About Norwalk's Rowayton

STAGING YOUR ROWAYTON HOME

You've seen HGTV. You know that staged homes sell faster and for more money, staging works, but it requires an outlay of money that you may not have. If you can't afford a stager, you can still apply some of the basic principles of staging to help your home sell faster. First thing you'll want to do is to walk through your house room by room with your listing agent. Your agent may not be able to give you the design advice of a stager, but he/she can give you advice about which room colors might cause a problem (e.g., a bright purple dining room) or furniture pieces that should be moved or rearranged. Don't make the mistake of painting the entire interior off-white on the premise that buyers can choose their own colors. Well-chosen wall and trim colors can make the difference in a buyer's decision.

Buyers have very little imagination, that's why staging is big business. Staging is all about creating an illusion of the perfect home for buyers to move into. Think Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Ralph Lauren, or Martha Stewart Living - soft inviting colors, nothing bright or stark. If you have a friend whose tastes runs along these lines or a decorator friend, ask them for help in choosing colors, arranging your furniture, and picking out accessories (e.g. throw pillows, area rugs, vases or bowls). After you've depersonalized the home, it may look a little stark and the right accessories will add the glamour and sparkle your home needs to stand out.

In a cool market, you need a hot property! Some properties are "hot" by virtue of their location, views, or style. Your property needs to stand out from your competition in order to sell fast in a slow market. We are assuming that you've priced your home properly and the buyer has to decide between your home and a comparable one. Let's look at what makes a difference, so that the buyer puts an offer in on your home instead of the competition...

DO ALL REPAIRS AND MAINTENANCE

No one wants to take on anyone else's problems. Buyers will heavily discount a home that needs repairs or maintenance, if they make an offer at all. Most often, they will just take a pass. Whether the market is hot or cold, the home that is in mint condition will get the most showings and offers.

If you are not sure where to start, get an inspection. You don't have to share the inspection with the buyer, it just gives you the information you need to prioritize your repairs and maintenance. Is there an appliance that isn't working, call the repair man. Everything should be in working order. After you've attended to the repairs and maintenance, the next focus should be decluttering and packing.

DECLUTTER AND DEPERSONALIZE YOUR HOME

You are going to be moving anyways, so pack away the items you don't use on a regular basis as well as all personal items (photographs, diplomas, trophies - buyers want to envision themselves in the home) and any knickknacks or papers (aim for completely clean surfaces on counters, tables and desks). Buy a Brother labeling machine from Staples for $29 and large clear plastic bins from Target and start putting away off season clothing, photograph albums, glassware, and so on. Stack the bins up neatly in a corner of your basement or garage.

No room in your basement or garage? Then it's time to declutter. Start with your garage, basement, attic as you will need to make room for storing the items from the main rooms of your home. You'll need to make three piles in every area/room you clean - one for items to throw out, another for items to sell at a tag sale (or to give to friends/family), and another to be given to charity (leftover items from the tag sale can go to charity as well).

CLEANING FROM TOP TO BOTTOM

Once the home is decluttered and depersonalized you can focus on cleaning it until it sparkles. You may need to hire a service to shampoo the rugs and clean the windows, but make sure the entire house is clean including the garage, attic, and basement. This is a big job, so call on family to help or hire a cleaning service.

PAINTING YOUR ROOMS

Painting the interior is the least expensive home improvement you can make and gives the biggest return on your investment. Make sure it is a quality paint job. Don't paint over wallpaper. Remember to scrape and sand or prime where needed. Wallpaper makes most homes look dated and should be removed, whenever possible.

LIGHTING

Lighting provides the next biggest return on your investment. Updated fixtures improve the look of a home, but don't have to cost a lot. Go to Lowes or Home Depot and replace the dated brass coach lights on either side of your front door with dark bronze lights that match the style of your home. Replace the ceiling and bathroom light fixtures, if need be. Replace your florescent light bulbs with incandescent bulbs (not green of me, I know, but you want the warmth and glow of incandescent lights for showings). Place small halogen floor lights in corners behind plants and furniture pointing up to create a sense of drama and adding accent light to the room. Make sure that there are enough lamps in every room so that there are no dark corners. Consider adding inexpensive halogen lights under your kitchen cabinets or even in your cabinets, if you have glass fronts.

HARDWARE

Check the hardware on your kitchen cabinets and bathroom cabinets. If it is old and dated looking, consider replacing with brushed nickel or bronze. Target has some inexpensive hardware that looks great. If your kitchen cabinets are old and dark, you might consider painting them off white before you add the new hardware, but be careful about how the hinges will look. You don't want white cabinets, brushed nickel hardware, and dark hinges. You may need a handyman to help you with the replacement of the hinges, if you go this route.

CURB APPEAL

If there is one thing I can't stress enough, it's that your home has got to impress the buyer BEFORE he/she steps out of the car. Your house can look fabulous inside, but if the agent can't get the buyer out of their car and into your home, then you've lost a potential sale. Even if the buyer does enter the home, the first impression of the exterior will linger. Also, don't forget the potential buyers who drive by your home and call from your lawn sign. Curb appeal is important for many reasons.

You can improve the curb appeal of your home with foundation plantings, a well manicured front lawn, painting and repairing fences, walkways, and steps. You can reseal your driveway, paint your trim, shutters, and front door, put flower boxes on windows (be sure to keep the flowers fresh and watered) or hanging flower pots from a front porch. Make sure the lock works easily on the front door and that buyers can enter through the front door. Replace old storm/screen doors with new high quality ones. If you have side lights or porch lights, replace them if they are out of date or rusty.

