Peter Baumbach

This my first entry into the Speechless Sunday themed blog posts. I enjoy photography and I believe it shows in my real estate listing photos. If you want to present your property for sale in the best light, then care and skill are essential. Call me to discuss what it takes to sell your home in this market.

Also see my earlier post showcasing my photos.

Search for homes in competition with yours at www.HelpShop.com.

I was a spectator at several residential auctions this year. For one, the home was run down, but many auctions are for well maintained homes. A contractor bought this run down home, and I think he got it for a good price. He has plenty of room to do a renovation right, and then sell for a profit.

For a buyer, auctions are a good way to find deals. But you have less protections. It is not as simple as ebay. Bidding for something over $100,000 is sure to make your heart race. But bidding against a real person also provides assurance that there is value in what you are bidding on. If you want to bid on a home at auction, then it is in your best interest to get all the help you can get. You can hire a Realtor such as us for no additional cost than if you were to bid and buy on your own. Most auctions have a buyers premium percentage that gets added to the final bid price. That percentage doesn't change if you have a Realtor helping you through it.

Ask a Realtor for help with the following:

• Finding financing is more complicated with an auction. You don't know what the price will be before talking to the bank. The bank does not know which house you are buying and its value in advance.
• Real estate value is local. Look at the other homes for sale in person that are in competition with the auctioned property. Do this in advance and you can get a feel for that value.
• A competitive market analysis (CMA) is a report on the local homes in competition. Find out what they sold for. How long did homes take to sell. Which homes went off the market. What price drops have there been. What is the absorption rate. What is the current inventory.
• An auction property is sold as-is. You can still get a home inspection for informational purposes. If you don't like what the inspector tells you, bid less or skip that house. If you like what the inspector says, you may be more informed than the other bidders and can be more comfortable out bidding them.
• Do you need estimates on repairs? Get the names of contractors and any experience people may have had with them.
• What would repairs do to the value. What should you fix. If you are an investor, how long could it take to sell once the repairs are done. Ask for a CMA for after repair value.

If you want to find a deal, then start your search at www.HelpShop.com. We provide the best tools for shopping for homes. The listing details for instance will show you the days on market, and the price history for that home. You can even search by price drop or days on market if you wish. Our MLS home listings search is something I am quite proud of.

As always let us know if we can help you with any of your real estate needs.

I hope everyone has had a enjoyable holiday season. Happy New Year!

Prices on homes can change in affordability when interest rates change. Look at this graph:

This is a graph of how much house you could have bought in any week over the past two years with the payment that would buy a $100k house at the start of the graph. Interest rates first went up, so the same payment bought less house. But current rates are down. You can buy a $107k house for the same payment. There is talk of interest rates dipping to 4.5%. If that happens, that same payment can buy over $120k value of house. All this, and prices have not stayed the same. Prices in most areas have dropped. Some people are waiting to find a bottom in house prices before purchasing. This only looks at one factor though. If you take interest rates into account, which directly affects how much payment a buyer can afford, then effective prices are very low right now. Even if actual prices drop a little more, interest rates going up will make the effective price higher.

Take advantage of these low interest rates and start shopping for a home. Start your search at www.HelpShop.com. We provide the best tools for shopping for homes. The listing details for instance will show you the days on market, and the price history for that home. You can even search by price drop or days on market if you wish. Our MLS home listings search is something I am quite proud of.

As always let us know if we can help you with any of your real estate needs.

I read about a really great discount grocery chain called Amelia's. I found their website, but deciding which location was most convenient, left me wanting. I decided to create a google map with all their locations to make it easy for anyone to see the best location for themselves.

There site says "Amelia's is the area's only authorized manufacturer-direct outlet for many national and regional grocery manufacturers. As you can see from our manufacturer list, we source close-out products from most of the major food manufacturers. It's like having a company outlet store for each of those manufacturers under one roof. And the result is that you save money, a lot of money."

View Larger Map

You may have noticed that I like maps. I think searching for real estate MLS listings is also easier by map. That is why I offer a powerful but intuitive map based MLS Listings search for Maryland. Go to www.HelpShop.com and check it out.

A past client and friend of mine joked that he wished my MLS Listings Search webpage could show how many minutes it was to Wegmans grocery store. He already has his home, and I think he is quite happy with it. But, I want to show that this type of information for home searching is available. I created the above map with Wegmans in Hunt Valley at the center. The orange area represents a 10 minute drive to or from Wegmans. The blue area represents 5 more minutes, or a total of 15 minutes drive to or from Wegmans.

I overlayed a zipcode map, since some people like to search for real estate by zip-codes. Some text based search engines even force you to know the zip-codes to search. The search engine I provide at www.HelpShop.com is map based. You do not need to know zipcodes. You can still search by them if you wish.

So since my friend was looking for a detached home with 4 or more bedrooms and at least 2 bathrooms, I limited my search to that. There were more than 270 homes that fit that criteria. You can see the current homes for sale yourself. I created and saved a search. Just click through to the live MLS Listings. I zoomed out to cover a larger area. If you zoom in, each house for sale will have an icon to show you where it is, and provide more detailed information.

You can modify the search criteria to suit your needs. You can save the search for later, and even get nightly email updates. Unfortunately there is no automatic drive time map available to you. I am however quite happy to provide you a custom map centered on any location you wish. I can create a similar map to the above with your work location at the center for instance. I can change the drive time to most any length. Rush hour traffic is unfortunately not taken into account. It is a good starting point to looking at houses. Once a house becomes interesting, you will want to verify the drive times by actually driving it.

Let me know what you think and if I can help you in any way.