Tips

Tips on selling during the holidays

Selling a home is no doubt a stressful time. Add the craze of the holidays, you may need some advice from the experts. We asked our real estate agents for tips that can help minimize the stress and possibly get that SOLD sign up before the big guy 🎅 comes to town.

  • Consider potential buyers spiritual backgrounds 🕎 in your market before decorating for the holidays. Keep it simple
  • Less is more when decorating a home for the holidays while you are trying to sell. Limit the amount of holiday-specific decorations that are displayed
  • Large over-size Christmas trees 🎄 and other holiday decorations consume space that might make rooms or landscapes appear smaller
  • Install and remove exterior holiday decorations ~2 weeks before and shortly after the It’s less distracting
  • Tum off lighted holiday decorations 🌟 before showings. Buyers should focus on your home and not your decorations
  • If you are having out-of-town house guests, ask your real estate agent to postpone showings until after your guests depart
  • Help potential buyers visualize 👀 your home in other seasons. Display summer photos of home / gardens to show off other features of the home
  • Before showings, remove snow ❄️, ice and leaves from walkways and driveways. Don’t overlook outside entrances to basements, garages, and porches. And don’t forget the pet dirt 💩. It’s a turn-off to buyers

Hope these tips help to keep stress levels to a minimum during the holiday season. If you need to talk through your specific situation, give us a call. Happy to help!

Home Inspection 🕵️— to attend or not?

For most home buyers, having an inspection performed by a licensed inspector is a “no brainer”.  This is especially true if you don’t have a BIG comfort zone when it comes to home construction!  The cost generally runs somewhere around $450.  Now, that may seem like $450 extra you don’t have as you’re getting ready to come up with your down payment and closing costs, not to mention moving expenses and getting your new home set up.  But, if the inspection points up a major defect you’re not aware of, I guess I’d rather know that in advance rather than 3-6 months down the road.  So, I find most buyers benefit from having an inspection done, and it’s well worth the money.

Once that’s been decided, the next question is should the buyer attend the home inspection or skip it?  Like everything else in life, there are pros and cons.  Here are my thoughts on the topic:

PROS

  • Basically you’ll learn a lot about your future home.
  • You’ll learn where the electrical panel and main shut off valves are.
  • You’ll learn some things about how to maintain parts of your home that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of.
  • You’ll get the inspector’s perspective on the significance of blemishes ( of which there will likely be many- dozens even, on average).

CONS

  • The process will take a half day of your time, on a work day.
  • It’s boring.  It’s a lot of standing around checking emails and Facebook while the inspector crawls through the attic and crawl space, test electrical outlets and water faucets.
  • It causes you to focus strictly on what’s wrong with the house.  Because of this, some lose sight of why they wanted to buy the house in the first place.  And with all the focus on what’s wrong it’s easy to lose perspective about the blemishes.  After all, we all accept blemishes in our homes, and when we go to sell there will be a list of blemishes the next inspector will find.  Heck, many of the ones on your inspection report will still be there when you go to sell.
  • And besides, within 24 hours you’re going to get a comprehensive report complete with colored photos detailing everything the inspector finds.

In the end, it’s entirely up to you.  There’s no harm or foul either way.  And it’s not a life or death question.  Personally, I find a good compromise is to attend the last half hour of the inspection.  This is what our friends at US Inspect recommend for experienced home buyers.  It allows you to take a look and hear what the inspector has to say about the house in general and about key issues.  That may make it easier for us to talk about the findings and to come up with a strategy to deal with those key issues.

For answers to all your real estate questions, give Indy’s Choice a call at (317)  625-0655.

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Are Corner Lots a Prize?

Just last week, I met with an older couple planning on selling their home.  They were wanting to downsize. As they were showing me around, they pointed out the upgrades they’d made and commented “And we have a corner lot.  It cost us to get it, but it was well worth it.”  In fact, they said that a couple times just to be sure I registered the point.

When we got around to talking about what they should price the house, the value of the corner lot came up again (with emphasis).  In their minds, the corner lot added at least a couple thousand dollars (2% of the overall value) to the asking price.

I wasn’t sold on the idea, as I’ve had many buyers skip past houses located on corner lots.  So, in these situations I make a list – – Pros and Cons – – asking myself “Do buyers prefer houses on corner lots or do they shy away from them?” Here’s what I came up with …

PROS

  • Corner lots are larger
  • Corner lots do not have a neighbor directly next door on one side (which can translate to having less noise from neighbors)
  • Circular drives are more often possible
  • If building, more flexibility on how to set the garage and driveway (side load or rear load)
  • In many locales, existing homes on corner lots are less expensive than interior lots!

CONS

  • Taxes may be slightly higher
  • Builders may charge a premium for the larger lot
  • Likely to have more traffic which parents are fearful of (and more traffic also means more traffic noise)
  • Corner lots typically have very small back yards, which parents don’t like because it’s often a challenge to fence the side yard or to keep an eye on children playing there

And a TOSS-UP

  • Because you only have a neighbor on one side, some people will say you have more privacy.  On the other hand, you have a lot more people staring as they drive by.

So, who’s right and who’s wrong?  Well, sometimes it just comes down to the lot itself.  More often it comes down to personal preferences.  But if you’re thinking about resale, and your potential buyer pool involves people with young children, then I suggest you keep looking.

When you are ready, give Indy’s Choice a call! – Bob (317) 625-0655