Tag Archives: existing home sales

Boost Your Existing Home Desirability to Buyers

The years 2023 and 2024 were challenging years for existing home sellers. That’s in general; there were some warmer markets. But overall builders captured the market with huge and I mean HUGE incentive dollars for buyers. The problem existing home SELLERS have is that their homes are not new, and they should not be priced alongside new or newer homes. And yet some are.

The problem I see is that often, sellers spend tens of thousands of dollars on their homes getting them ready to sell, and promptly add that dollar amount to their dream price. That NEVER works, folks. What sellers spend is actually required to bring their home back to life to be worthy of the market; it’s not icing. They replace worn out flooring, leaky roof, repair wet crawl space, put in a new water heater, update appliances…all of the things buyers EXPECT to see when they are shopping homes on the market. Today’s buyers do not want to do DIY. They want older but they want it to BE new. See the conundrum?

There’s that dirty word no seller ever hears: Market. The internet makes my job much harder in a way, because it fools people into checking the square footage box, the acreage box, the age box and POOF! There’s your home value. Not. Not not not! Please hear me when I say this: There are a thousand other things to consider when deriving a price for your home and NONE of the online home sites consider any of them. So they tell you a dream price and you buy it, hook, line and sinker.

Remember the ‘nose blind’ commercials? It’s real. But there’s ’emotion blind’ too. Buyers don’t care that your parents built this home; they don’t care that this used to be your room as a child! They have never seen this house, and they don’t see it through your emotion lenses. The automated valuation models don’t know that your back yard view is of a propane dealer or that you have termites eating your floor joists. The AVMs don’t know that there is a plan to put an interstate alongside your property line! AVMs don’t know that your kitchen appliances are forty years old, or that the bathrooms are that age too. They look at age, square footage, zip code and then they grab others with those criteria and give you an average. Most of the time, they are wrong. Read that last sentence again, please.

I’m going to say this and hope you will listen. Real estate agents see thousands of homes each year. We see the best of the best and the worst of the worst. We know how to value your home. By the way, your market is not the same as the one 20 miles away from you. Real estate is LOCAL. Know that when we come to meet you and your home, our goal is to find out your STRATEGY for selling your home. In other words, how motivated are you and why. That’s critical. And then we talk to you about the repairs you’ve had to do, the ones you plan to do, the age of the systems, what you love and what you hate about the home. Then we investigate the building materials (like Masonite or polybutylene) and whether or not you are in a flood plane. We check for easements and private streets and road maintenance agreements. And we check the HOA and covenants. ALL OF THAT makes a difference folks. All of it. AVMs do not consider them, by the way.

But the bottom line is that unless you have made your old house new in all of the ways, you cannot price it alongside new construction. Even if, may I say, the quality of construction may be better. So please, consult a real estate agent (me) and let’s just talk about it. Oh, and then please listen. I will tell you the truth. And then I will help you actually sell your home.

I’m Brenda, a real estate broker with Premier Advantage Realty. Call me.

Statistics on Home Sales

Articles on home sales fill the internet lately, and most people cite those statistics without doing a deeper dive, or having the background information to interpret the data.  But it is imperative that you know where the numbers come from that influence your decisions related to buying a home, or selling your existing home, or both.  And it is important that you understand your market well enough to truly understand what the data is telling you, or whether it even applies.

I just read a article that said existing home sales are down 2.6%.  For many, that would be the end of the story.  But in my market, if existing home sales are down at all, it is definitely not due to the economy; it is because there is a shortage of listings.  In other words, MANY realtors have clients standing in line to buy existing homes, but there just aren’t any available to buy in their price point.  IMPORTANT: If you are thinking of selling YOUR existing home, this is GREAT news for you!  Supply is low and demand is VERY high.  This means many thousands more dollars in your pocket!  So in this case a 2.6% drop is not bad news. In fact, it’s a reason to celebrate.  And that is in the Raleigh/Triangle market, not in Chattanooga.

Something else to consider is seasonal effect on data.  Most folks don’t want to have their home on the market for sale during November and December, because of the holidays.  And during summer vacation time, it’s not unusual to see a slow down in buying activity.  It doesn’t predict gloom and doom for the market; rather, data predict typical human habits and traditions.  I always have homes closing over both Thanksgiving and Christmas, so some folks clearly take advantage of the lower supply of homes and they list, or they take advantage of the holiday slowdown to take advantage of buying at potentially a lower price.  See how this works?  Make the data work in your favor by understanding it.

The other thing you need to dig out of these articles is the source of the data.  I just looked at a chart showing lowest time on the market for existing homes.  I know our time on the market here is much lower, on average, than what the chart showed.  So I found the small print and saw that the data came from San Francisco CA, Billings MT, Chattanooga TN.  This data had NOTHING to do with our local market.  So be sure you know where these “stats” come from.  In fact, in some neighborhoods, I can almost predict when a home will go under contract, based on that community’s time on the market.  In the last case I examined, time on the market was about 40 days, lower than that chart indicated from these other areas.

The bottom line is this, and you’ve heard it a thousand times: Real estate is local.  Now that sounds a bit ridiculous, right?  But the saying is packed with truth.  What happens in San Francisco has nothing to do with us, here in the Raleigh/Triangle market.  Each day we have 60+ people moving here, needing homes.  EACH DAY.  So our market is always healthy, or healthier, than markets anywhere else in the US.  This means if the economy crashes, we will slow down, but not as much as most other markets in the whole country.  So don’t be afraid to buy, and I will beg:  Please list your existing home.  I can sell it!  I probably have a buyer waiting.