Sellers — Lise Howe.com

When Should the Seller Move Out?

May 27, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Lise Howe Sold Your House!

Congratulations! You have a contract on your home! Your agent has done a wonderful job for you, found the buyer of your dreams, gotten you top dollar, and the buyer will even let you stay in the house after settlement for a few days or even a few months! Wow – how much better can it be? STOP!!!! This is not a dream – it is the beginning of a nightmare.

When you go to settlement, the buyer is going to ask for an escrow deposit to guarantee that if there are any problems with the house when you move out, that there will be money for the buyer to make the repairs. Imagine if the moving company knocks a hole in the wall as it is moving your concert grand piano out of your old house. You have the contract with the moving company – not the buyer. The buyer can’t easily argue with the movers to repair the wall, and you are out of the picture now. Escrows can be as low as a couple of hundred dollars and as high as five or ten thousand dollars.

If the house is empty before settlement, the buyer comes in for his or her walk through, typically an hour before settlement and on the way to the bank to get the certified check for the remaining funds. The buyer is psyched and dazed at the prospect that this glorious house is about to become his house and not yours. The walk through is brief. Does the stove turn on? Does the toilet leak? Are the walls still standing – great – check, check, check! Lets get to settlement and buy a house!

Buyer after settlement

If the seller stays in the house after settlement for a few days, then the real walk through is entirely another matter. The buyer has lots of time to do the walk through – now he is calm and focused on whether the seller has hurt the buyer’s new house. Is there any paint chipped? Are the curtain rods there? What about that spot on the floor? That wasn’t there at contract ratification!!!! Oh dear – the buyer needs $1000 for a new floor! Does the washing machine rattle with heavy wet towels? Definately that isn’t working condition!

How is this resolved? First the buyer directs his agent to ask for a portion of the escrow. The seller is outraged. That spot on the floor was definately there since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. The contract provided that only the blinds conveyed and not the curtain rods! The washing machine works even if it does shake a little. No payments! This goes back and forth for a few days, and finally the title attorney is called in to arbitrate. Eventually everyone makes nice and life goes back to normal.

As the seller, maybe a rent back or post settlement occupancy is really necessary, but make sure that it truly is necessary – that it is your only option. Every post settlement occupancy that I have been involved with this year in Kenwood Forest has been contentious. Buyers feel like they are paying alot of money for their new homes and they want to make sure that those homes are in good condition. The post settlement occupancy gives some buyers a last bite at that apple, a last chance to save a little more money – at the seller’s expense. If you are a seller, just be careful. Make sure you really need that post settlement occupancy – and be prepared to really pay for it.

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Filed Under: Sellers Tagged With: Contract, Escrow, House, post settlement issues, post settlement occupancy, property condition, Real estate

Don’t Sell Your Listing to the Highest Bidding Realtor!

February 10, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Some Agents Just Keep Bidding UP

Some agents get the listing by inflating the value of your house.

Or they may simply go along with “your” unrealistic price without objection. This is what’s known in the trade as “buying the listing.” The agent figures that you’ll eventually give up and give in and place a real price on your property. If you let this happen, it’s really your own fault.

Don’t be fooled! You need for your agent to be straight with you from the beginning. This means you should receive from every agent you interview a “supportable” opinion of value based on recently sold properties in your neighborhood; exactly what you would demand if you were a buyer. An honest agent will give you a “range” in which your house should sell.

If you price your house too aggressively high it will take longer to sell and you will probably will receive less in the end. If you take too long to reduce your price, your house can get stigmatized with prospective buyers wondering what’s wrong because your house has been on the market for so long.

In the end, ready, willing and able buyers determine value … not sellers and not real estate agents. And sometimes it isn’t even the buyer who determines the price, but rather the mortgage company’s appraiser, who can come in and find a value for the property that is significantly different than the contract price.

Rather than pick an agent based on which one promises you the highest price, why not look at the agent’s marketing plan. You want an agent who understands and “gets” your house. I talk to my sellers about how I plan to tell the story of their home and to communicate that story to prospective buyers. I believe that each property has special qualities that make it appealing to buyers. In the case of a condo that I sold recently along Connecticut Avenue, the story was the old world elegance of the building and the condo itself. The website that I hosted for the property, www.2737devonshireplacenw.com, brought out that feeling in buyers and it sold within three days with a full price offer.

Does the agent plan to make a video tour of your home? We all are so conditioned to twenty second sound bites and visual stimulation! It only makes sense to put together a video tour of your home in order to hook buyers into the emotions of your home.

Don’t sell your home to the highest bidding realtor – Your home and you deserve better than that!

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Filed Under: Sellers Tagged With: Bethesda home search, Bethesda sellers, Lise Howe, Marketing DC metro homes

Why Hire A Realtor to Sell Your Home?

February 2, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Back in the hot days of the real estate market, when sellers were secretly sure that if they wanted to move, all they had to do was put a For Sale sign in their yard, and the buyers would come flocking to them, waving vast sums of money. Times have changed, and sellers see more value in Realtors, but is this really the case? Where are homebuyers getting their information? Is a Realtor really necessary?

A recent survey by the National Association Realtors showed some surprising results in the attitude of recent homebuyers.

An eight-page questionnaire was sent out to over 100,000 consumers who had purchased a home between July 2008 and Jun 2009. They were asked to rank the usefulness of certain information sources typically used by Realtors® to market homes. When asked which information sources they found to be useful consumers ranked as follows:

Real estate agents 81%

The Internet 77%

Yard signs 42%

Open houses came out low in the ranks with 10% of buyers finding them to be very useful and 25% said that they were somewhat useful.

But where are buyers actually finding the homes that they eventually buy?

36% found their homes on the Internet
36% discovered the home from a real estate agent
12% from yard signs

Only 4% of buyers said they found their homes via newspapers, home books, magazines and television.

Many realtors still find open houses to be a good way to meet the public as well as an effective way to expose homes to buyers. But according to this latest survey – consumers, apparently, do not agree.

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Filed Under: Sellers Tagged With: Bethesda Seller, Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, Home Seller, Lise Howe, Realtor, www.homesinche