Reasons to buy in the off-season!

Lizzie Weakley of RIS Media’s Housecall wrote a blog recently about why it’s okay to buy in the off-season. I want to piggy-back off of that here. First of all, yes, there is an “off-season” in real estate. For the most part, winter is the time of year that the industry slows down in markets around the country.

However, there are a few good reasons why the off-season might actually be a great time to buy a home, especially in the Bay Area! As Weakley lists, there are fewer buyers crowding the markets. This decrease in competition is an excellent advantage for any prospective home-buyer. On that note, sellers seem to accept lower bids in the winter because of the low competition. In our area, we also don’t have to worry about trudging through snow storms to see a listing (one of the major reason for a slow-down), in addition to the holidays when most people are entertaining or having family visit.

Everything can move a little bit faster in winter. Home inspections can get done quicker, and mortgage companies tend to finish paperwork faster, too, because – again – they don’t have as much traffic. I should mention that in the Bay Area, with our warmer climate in Spring, the winter “off-season” tends to be much shorter than in other places, but still usually extends for a couple months at the end of the year and wraps around into January (we are nearing the end of the off-season now). Often buyers are out in January, but the sellers have not yet readied their home for sale, so we often find a switch back to a seller’s market this time of year. We will see what 2019 holds.

One more perk to buying homes in the winter? Us real estate agents have more time to dedicate to you! Sure, we love to give as much personalized attention as possible to each and every client, but the truth of the matter is that we get busy in peak seasons too. When I can focus all of my energy on one listing, it’s almost always smooth-sailing and everything gets finished at the speed of light!

Next time you are thinking of buying a home, and read that you should wait until the weather warms up again, give it a second thought. There are some big-time perks to buying in the off-season!

11 reasons your home isn’t selling

RIS Media shared a story from Charles Muotoh giving 11 reasons your home may not be selling. I found the piece very interesting and have summarized the points below, and added some commentary. Let me know what you think!

You overvalued your property: Overpriced homes will not sell. Simple as that. If you have an experienced real estate agent, they can give you an accurate value of your home.

Your listing is poor: You can’t poorly write the description of your home without any images. It will be skipped. Work with your realtor to make the listing attractive and interesting.

You’re always present at showings: Do not get in your agent’s way at showings. Let them do what they are experts at. Buyers don’t want you hovering over them the whole time anyway.

You’re too attached: If you are too stubborn to refuse to negotiate your price down, then there’s a good chance that you’ve become too attached to your home. That will make selling difficult.

You haven’t had your home professionally cleaned: What kind of buyer in their right mind will want a dirty house? Ask your realtor to recommend a professional cleaner for the carpets and windows before showing your home.

You haven’t staged your home: Never show an empty house, because it’ll make it hard for buyers to picture living in it. Always have it staged. Your realtor should have a stager on speed dial!

You kept up all of your personal décor: If you keep your home personal (with pictures, etc.), buyers will feel uncomfortable in your house. Take those down before showing the home!

Your home improvements are too personalized: If you tailored your kids’ rooms to their specific obsessions, that’s great…until you need to sell the home. Those little touches could scare off buyers.

Your home is too cluttered: Clutter can still be an issue in a clean home. Don’t keep too much furniture in the rooms – it will make your house feel smaller than it is!

Your home is in need of too many repairs: If a buyer knows he or she has to do a bunch of repairs, they are less likely to want to make a move. That’s a lot of extra effort and cost on their parts, even if the repairs are minor.

You choose the wrong real estate agent: You may have noticed a theme throughout many of these previous points. Choosing the right real estate agent is absolutely essential to the selling process. We can make all the difference in selling your home for the right price, in a reasonable amount of time!

Things NOT to do when your house goes on the market

You’ve probably seen endless lists about how to sell your home. Everything from choosing the realtor, to the staging, to the deliberation is under the microscope. But how often do you get told how NOT to do things? RIS Media has put together a good four-step process for how to not get in your own way when selling a home.

First, don’t over-improve the house, the article says. This is good advice. While it’s important to clean up any holes and cracks in the wall, and make sure the lighting is fresh, etc., doing too much can be damaging to your case. But if you go out and make your dream changes to the house right before you sell it, you better hope your potential buyers see it as an awesome improvement, too, and not a large project to fix.

Next, don’t over-decorate. Simple, neutral colors and decorations will be just fine. Similarly to the first point, if you decorate your home with a bunch of lace, lavender and lemon scent because they are things you like, you’ve done too much. What if a buyer walks in and is immediately overwhelmed by it all? Keep it simple. Remember, the buyers are the ones who get to decorate when they move in. This is why I pay for a staging consult; because it tells you what to remove, and then I highly recommend doing some staging as it makes a huge difference in how your home is photographed. The online view of those photos will be the first impression a prospective buyer gets, and will help them decide if they want to see your home in person.

Third, and probably most important: do not BE THERE when the buyers arrive. If your realtor is going to show the house, try to get everyone (pets included) out for a couple hours. Go to a movie. Have lunch at the park. Find a way to get out of the potential buyers’ ways, so they aren’t attacked by a bunch of people upon walking in. Remember, they want to see themselves in the house. Not you!

Lastly, don’t take things too personally. You’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, tears, money and memories into your home. When a buyer lowballs you or requests repairs, don’t be upset. They are trying to afford their newest home, too. And they might tell you the reason they have to offer low is because of something they think needs updating that you disagree with. Bite your tongue, and keep negotiating. Remember, it’s all a business!