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When Your Selling Price is too High, Beware!

10-11-08
Tammy Vertrees
Tammy Vertrees: Real Estate Agent in Paradise, CA
  • view my blog
  • Office: (530) 413-8383
  • Secondary: (530) 877-6244
 
What Happens Behind the Scenes
If you start out with too high a price on your home, you may have just added to your stress level -- and selling a home is stressful enough. There will be a lot of "behind the scenes" action taking place that you don’t know about.

Contrary to popular opinion, the listing agent does not usually attempt to sell your home directly to a homebuyer. That would be inefficient.

Listing agents market and promote your home to the hordes of other local agents who do work with homebuyers, dramatically increasing your personal sales force. During the first couple of weeks your home should be a flurry of activity with buyer’s agents coming to preview your home so they can sell it to their clients.

If the price is right.

If you and your agent have overpriced, fewer agents will preview your home. After all, they are Realtors, and it is their job to know local market conditions and home values. If your house is dramatically above market, why waste time? Their time is better spent previewing homes that are priced realistically.

Dropping Your Price...Too Late

If you start out with a high sales price, then drop it later -- your house is "old news." You will never be able to recapture that flurry of initial activity you would have had with a realistic price. Your house could take longer to sell.

Even if you do successfully sell at an above market price to an uninformed buyer, your buyer will need a mortgage. The mortgage lender requires an appraisal. If comparable sales for the last six months and current market conditions do not support your sales price, the house won’t appraise. Your deal falls apart. Of course, you can always attempt to renegotiate the price, but only if the buyer is willing to listen.

Your house could go "back on the market."

Once your home has fallen out of escrow or sits on the market awhile, it is harder to get a good offer. Potential buyers will think you might be getting desperate, so they will make lower offers. By overpricing your home in the beginning, you could actually end up settling for a lower price than you would have normally received.

For a professional, experienced agent that practices honesty & integrity, give me a call for a free consultation: 530-872-5428. I love helping my buyers & sellers with their Real Estate goals!



www.TammyVertrees.com

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.


Paradise, CA (95969) Weather Forecast
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Want to Start Off With a High Sales Price?

10-11-08
Tammy Vertrees
Tammy Vertrees: Real Estate Agent in Paradise, CA
  • view my blog
  • Office: (530) 413-8383
  • Secondary: (530) 877-6244
When Your Selling Price is too High, Beware!

Meeting With Realtors
So you’ve decided to sell your home and have a fairly good idea of what you think it is worth. Being a sensible home seller, you schedule appointments with three local listing agents who’ve been hanging stuff on your front doorknob for years. Each Realtor comes prepared with a "Competitive Market Analysis" on fancy paper and they each recommend a specific sales price.

Amazingly, a couple of the Realtors have come up with prices that are lower than you expected. Although they back up their recommendations with recent sales data of similar homes, you remain convinced your house is worth more.

When you interview the third agent’s figures, they are much more in line with your own anticipated value, or maybe even higher. Suddenly, you are a happy and excited home seller, already counting the money.

A Sales Practice Called "Buying a Listing"
If you’re like many people, you pick Realtor number three. This is an agent who seems willing to listen to your input and work with you. This is an agent that cares about putting the most money in your pocket. This is an agent that is willing to start out at your price and if you need to drop the price later, you can do that easily, right?

After all, everyone else does it!

The truth is that you may have just met an agent engaging in a questionable sales practice called "buying a listing." He "bought" the listing by suggesting you might be able to get a higher sales price than the other agents recommended. Most likely, he is quite doubtful that your home will actually sell at that price. The intention from the beginning is to eventually talk you into lowering the price.

Why do some agents "buy" listings this way?

There are basically two reasons. A well-meaning and hard working agent can feel pressure from a homeowner who has an inflated perception of his home’s value. On the other hand, there are some agents who engage in this sales practice routinely.

For a professional, experienced agent that practices honesty & integrity, give me a call for a free consultation: 530-872-5428. I love helping my buyers & sellers with their Real Estate goals!



www.TammyVertrees.com

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.


Paradise, CA (95969) Weather Forecast
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Things Not to Do Before Purchasing a Home

10-08-08
Tammy Vertrees
Tammy Vertrees: Real Estate Agent in Paradise, CA
  • view my blog
  • Office: (530) 413-8383
  • Secondary: (530) 877-6244
Things Not to Do Before Purchasing a Home

No Major Purchase of Any Kind
Do not make any major purchase that would create debt of any kind. This includes furniture, appliances, electronic equipment, jewelry, vacations, expensive weddings…

…and automobiles, of course.