BEAT THE ROWAYTON MARKET COMPETITON

If you've seen staged homes, you'll notice that it doesn't look like anyone lives there. The counters are clear of toaster ovens, blenders and dishes. There are no magnets or notes on the refrigerator. The coffee table has no magazines, books or newspapers lying on it, just a decorative bowl or candles. The dining room table does not have a table cloth, you can see the wood and a bowl of fruit and perhaps a table runner is resting on the well polished surface. Furniture is minimal, just enough to indicate the function of areas.

You won't fully achieve this look without a professional stager, but your goal isn't to have the most perfectly staged home, it's to have a home that looks better than your competitors. Attend the Open Houses of your competitors. It's the only way to know how your home compares. If your home isn't the best staged home in your price range, make the changes required. You only get one chance at a first impression with buyers, so make sure that you've done all you can before your home goes on the market. Your staged home will also look fabulous in the photos and photos bring buyers to your home.

THINKING OF SELLING YOUR ROWAYTON CONNECTICUT HOME?

Please call Gail Robinson, REALTOR, at 203-521-0768.

PRICING YOUR ROWAYTON CT HOME TO SELL

This is the second article in a six-part series about Selling Your Rowayton CT Home in a Buyer's Market. In the first article we described the characteristics of a buyer's market. We will now talk about pricing your home to sell in today's buyer's market.

IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU

The most important thing to understand about pricing a home to sell is that the market determines the price. The market doesn't care how much you paid for the home or how much money you put into upgrades or repairs. Your home will sell for the price that buyers will pay for comparable homes. If you price your home too high, even if a buyer comes along who is willing to pay above market value for your home, the mortgage company will whittle the offer down to the market value during the appraisal process, so you might as well price the home right from the start.

If your home stays on the market for several months and prices decline, you may have to revisit the list price and adjust it to changing market conditions. If you make an adjustment, make it large enough to get ahead of a declining market. You don't want to trail the market in your price reductions. You'll get the most showings during the first few weeks on the market from buyers already looking for a home. After that you'll be getting showings as new buyers come into the market, so showings will slow down. Your best chance of selling your home is to price it right for the first wave of buyers, when you have the most showings and the property is new to the market.

COMPARE YOUR HOME TO OTHERS

The first thing you will want to do is compare your home to others which have sold and currently on the market. Properties that have sold within the past six months give you the best information about pricing your home. You will want to compare your home to homes that sold in terms of location, square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, style, and other amenities.

A real estate professional can prepare a CMA (Comparative Market Analysis) for you which provides this information in the form of a report. Make sure the real estate professional has seen the interior of the homes being used as sold comparables, otherwise they may be relying just on the information provided in the MLS listing, which can be misleading. It is also important that they know the community well, since in some market areas, there can be as much as a $50,000 difference between comparable homes from one street to the next. The CMA is only as good as your real estate professional's knowledge of the homes in your market area. Ask your agent how many homes he/she has sold in your market area in the past year and whether he/she has been inside the homes shown in the CMA report.

DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH

Forget Zillow and Homegain for determining market values unless you live in tract housing. An automated valuation system can't take into account the differences in comparable homes. Go to Open Houses in your market area to get a sense of the differences between your home and the competition in your price range. Look at these homes through buyers' eyes. You'll begin to see that some sellers are just unrealistic in their prices and if you price your home properly, the competition drops away. When you've seen comparable homes on the market, you'll have a sense for where you want to position your home in terms of price. Ideally, your home will be priced to offer the best value in your price range.

CONSIDER APPRAISAL ISSUES NOW

When you get to the point where you have a buyer, about 1-2 weeks after contract signing , your buyer's lender will send out an appraiser to determine the value of your home. If the appraised value of your home is less than the sale price, you could find yourself in the unpleasant position of having to negotiate with the buyer over how to make up the difference.

Sometimes the buyer cannot come up with more cash to cover the difference because they just don't have it or don't want to pay above the appraised value as determined by the lender. As a seller you may need to decide whether to lower the sale price or let the buyer walk away from the sale. However, unless there are other comparable sales about to close at higher price levels, you may run into the same problem with the appraisal with the next buyer.

This is why it's important to think about appraisals at the time you are pricing your home before it goes on the market. In determining your list price, take into account recent sales (within past six months) of comparable homes within a mile of your home. If your list price is much higher than the comparable sales, you should be prepared for potential appraisal issues, and question the wisdom of pricing your home at this price point. Ask your listing agent about potential appraisal issues if your home were to sell for full list price or anywhere close to it. While your listing agent can't predict what the lender's appraisal will be, he/she can look at the comparable sales the appraiser would use if your home sold at this point in time and let you know whether there might be a problem.

PRICE YOUR ROWAYTON CT HOME TO SELL

You don't want to leave money on the table by pricing your home too low, but in some areas of the country, such as Manhattan, sellers deliberately price their properties slightly below their true market level to generate multiple offers, even in today's buyer's market. They know that having a number of buyers bid on a property will cause their home to stand out and give them a better price and a faster sale than waiting for a single buyer to make an offer once every two months. I'm not recommending this as a strategy, because it can backfire, but the point is that you want to get as many buyers as possible to see your home in order to generate offers.

Buyers will ignore overpriced listings and may never even know your home exists, if they are looking in a certain price range, because your home won't turn up in their search results. It's not true that if buyers want a home, they will ignore the price and make an offer at a level they can afford. Most buyers look within the price range they can afford and if you price your home out of their range, they will never even see it. If you want showings and offers in a buyer's market, you need to price your home to sell.