Real Estate Blog

Topics of interest to help homeowners when thinking about selling their home.

7 Tips For Moving

Mario AvalosLeave a comment

Below are a few helpful links to aid the process of “where to look” to get things done when you are ready to move to a new home.

  1. Change of address
  2. FPL (connect / disconnect electricity)
  3. Water (connect / disconnect water)
  4. Schedule a Bulk Waste Pick Up
  5. Yelp.com: go to this site and type “moving services” to check out companies and reviews of them.
  6. Amazon.com: type “moving boxes” on the search box and get great deals (free alternative: you can go to your local supermarket during product unloading time to get their boxes. This is usually done around 6 or 7 am).
  7. Evernote (for you techies that your life revolves around your phone, keep track of all items / schedules via this amazing app).

You can always Google about “moving checklist” and you will get 5.5 million results on the topic. So I figured why fight a beast when the work has already been done.

Submitting Offers Without Success?

Mario AvalosLeave a comment

Despite the media hype about the overflow of real estate homes, buying a foreclosure in today’s market can be complicated. Without the right advice and guidance, buyers often become de-motivated, fed up and tired of submitting offers to countless foreclosures. Here is my simple tip for increasing your chances of scoring a good foreclosed home…submit an offer above asking price….higher….higher!

Why? REO sellers price their properties below market value. This is a tactic utilized to lure in as many buyers as possible offers, house, successfull, bid, bidding, closedinto a deal at the same. The lower the price, the more people find out about the property.

The more people find out about the property, emotions run wilder. And the more wild emotions get…the higher offer amounts people submit relative to the asking price. Off course…there is no need to submit offers above fair market value, but definitely above asking price. It is very usual to see 4, 5, 8, or even 10 offers on a particular property.

In addition, knowing what terms (non- price related) should accompany an offer is key to a successful bid. Say you are financing a deal, yet we know we are competing against cash offers. Well, cash offers mainly have two contingencies that protect them (which is why sellers prefer cash as opposed to financing where you may have at least 5 or 6 contingencies that protect the buyer)…the inspection period and clean title.

For a buyer that is financing a deal, your inspection, appraisal, title, letter of commitment and so on…must be super aggressive in order to entice the seller to choose your offer over the cash deal. It’s tough, but doable.

Thick Skin For Buyer Feedback

Mario AvalosLeave a comment

kendall sunlight

Apart from price, marketing advertising, etc…listening to buyer feedback is key to selling a property. Married people should be pros at this. Often, sellers want to fix this and update that and upgrade the other. Non sense. The chances of finding a buyer with your taste, or somewhere similar, are slim to non.

Want to increase your bottom line? Don’t spend it…yet.

If the flaw with your home is not detrimental (there is a waterfall coming thru the roof), don’t fix it. Put the home in the market and see what people’s opinion are all about if any. If buyers complaint about the same thing, then, you do something. You either adjust the price to reflect the problem or fix it. This will save you time and money and believe it or not, you will make the buyer happy for not picking granite counter top colors of your taste.

Once the problem is fixed, call those buyers back and negotiate. Last piece of advice; ask for buyer feed back while showing the property or as they are stepping out the door. See…most buyers are not just looking at your house. They are seeing several. So unless they like yours in particular, they will not remember your home’s features if you wait to ask a day or two later.

Last…last…piece of advice. Grow some skin. Some feedback may not be pleasant, some may be great. The whole point of this is to help you spend less money fixing things, save you time, and sell the property quickly. This is not a popularity contest.

Short Sales Suck? Not So.

Mario AvalosLeave a comment

Short selling a property in today’s market is a whole different ball game than what it used to be a year go or so. For the better. A combination of a dried-up-inventory-market and quicker negotiation turn-around is making short sales (aka: underwater homes) that much more attractive.

Back in the day it was normal to work with a buyer’s offer without collecting earnest money upon execution of contract. The bad part about this old way to handling a short sale was that 6 months down the road, once a short sale was approved, most buyers would go MIA (missing in action). This created a mess in terms of having to re-approve the short sale with a new buyer’s name often delaying the process another two or three months.

Now that inventory is dried up and short sale departments are on the ball about getting short sales approved, they are a commodity. Considering all the bidding wars and multiple offer situations that exist in well priced properties, it can be somewhat emotionally complicated to buy an REO making short sales a good option to go after assuming a buyer does not need a home within the next 6 months to a year. Because of this, demanding (as part of the negotiation process) buyer-earnest money upon execution of a contract is a must…and buyers will wait.

If a buyer does not want to put money up front, move on to the next. And the next. And the next. Until a buyer is found that will stick with you until the short sale is approved. It’s a seller’s market out there, even if your upside down.