Selling a Home in a Buyers’ Market

Selling a home in any market takes planning and hard work, like taking a hike up a mountain. Selling in a stronger buyers’ market is much more like rock climbing a vertical cliff. Sure, you need special equipment in either, but the danger, anxiety and concentration are greater while you pull your way up the vertical cliff, as are the consequences if you misstep.

Certainly the very best way in either circumstance is to have a strong partner to help plan, navigate and carry some of the load. Most would not attempt any hike or climb without an expert as their partner. Certainly, if this is your first time, you will require the assistance of a professional.

As you do your homework, you will want to gather some very solid information to help put you in a better position from the very start of your journey. Helping homeowners and sellers with real estate planning and marketing is a specialty and an art. Not all professionals are equal to the task, and you need to know if they or their team of experts can help you make a success of your efforts in the short run.

To get you started we have put together some Tips for Home Sellers:

Knowing that home prices are soft and still falling in many areas of Florida, it's most likely is very tempting to try to sell on your own and avoid paying a commission to an real estate agent. However, note that homes represented by licensed professionals historically sell faster and for a higher price than those sold by owners alone, a fact in the results of the National Association of REALTORS recent annual survey. It is also harder and riskier to try selling on your own. Perhaps if you are still willing to do most the work and save some of the commission, you would consider placing your listing with a licensed brokerage on a limited listing basis. Typically, you can save almost half the commissions.

When using a licensed professional, be sure to select an internet-savvy real estate agent to represent you. Questions to ask any agent you're considering include:

• Do you plan to use syndication to publish my listing widely?
• Do you cover Craigslist, Yahoo!, Google, etc.?
• How many sites will my home be on?
• What kind of traffic do those sites receive?
• Will you purchase ad space on the Internet

Use the Internet to find a tech-savvy agent. Sellers can find local agents with sophisticated internet marketing skills. These agents use technologies and other web marketing techniques to syndicate listings and to create and maintain user-friendly, informative Web sites designed to help their clients sell their homes.

Know your most probable buyer. Just because they make an offer and are breathing does not make them the right buyer even in this buyer-barren-market. In the current buyers’ market, the buyers today are very picky compared to what they were just a few years ago. Are you potentially selling to a first-time home buyer? A Move-Up Buyer from a neighboring community or town? A Relocation Buyer who most likely will be working with a relocation-specialty brokerage. A Move-Down Buyer coming from a larger home as an empty nester or as the result of a recent divorce?

Knowing who may be the best candidate can help you in your marketing to one or two of these categories.

Know your Home’s Faults
Homebuyers have so many houses to choose from that they can shop at their pace. They can get more information on each home before they make an offer on any of them. If you find a buyer for your home, they get it inspected and the home inspection uncovers a problem, today's buyers are more apt to walk away and find another house.

An informal survey of a handful of home inspectors found that the percentage of their business devoted to pre-listing home inspections has increased from practically nothing to about 8 percent to 10 percent in the past year. Some sellers decide to fix the problems and show receipts of the work; while others disclose the problems at the time of listing, telling sellers their listing price reflects their awareness of the home's flaws.

Home inspector Jim Nolan, president of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Home Inspectors, suggests sellers obtain a pre-listing home inspection and then adjust the price if problems are uncovered unless it's an issue that needs immediate attention.

More often than not, home inspectors and agents said that sellers who need no convincing to get a pre-listing home inspection tend to be the homeowners who took good care of their property. But it especially makes sense when the home seller, because of work demands, health or age, has not been able to keep up with every aspect of home maintenance.

Sell it Vacant or Not?
When a real estate agent shows a home to a potential buyer, each room and its potential to those possible buyers is somewhat outlined by the content. The depth, width and height are more understandable with the sellers’ objects in the room versus an empty room. All too often a listed house will often go to market without furniture or accessories of any kind, drastically lowering its full market potential.

And now thanks to popular television programs such as "Flip This House" and the multitude of similar shows, a lot of people are tempted to try their own hand at setting up or selling their home (known as For Sale By Owner, or FSBO). It certainly can be a great way to make some money, if you have the right home in the right neighborhood at the right time. However, many of these homes miss the mark when the time comes to listing the house for sale.

