Falling leaves

The trees are finally starting to turn and we know Summer is giving way to the inevitable Michigan Winter. Yuck Winter! Potential Sellers begin to ask themselves if they should just wait until Spring when considering putting their homes on the market. I will give you the pros and cons through the eyes of a Realtor.
Pros: While there are fewer Buyers out looking during the winter months, the market never stops and the Buyers are more likely to be serious. In the Summer you get some people out just looking, the weather is nice and maybe they will see something they like enough to push them to buy, maybe not. Another plus is less competition as a number of Sellers will opt to wait until Spring. At that time a whole herd of homes will flood the market and you might get lost in the shuffle. Homes also look lovely decked out in their Holiday wear, this can be a plus making buyers feel all warm and fuzzy!
Cons: You may have fewer showings and find yourself anxious over what might feel like a lack of interest. You will have to deal with keeping the access to the home clear of snow and ice.
All in all, if you are ready to make a move, I'd suggest you go ahead and put the home on the market. It may take a bit longer, but you will have good potential buyer's coming through and it just takes one to make the sale!

Reality TV?

I was watching 20/20 the other night and they had a show that revolved around Real Estate. At one point they talked about the avg. price increase a homeowner has realized in the past 3 years. These ranged from over 100% in Florida to 25-30% in what they gave as the lower range. This no doubt sounds great to many potential Sellers, unfortunately they are very off when it comes to our market. We stopped seeing major increases three years ago and in the last year Lenawee County actually saw a drop of 10% according to our Michigan Association or Realtors statistics. This drop is partly an adjustment to prices that rose too rapidly a few years ago, partly due to high gas prices that make our Washtenaw Buyers think twice about the savings they enjoy on home prices verses the added drivetime and costs. The other factor is we are in a Buyer's market and that is reflected in sales price.
Here is a tip to help safeguard your equity. The most important is to not fall prey to using your home equity to take out additional loans against the property. We have come across more and more Sellers who find they are unable to get out of their homes what they owe. When applying for the equity loan, an appraisal is run on the home to justify value, the problem we have seen are appraisals that are way out of whack with true market value The Sellers get the loan but when it's time to move, they are stuck. Promises of consolidating debt, lower monthly payments and extra cash in your pocket are tempting, be very careful before you jump in. You might even want to ask a Realtor to come out and give you their opinion of what a reasonable asking price would be.

Tuesday Morning Meeting

Just got back to my Tecumseh office after attending our weekly company wide meeting in the Adrian office. Each week we have a power point presentation of all the new listings, this gives each agent an opportunity to talk about the selling points of the homes they are marketing. It's helpful for all the agents since we often will receive calls to the office and we like to have some knowledge of each listing, of course with hundreds of properties, we won't always be able to remember the details, but we are happy to take you out to preview the homes for yourself.
We also talked about the responsibilities of Buyer's Agency. When a Buyer calls or comes to the office, they are not being represented by an agent until a Buyer's Agency Contract has been signed. Up until that point, nothing talked about is considered confidential. It's important to establish a Buyer's agency as quickly as possible once you find an agent you are comfortable working with. At that point, the agent immediately has a responsibility to maintain your privacy on all matters, act in your best interests at all times and will be invested in the success of your home buying experience. Our Team has a policy of allowing any Buyer out of the contract with us if they are at all unhappy with the service we are providing. We have never had the issue come up as we take pride in creating satisfied Clients, but until you get to know an agent, we understand the hesitation some people feel about binding themselves to one agent. There is no charge for the service and with our policy there is no risk and only benefits to the Buyer. The contact ties the Buyer to the agent they are working with for the duration of the contract, if you find a home you wish to make an offer on, you must write it with your agent. This creates a working relationship where the agent will be willing to invest time and effort into the Client. You can understand that if a customer is not under contract and can write an offer at any time, with any agent, you would not expend too much effort there. We also cannot act as effectively with a customer (someone who is not under contract) as we can with a Client (a Buyer under contract). We cannot provide advice, run a market analysis to compare pricing, or negotiate on your behalf when you are not a Client. As a professional Real Estate Consultant I will not work with a Buyer without being able to provide that level of service, it is simply not doing my job to the best of my ability.

Here I go!

This is my first attempt at blogging and I am testing how this works. I hope to use this space to share some information on Real Estate, post some thoughts and ideas and hopefully provide some helpful facts and maybe a laugh or two along the way. I wandered into this as a result of vanishing from Google. After working hard to have my website ranked on their first page, I came to the search engine and discovered I have been bumped into the nether-regions. While not at all sure why this happened, I am determined to add features and info to my site that may breathe new life into my rankings. Thankfully, Yahoo and MSN are still my friends! I'm excited at the idea of doing something new and different and sometimes a little nudge like this can be good for sparking a change from being complacent. I love the power and versatility of the internet and wish I had even more knowledge on how to use it to the fullest. I've been doing a lot of research since my plunge off the Google search engine and found that Google advises adding a simple site map feature that will help their spiders crawl the site and up the rankings. Their idea of simple is like reading gibberish to me, help! If anyone reading this knows how to accomplish the 'simple' task, email me, I would love the help. Now, I will work on getting this blog page organized and linked to my site. After I settle in, I will begin to figure out just what I want to do with it. I am sure it will evolve with time and that I will need to remind myself that other people may actually read it so that I better not go off on too many tangents. Stop back and check for updates.