How to differentiate your home from the competition
There is more on the market now that (perhaps) ever before. So the question sellers are asking is, “how do we make our home stand out from the competition?”
Between 1 June and 1 August 2004, 117 homes (no condos) were listed in the City of Charlottesville. 131 sold in in this 60-day period. More houses sold than were listed.
146 were listed in the same timeframe of 2007. 127 sold between 1 June 2007 and 1 August 2007. Fewer houses sold than were listed - certainly an indication of a Buyer’s Market, but things are selling.
The answer is simple yet requires work - on behalf of everybody. From a client whose house is not yet on the MLS:
How do you plan on showing the house to differentiate it from other houses on the market? We have been to the open houses of the (three other properties in our neighborhood).
…
I bring these up because I would buy a house based on impressions, and if I saw ~10 houses in one day I will remember 1 or 2 things about each. In the cases above, I wouldn’t remember good things. I do not really care what you do to our house, as long as it sells, but wonder what the plan is to get it remembered favorably.
1) Make your house stand out because of the price (make it more competitive than the rest).
2) Make your house spotless. Clean windows, baseboards, floors, corners, cabinets … everything.
3) If you don’t have a huge back yard, make it functional as it is. If you do have a huge back yard, offer your riding mower.
4) Make it sparkle. Do any and all reasonable (and some not-so-reasonable) repairs before it hits the market.
5) Remove any and all objections that you can before the house goes on the market. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
In short, sellers are having to do far more work than they have before, and buyers are demanding more. Buyers are asking for the moon right now; our job as listing agents and sellers is to get them to ask.
Update 31 August 2007: Greg writes a similarly-themed article today.
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Green Links for Thursday 30 August
The complexities of building green
Building green doesn’t cost more greens
Will going green help you beat the slow housing market? It certainly can’t hurt. Anything to differentiate your home from the competition will help.
McMansion tax - I’m shocked this hasn’t been proposed by somebody in the Charlottesville area.
Seven solar lights = draconian homeowner’s association response - Homeowners’ Associations should be encouraging these things rather than being so small-minded.
Solar power now standard - for California developers
Technorati Tags: green
Secret Agent Ken Boyd
You’ve gotta love the creativity in this satirical piece. If only I could embed it here.
My previous call for transparency in local government. All politics are local. Unfortunately, there is probably some truth in there.
“Motion to approve whatever Mr. Wood wants to do?”
We need more satire.
“Sponsored by the Virginia real estate developers lobby in conjunction with republicans everywhere, Inc.”
hat tip: Cvillenews.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, politics, real estate
Transparency in government and real estate
Transparency is a good thing.
I’ve noted before how my company’s commissions are broken down. As a buyer and a seller, the expectation is that all money being moved around between the buyer and seller be shown on the HUD-1 form (PDF). Granted, the HUD can be confusing, but at least it’s all there in plain sight.
Why are there only three candidates in the presidential campaign who have embraced transparency and accountability in government? Why not hold government to the same standards as the rest of us?
Technorati Tags: ron paul, real estate
Charlottesville gets ranked highly again
Courtesy of Travel + Leisure magazine:
Jefferson’s spirit—forward-looking, yet rooted in the land and mindful of the past—lives on in the new Charlottesville. Like other Southern university towns, such as Asheville, North Carolina, or Athens, Georgia, this is a place where people drive hybrid cars and tend to care deeply about what they eat and drink, and where it comes from. At the C&O Bar—the dimly lit college watering hole of our dreams, with early R.E.M. and the Cocteau Twins jangling through the revelry—we ordered glasses of Stone Mountain Vineyards rosé, listened to trains whistle by, and watched a table of professors and students arguing over the wine list as though it were a political treatise.
Ah, the romantic depictions of the Charlottesville area! Keeping up with all the ratings our region gets is nearing a full-time job. Look for the press releases from the City of Charlottesville in the coming weeks. The danger inherent in all of these rankings is two-fold. One, even more people will come here (not necessarily a negative, depending on one’s point of view) and two - the City and County get complacent and rest on their laurels.
Hat tip to the incomparable cVillain.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, charlalbemarle, charlottesville
Condo conversions in the Charlottesville area
Let me start with this - the doom and gloom depicted in the WSJ article are not necessarily applicable in the Charlottesville/Albemarle market. However, to a lesser degree, we may have some “growing pains.”
From Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (temp free link):
For the nation’s real-estate lenders, the other shoe may be about to drop: condominiums.