While much care is taken to note the amenities in a listing such as the perfect new kitchen cabinets and counter tops, tile for the bathrooms and gorgeous flooring for the living room, these same homes go on the market bare naked, and dollars are being left on the non-existent dining room table. It is not just a few FSBOs that make this mistake. Real estate agents and home sellers who decide to list a vacant property are also missing out on the greater market potential they could enjoy if the empty rooms were staged & decorated by a home stager. Given the same circumstances, a limitedly staged home will sell faster and for more money than a vacant home.

Save Time, Money and Peace of Mind
Homesellers, if you truly wish to reduce the danger, anxiety and loss of concentration in your home sale, you will take some of this FREE advice. As you decide your course of action in climbing that cliff, you will be best served by doing some homework, getting some help and setting plans for success. These tips will be a great start. After all, failure to prepare can hurt you monetarily and emotionally. Based upon the average home in the current market, these tips can save you up to 30%. In this market place, that is quite a bit of savings back in your pocket. And will give you back some peace of mind.

Knowing is best in a Short Sale Situation

Know the Facts
With all the misinformation swirling around the troubled mortgage markets and real estate industry, the average homeowner and home buyer are sure to be confused, anxious and fearful of their next move. Well, take some comfort from the current situation as there are options for every circumstance. The real problem is finding someone to help you sift and sort through the appropriate options and work with the lenders involved.

And, it all starts with the foundation of facts. then we build the options from these to fit the circumstances of the homeowners and buyers.

Take the facts as they are:

• In Central Florida alone, there are over 24,000 listed properties in the MLS (Multiple Listings Service) available to willing, able and ready buyers.
• Foreclosure proceedings are at a record pace in Florida.
• Mortgage lenders are financially troubled by the volume of past-due loans (pre-foreclosures), foreclosure proceedings and REO (Real Estate Owned) they now find they need to deal with.
• Mortgage lenders have changed and tightened up credit requirements for most of the loan programs available.
• The federal government is offering help to targeted homeowners and lenders to alleviate many of the troubled loans.
• Mortgage interest rates are still low relative to rates just five years ago.
  With the saturation of available properties in the market, we are in a very heavy buyers market and properties are being discounted by up to 30% (a bit more in certain circumstances).
• Mortgage lenders do NOT wish to have the real estate /homes (thus becoming REO), but would rather have the owner make payments as agreed (or modified) to make when the loan originated.

Short Sale
The facts above lead many to utter the words “Short Sale” very quickly as the answer to the situation of both Buyers and Sellers. This is the term most misunderstood and misused in the current market.

The REALTORS boards and MLS have come up with procedures to minimize the misuse and misrepresentation of a “Short Sale”. The unfortunate part is that not all REALTORS are equal to the task. Many will offer the use of a “Short Sale Listing” to “help” the home seller. But without doing all the work necessary to establish a short sale, it is nothing but a misleading listing with a CYA (cover your Assets) label imposed by the REALTOR & MLS rules.

The label of a short sale with the proper disclosure that the listed asking price may not satisfy the outstanding debt and is subject to a third party approval is just the tip of the iceberg that can be the “Short Sale Listing”. What lies beneath is the big, hairy, icy mess of getting the property sold.

The basis of a short sale is that the lender knows.
A short sale will never work if the lender does not know. They need to know the financial circumstances of the owner /borrower (not just the fact that they are past due on their payments or will be very soon). They need to know the market conditions of their collateral-home (relative to the loan balance, whether it is still owner-occupied or leased). And they need to know that they are willing to take a discounted sales price for the home in order to avoid the long and costly foreclosure process. Absent of the right knowledge by the lender, the offering of a short sale listing is a pure waste of time. And, it kills many transactions.
It wastes time for the homeseller, the possible homebuyer (and many times there are more than one), and it wastes the time of the real estate professionals involved in writing contract offers and counter offers.

Know thy Short Sale Terms
There are far too many listing agents and brokerages which offer short sale listings without the knowledge and permission of the lender to do so. If you decide to get involved with one of these listings, note that it will not be an easy process, nor a quick one, and certainly not a probable one. Think 3-4 months.

Doing What is RIGHT
This is not to say that buyers and sellers can’t have success without engaging the lenders early in a possible short sale situation. But many more options open themselves to the seller if they do including being able to stay in the home. And, yes, doing what is right by the client may mean the listing agent doesn’t get the listing. But after all, isn’t helping the client the real answer anyway?