5 Mistakes Sellers Make in a Hot Market

 

Tara-Nicholle Nelson

Sometimes, the real estate market can play games with our minds. At the top of the market, home buyers imagine that sellers frolic through fields of cash, rubbing their hands together megalomaniacally as they flip through hundreds of offers, concocting arcane "no brown M&M"-type contract clauses to put the screws to buyers-in-waiting.

At the bottom of the market, the tables turned, and sellers might have visualized buyers sitting on top of truckloads of cash, while deigning to offer them only a paltry few pennies for their Most Precious Asset.

Reality check: neither of these images are anywhere near reality. At the bottom of the market, even the most bargain-hungry buyers are riddled with grave concerns about whether and when to buy, as well as how to get through the maze of tight mortgage and appraisal guidelines. And the opposite is true, too. Even on today’s market – which is much more active than it has been in years – sellers fear making missteps and mistakes that will cause their home to lag or will result in them leaving money on the table, so to speak.

Here are five of the mistakes I see sellers make when the market heats up and buyers start biting – and some tips for avoiding them.

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How to Prioritize Home Repairs

 

Posted by Lindsay Listanski in Tips for Home

Buying a home can be an expensive endeavor, and many potential buyers choose to shave a couple bucks off the final price by purchasing starter homes or properties that need a few repairs. And while this strategy can be an effective way to save money and, in some cases, personalize the house, knowing which repairs are more pressing can help new homeowners avoid delaying certain issues for too long.

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6 Home Improvement Projects You’ll be Glad You Did in the Summer

 

By: Joselin Linder

Tackling major home improvement projects during the hot months can minimize inconvenience to your family.

Betsy Taylor and her husband decided to embark on a major home improvement project one winter: renovating their kitchen in Portland, Maine.

“We hadn’t planned on redoing the floors, but after three weeks of tracked-in Old Man Winter, the contractor replaced it at no additional cost,” she says. “While it was nice to have a new free floor, in retrospect, I wish we had waited for summer when our chances of terrible weather were minimized. By the third week of construction, I just wanted my home back!”

While sometimes the winter blues can make a person want to make home improvements, in many cases, summer is the best time for such projects. While summertime is when attention moves outdoors, that doesn’t mean all summer home improvements need to be relegated to the patio. Here are a few home improvements perfect for summer that you may not have considered:

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5 To Do’s When You and Your Mate Want Different Things in a Home

 

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

Early on in my real estate career, I noticed a recurring anthropological event among house hunting couples. They would come into my office and sit down to tell me about what they were looking for in their next home. In about 75 percent of cases where one of them had expressed an interest in a fixer-upper, as soon as the wanna-be-weekend-handyperson excused him or herself to go to the bathroom, their significant other would pull me aside. Then, eyes desperately darting around in a sort of optical Morse code, sweat beads dropping from their brow, they would initiate what I came to call “The Restroom Conversation,” which always went something like this:

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Case Shiller: Home Prices Up after 7 Straight Monthly Drops

 

By: Mark Lieberman

The Case Shiller Home Price Indexes rose for the first time in eight months in April. The 10- and 20-city indexes each rose 1.3 percent, to the highest levels this year. Year-over-year, the 10-city index was down 2.2 percent and the 20-city index off 1.9 percent, both improvements from March.

Economists had expected the 20-city index to show a 2.3 percent year-year decline in April.

Prices improved month-month in all but one of the 20 cities tracked by Case Shiller; prices fell 3.6 percent in Detroit. Prices were up year-year in 10 of the 20 cities

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Timing the Market: 5 Signs It’s the Right Time to Buy or Sell

 

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

I’ve long marveled at how the prospect of buying or selling a home can transform the most patient poetry professor or the sweetest Sunday school teacher into a fast-talking, number-crunching, negotiator extraordinaire. Or, rather, it can make these sorts of people *think* they need to talk and act like wheeler-dealers! In my experience, this mostly involves ranting about “leaving money on the table” while they secretly quiver with the fear of making a mistake!

But offers and negotiations aren’t the only real estate decisions that make people think they should be more strategic than they are legitimately equipped to be. Many buyers and sellers believe they should know precisely how to time the market to buy at the bottom and sell at the top, despite the facts that:

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5 Secret Sources of Down Payment Money

 

Tara Nelson

Down payment: the mere utterance of the term strikes dread in the hearts of many a homebuyer-to-be. Coming up with a down payment often seems like an obstacle that must be overcome, as it is the biggest test of our ability to save money most of us will ever face and it’s a test that stands between us and our ability to become a homeowner.

I think it’s time to flip the script on how we think about down payments. What if we looked at them less as an obstacle, and more as an opportunity? Saving and collecting a down payment takes time, discipline and financial planning. It forces us into creating and practicing sound money management skills and habits, and into making clear choices about what’s important to us – things that will stand us in good stead throughout our tenure as home owners. To boot, the more money we have to put down, the more choice we have in terms of our purchase price range and the more control we have over our monthly payment.

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9 ways to cut summer energy costs

By Kimberly Palmer of U.S. News & World Report

Cool can be costly

With energy costs on the rise, this summer could be sweaty — and expensive. But there are some easy ways to trim your cooling costs without suffering through 90-degree evenings, sans air conditioning. In fact, if you start preparing for the coming heat wave now, you can probably save a few hundred dollars. You’ll also be doing the environment a favor, since the Energy Department estimates that half of a household’s overall energy usage goes toward heating and cooling costs.

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March Pending Home Sales Rise, Market Recovering

 

RIS Media

Pending home sales increased in March and are well above a year ago, another signal the housing market is recovering, according to the National Association of REALTORS®.

The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contract signings, rose 4.1 percent to 101.4 in March from an upwardly revised 97.4 in February and is 12.8 percent above March 2011 when it was 89.9. The data reflects contracts but not closings.

The index is now at the highest level since April 2010 when it reached 111.3.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said 2012 is expected to be a year of recovery for housing. “First quarter sales closings were the highest first quarter sales in five years. The latest contract signing activity suggests the second quarter will be equally good,” he says.

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7 Springtime Home Spruces to Boost Buyer Interest

 

By Tara Nelson

One of the first things many homebuyers look for are the unmistakable signs of something called ‘pride of ownership.’ As a whole, it’s a relatively intangible concept: there are just homes that have it – reeking of their owners’ love and meticulous care for the property — and homes that, well, don’t.

I’ve watched firsthand as buyers who like a cute home that is in generally good shape literally talk themselves into looking at a more homes once they start to notice one rickety gate, which snowballed into a nitpicky laundry list of little, tiny fixes the seller had left undone. The challenge is that between deciding whether and when to sell, staging, interviewing agents and determining a list price, it can be tempting for homeowners to fall into the trap of deferring maintenance on a home they might sell soon.

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