How Can You Price Your Home for the Market?

If you want to sell your home for top dollar, you need to price your home correctly. Here are three common pricing pitfalls to avoid.

Looking to buy in Vero Beach? Get a Full Home Search 

Looking to sell in Vero Beach? Get a Free Home Price Evaluation

It’s natural for home sellers to want the highest price in the shortest amount of time. However, there are three issues that you need to avoid in order to make that happen. 

First of all, don’t rush your home onto the market. Take the time to properly prepare. Take care of any repairs, painting, or maintenance items that you might have overlooked in the time you’ve lived there. When the time comes to launch your home onto the market, you want to put your best foot forward. 

Price your home correctly right from the start.

Statistics show time and time again that when homes are priced correctly from the start, they will sell for the most money. The reason is that testing the marketplace with an inflated price diminishes buyer interest. Instead of the buyers and agents saying, “Wow, what a great house!” they say, “That’s a nice house, but it’s not priced correctly. It’s a little expensive for the market.” 

Finally, if you have been on the market for awhile and you’re not getting a reasonable number of showings (three to five a week), then it may be time to adjust the price of your home. Your home should be priced based on what has come on the market or what has recently sold. If buyers are choosing other similar homes over yours, then your home is not priced correctly. 

Once you realize that your home is overpriced, it’s incredibly important to have that conversation with your agent and reduce the price of your home. If you have any other questions, just give us a call or send us an email. We would be happy to help you!

What’s the Difference Between Using an Online Lender and a Local Lender?

When getting pre-qualified, you’re much better off using a local lender instead of an online one. Today I’ve brought in a mortgage expert to help explain why.

Looking to buy in Vero Beach? Get a Full Home Search 

Looking to sell in Vero Beach? Get a Free Home Price Evaluation

We’re seeing a lot of people lately get pre-qualified over the Internet instead of through a local lender. Maybe that’s ok for some people, but for most it brings some unwanted surprises. To help explain why, I’ve invited Eric Intihar from U.S. Mortgage of Florida to talk about this subject. 

In Eric’s words, a mortgage isn’t a commodity—it’s a sophisticated financial product. That’s why it’s very important when evaluating what your mortgage options are that you deal with someone you know, trust, and can get ahold of when you need to. There will be a lot of questions you’ll have as part of the normal mortgage process, and you need someone with the experience and patience to address those concerns.

A mortgage isn’t a commodity—it’s a sophisticated financial product.

Unfortunately, Eric frequently gets clients who need his help to fix something that went wrong with an Internet pre-qualification. This is because online lenders have no real relationship to the client or Realtor, so you aren’t a top priority for them. That’s a lot of risk to take on for such a big financial decision. As a general rule of thumb, when you’re working with an online lender, you’re typically working with someone who’s not as experienced as other lenders. You could even go so far as to describe most of them as entry-level. 

In my experience working with Eric, older clients who might not be as tech-savvy can especially benefit from using a local lender instead of an online lender because local lenders can actually go to their house and help them navigate through the process. Like any line of work, customer service is key, and using a local lender means getting a personal touch. 

For more information on lending and the pre-qualification process, you can call Eric at (954) 448-9829. If you need to buy, sell, or invest in real estate in the Vero Beach area, don’t hesitate to give us a call. We’d be happy to speak with you! 

How Is the 2017 Vero Beach Market Doing?

How is the 2017 real estate market doing so far? We’ll take a look at the latest numbers from the Vero Beach market to find out.

Looking to buy in Vero Beach? Get a Full Home Search 

Looking to sell in Vero Beach? Get a Free Home Price Evaluation

The first month of 2017 has come to a close. We had a great year last year but today, I want to tell you a little bit about the market stats in our area. 

As of today, there are a little over 1,500 residential homes available for sale. In the last 30 days, there have been 180 home sales. These numbers determine the absorption rate, which tells us how many homes are selling compared to what’s on the market. The absorption rate also tells us whether we are in a buyer’s market or a seller’s market. 

As of right now, we have eight months of inventory on the market, which means we are staying in a buyer’s market. That could be a trend or that could just be a blip; we’ll keep an eye on that for you. Since interest rates will continue to rise, we could be headed into a buyer’s market. If you’ve been on the fence about buying a home, it may be time to jump into the market and plunge into homeownership. 

If you’ve been waiting to buy a home, now may be the time to take the plunge.

In the year ahead, we are committed to helping you achieve your real estate goals. We have never been more committed and we have never had a stronger team. This week alone, we put six homes under contract, which is pretty cool, especially since the average agent will sell four homes all year long. 

Yesterday, we had the Sotheby’s award ceremony. Our team won number one in Closed Transactions for the fourth year in a row! We also won number one in Closed Transactions for Indian River County. We couldn’t do it without you. Thank you for working with us, and thank you for your trust and your referrals. 

If you have any other questions about our current market, give us a call or send us an email. My team and I would be happy to help you!

Why Is It So Important to Hire a Local Appraiser?

Today I want to discuss why, if you’re a buyer, you always want to hire an appraiser that lives and works in your area. 

Looking to buy in Vero Beach? Get a Full Home Search 

Looking to sell in Vero Beach? Get a Free Home Price Evaluation

Today I’m joined by Shannon Pohl, a lender with Caliber Home Loans here in Vero Beach, to talk about how important it is to hire locally when it comes to appraisers. 

When you’re in a market that has appreciated as ours has over the last five years or so, issues can sometimes arise regarding appraisals. This is because an appraisal is looking back on closed sales, and sometimes the appraisal process has not yet caught up with the active listings currently going under contract. If you’re a buyer, you want to hire someone local to do your loan if you want a good chance at securing the home you’ve fallen in love with.

Local appraisers know your area far better than out-of-area ones do.

Shannon’s company has an appraisal panel to vet any appraisers they do business with to make sure they’re local. Local appraisers—the ones who live and work in your community—know the area and its nuances more accurately. An out-of-area appraiser could pull our 32967 area code and see neighborhoods like Vero Lago, Eagle Trace, Grand Harbor, and Vero Lake Estates, and not know that they’re all completely different from each other. This ignorance can easily screw up your appraisal. 

If you have any questions for Shannon, you can call her office phone at (772) 226-6300 or her cell at (772) 360-6030. You can also visit her on the web at www.caliberhomeloans.com. 

If you’re looking to buy or sell a home or just need some friendly advice about our local market, don’t hesitate to give us a call or visit us online. We’d be happy to help!