Already plagued by rising home-loan defaults and foreclosures among overstretched consumers, major markets across the country — including parts of Florida, California and Washington, D.C. — are seeing rising foreclosures and bankruptcies of entire condo projects.
…
The condo market, while tied to the housing market overall, behaves differently under stress. While a single-family home builder generally constructs units as orders come in, a condo developer builds all at once and hopes for the best, adding risk. So while the speculative overhang of newly constructed single-family homes may have peaked in many markets across the country, the full force of the condo glut is starting to hit now.With single-family homes, “you put up a couple of model homes and build the rest as you get sales contracts.” says James Haughey, director of research at Reed Construction Data in Norcross, Ga. “But you have to build the entire…building before you can sell a single condo.”
Hessian Hills. Riverbend. Barracks West. Walker Square. The Greens at Hollymead. Villas at Southern Ridge. 1800 JPA. Carriage Hill. These are most of the condo conversions in the Charlottesville/Albemarle area; no doubt there are a few others I am sure to be forgetting, not least the odd duplex that was converted to “condos”. There are a few on the market right now.
Questions that I would ask on any of these conversions (make sure you have your own buyer’s agent) -
- How many units are there in the development?
- How many have sold?
- When did the conversion become official? (when was it registered with the Commonwealth?)
- How many of the sold units have been sold to owner-occupants?
To give a very high-level (and admittedly somewhat inaccurate due to GIGO) overview of the Charlottesville condo market, here are the results of a quick MLS search with no status attached:
Condos in Charlottesville/Albemarle marked as new construction: 313
Not marked as new construction: 3,333
Conclusion - there have been far fewer new condo developments built than have been converted to condos. New condo developments should be (much) less susceptible to what may be coming to the condo conversion market. Might a reversion be in the offing? (ironically, one of the condo conversions in Charlottesville appears to be advertising on Yahoo for “condo reversion Charlottesville.”
The CR’s post has some excellent comments, including this one:
… we have the mostly unrelated condo conversion issue, which was nothing more than an arb of the overheated housing market vs. relatively low rents.
But too many of these “conversions” were nothing more $1000 of new paint and countertops slapped into formerly rental units and that was supposed to support valuations 20, 30 even 50% over the income property valuation (even at today’s crazy cap rates). That arb play has failed, and the “developers” behind them are going down, and good riddance.
Technorati Tags: albemarle, charlalbemarle, charlottesville, condo, real estate, realtor
Monday links 26 August 2007
I’ve been looking for this for some time - a way to capture the water from an air condition’s condensate drain
Now, if only I could install a revolving door on my house.
The “Right to Dry” (clothes in your backyard)
Where is Albemarle growing as of 2nd Quarter 2007? Building permits seem to be returning to more stable numbers (look at 2002 and 2003).
I love this analogy - a blog handshake.
Three simple ways to use solar power at home
Properazzi - what will the MLS landscape look like when they come to the States?
What will the shift do to real estate consumers’ psychology?
Referencing this article, Seth asks:
The shared belief about real estate might be in danger. The facts changed this month for the first time. The question that those that market real estate have to answer is this: will people treat a bounce in real estate the way that they think about a drop in the stock market (a chance to profit) or will it lead to a long-term reevaluation of what it means to own a house?
My prediction - absolutely. Owning a house means owning a place to live - people will pay attention to intrinsic value more than they have in some time. They will care about how much happiness they have in the home more than they care about how much equity they have. What we are witnessing is the return to a less transient real estate market (even though Charlottesville has traditionally been a bit more transient due to the University of Virginia), where buying and selling a home requires more due diligence and careful consideration than it has for the past seven years. Those who think that interest rates are high when a 30-year-fixed-rate mortgage can be had for under 7% - need to see things in a little bit of historical context.
But is it a marketing problem? We’re seeing now the blowback from the real estate consumer to the Realtors’ belief/consensus that it’s all the media’s fault. Blaming the media is a cop-out. The consumer is more skeptical and more educated than some might think or like to believe. Realtors should be able to frame the media’s frequent parroting of common memes in the appropriate light. There is frequently more to the story than can be presented in one thousand words or less (that’s why we have blogs).
Understanding that housing has, outside of the past 5-7 years, been regarded as a long-term investment is fundamental to the strength of the housing market.
The TJPDC says that (PDF) the Charlottesville region can expect housing demand to increase 11% from 2010 to 2020 (p.62 of the report).
The demand will be there, but the “quick buck” will be harder to find. Everyone needs a place to live.
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