Don’t Move Money Around
When a lender reviews your loan package for approval, one of the things they are concerned about is the source of funds for your down payment and closing costs. Most likely, you will be asked to provide statements for the last two or three months on any of your liquid assets. This includes checking accounts, savings accounts, money market funds, certificates of deposit, stock statements, mutual funds, and even your company 401K and retirement accounts.

If you have been moving money between accounts during that time, there may be large deposits and withdrawals in some of them.

The mortgage underwriter (the person who actually approves your loan) will probably require a complete paper trail of all the withdrawals and deposits. You may be required to produce cancelled checks, deposit receipts, and other seemingly inconsequential data, which could get quite tedious.

Perhaps you become exasperated at your lender, but they are only doing their job correctly. To ensure quality control and eliminate potential fraud, it is a requirement on most loans to completely document the source of all funds. Moving your money around, even if you are consolidating your funds to make it "easier," could make it more difficult for the lender to properly document.

So leave your money where it is until you talk to a loan officer.

Oh…don’t change banks, either.



www.TammyVertrees.com

The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
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Buying a Home With Resale Value

10-08-08
Tammy Vertrees
Tammy Vertrees: Real Estate Agent in Paradise, CA
  • view my blog
  • Office: (530) 413-8383
  • Secondary: (530) 877-6244
Buying a Home With Resale Value

There are many things that should be considered when buying a home. Since most homebuyers expect to buy a bigger and better home someday in the future, resale value is an important factor in decision-making. You use the proceeds from selling one home to buy the next one.

While no one can guarantee that your home will grow in value, there are steps you can take that maximize your potential gain.

"Location, Location, Location"

"Location, location, location," is a common and almost hackneyed phrase in real estate literature. Your agent may even throw it at you when you ask for advice about buying a home. However, what does "location, location, location," actually mean? Why repeat it three times?

Mostly, "location" is repeated to emphasize that it is extremely important to the resale value of your home. The idea is to buy a house that will appeal to the largest number of potential future homebuyers. A careful choice of location can minimize potential negative influences on future resale value, and maximize positive influences.

Focusing on resale value requires you to make several different "location" choices. The first choice you have to make is "which community?" At the very least, you should narrow your choice down to just a few local communities.

For a professional, experienced agent, give me a call for a free consultation: 530-872-5428. I love helping my buyers & sellers with their Real Estate goals!



www.TammyVertrees.com

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
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Shopping for an Agent

10-04-08
Tammy Vertrees
Tammy Vertrees: Real Estate Agent in Paradise, CA
  • view my blog
  • Office: (530) 413-8383
  • Secondary: (530) 877-6244
 
Shopping for an Agent

Your first step should be to shop for a Realtor, not to shop for property. Shop for a Realtor the way you would shop for a good attorney, accountant, mechanic, plumber, doctor, financial advisor or other professional.

Now that we have the Internet, you have more information at your fingertips than buyers from the past. The web is a good place to start. There are lots of directories that list agents, plus search engines, too. Peruse the sites. If an agent has lots of information on their site and seems genuinely concerned about informing homebuyers, that's probably a better choice than someone whose web site only talks about how good they are. The client should be the focus, not the agent. At the same time, agents have to market themselves aggressively -- or else you won't notice them.

If Automobiles were Houses

Imagine that automobiles are sold like real estate, with no more car lots or dealerships. Both new and used cars are just parked on the street. So if you want a Ford, there are no more Ford dealerships. No more Lexus dealerships or any other kind of dealerships, either. If you want to look for a car on your own, you just drive around and see what you can find. Even then, you can only look at the outside because you don't have the keys.

There are some people that have the keys. They also have a computer that tells them where all the cars are parked, what model and year they are, what size engine they have and how many miles are on the odometer. They get paid a commission for selling the cars.

Some of these commissioned agents just sit around and look at the computer, waiting for the phone to ring. Some of them go out and locate the new cars, physically inspect the interior and exterior and flip on the ignition to listen to the sound of the engine. They are interested in finding the best cars so their customers refer future clients to them.

Who would you rather call?

For a professional, experienced agent, give me a call for a free consultation: 530-872-5428. I love helping my buyers & sellers with their Real Estate goals!



www.TammyVertrees.com

Some people weave burlap into the fabric of our lives,
and some weave gold thread.
Both contribute to make the whole picture beautiful and unique.
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