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Category: Sun City Real Estate (page 8 of 9)

February 19, 2008

Down Payment Assistance is another creative financing option you can deploy to make sure yours is the home that sells

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Sun City Real Estate Broker

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Down Payment Assistance is another creative financing option you can deploy to make sure yours is the home that sells

It’s a hard world for home sellers right now. It’s possible that things are slowly getting better, but a qualified buyer still has at least ten suitable homes to choose from.

Does this mean you might sell now, or you might sell a little later? Probably not.

Does it mean you might sell for your price, or you might have to accept a little less? Probably not.

What it means is that, if your home is not the one that answers most of a potential buyer’s needs, it probably won’t sell at all in this market.

We’ve talked before about being the most appealing — best priced, best prepared, best presented. These are the homes that will sell to the best qualified buyers — while the near-misses languish month-after-month.

We’ve talked about using seller-financing to help less-qualified buyers. Carrying back a note for a third mortgage entails a risk of loss, but, again, that marginal difference can be moot if the house wouldn’t sell otherwise, or if it sells months later for a much lower price.

There is another creative financing avenue you can pursue, although this one comes with an assured loss to the seller. It’s called Down Payment Assistance. Through programs like AmeriDream or Nehemiah, sellers contribute a portion of the sales price to serve as down payment or closing cost assistance to the buyers, who receive those funds at close of escrow as a grant.

This is what I call Psycho Lender Math at its worst, since the lender is permitting the sellers to discount the home by a huge percentage while pretending that that same pile of money is coming to the buyers as a grant from a neutral third party.

The house still has to appraise for the full purchase price, so it really is just a seller discount disguised as a shell game — but if it means your house sells while all the others languish, you still might be ahead of the game.

These programs require advance legwork, so talk to your Realtor about what you need to do to participate. Note also that both programs are slated to be discontinued and are being kept alive, for now, by court intervention. If you do initiate a transaction involving Down Payment Assistance, it probably makes sense to act fast.

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February 14, 2008

Choosing second-best could get you the best possible home

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Choosing second-best could get you the best possible home

Last week we talked about how, even with so many unsold properties, multiple buyers can somehow land simultaneously on the one property on the market that approaches perfection.

This is perfectly natural human behavior, if you think about it. Who hasn’t thumped a melon? Who hasn’t reached into the back of the cooler for the fresher milk? Who buys the brown ground beef when there’s redder meat available. We were not just born to shop, we will perish if we don’t learn to shop wisely and well.

It’s no different for houses. You have a certain amount of money available, and a certain selection available to you for that money. It’s completely natural that you would shop until you find the home that is far and away better than your other choices.

And it’s perfectly natural that other buyers would come to the same evaluation of the available inventory. They wold have bought the same melon as you, except you got there first.

But there’s still an important difference. A good melon is as good as it’s going to get, and a bad melon cannot get better. But a house can almost always be improved.

Here’s a melon-improvement strategy for financially-savvy home shoppers.

That home you fell in love with is almost certainly a production home — a tract home. Yes, it’s in great shape, and it’s staged to perfection. But guess what? There are three more almost exactly like it for sale on the same street. They’re not as clean, not as nicely-decorated, not as well-marketed — but that works to your advantage.

The difference between your dream home and what looks to you like a bad melon is really just a matter of money. If you put that money into the bad melon, it will be as good or better than your dream home.

So, rather than competing for the best house and paying top dollar, you can use it as leverage to get a lower price and seller concessions on a home that could be even more ideal for you — after you do a little work.

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February 1, 2008

If you’ve finally found your dream home — don’t dawdle

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
If you’ve finally found your dream home — don’t dawdle

Here’s a paradox for the ages: It’s been a strong buyers market for more than two years — and yet buyers still can’t afford to be lax about the houses they love.

How’s that? In our recent seller’s market, sellers were completely indifferent to home-buyers — as a matter of studied strategy. “We might consider your offer,” they seemed to say, “but not today. We’re letting the offers pile up until Monday or Tuesday, then we’ll take a look at them all at the same time.”

Why can’t buyers in this market approach sellers with the same bland indifference?

They can — provided they’re willing to buy just any home.

In a seller’s market, qualified buyers are essentially a fungible quantity. Each one is simply a pile of money in the seller’s eyes — some larger, some smaller, some sooner, some later. Allowing for risks and opportunities, one is as good as another.

Not so for buyers. Houses are inherently non-fungible — each one is unique in location, appearance, construction, condition, amenities and lifestyle factors. Even with so many homes for sale right now, it can be a challenge for buyers to find even one house they are completely committed to buying.

My take: If you want to get the best possible deal, pick three homes, not one, and pit the sellers against each other.

But buyers don’t do this. Instead, they look at dozens of sub-standard offerings, and then focus all of their attention on the one house they can find that is priced right, repaired and staged right, marketed right.

And guess what? Of all the houses these buyers will have seen, this is the one for which there is competition. The factors that appeal to them also appeal to the other folks out there looking for homes right now. The dirty or neglected or over-priced houses attract no offers, where the few that are truly market-ready can draw multiple contracts within a few days of being listed.

The lesson to take away: If you really love the home, don’t dawdle. Chances are, someone else loves it, too.

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January 27, 2008

Selling your home in a declining market? The race is to the swift

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Selling your home in a declining market? The race is to the swift

If you’re chasing the market down, chances are you’ll never catch it. The trick to pricing a home for sale is to race the market down.

How’s that again? We’re in a declining market, that’s understood. It won’t be this way forever, but prices could continue their slow leak for quite a while longer.

What that means is that, whatever price you might get for your home today, you will probably get still less a month from now or three months from now.

Hence, you need to make a difficult decision.

If you don’t actually need to sell right now, you might do better putting your move off for two or three years.

But suppose instead that you do need to sell your house right now. You have a job offer out of town. You have a big deposit on a new home. You’re expecting triplets. What now?

Even in the best of markets, sellers can have an inflated idea of the value of their homes. This has certainly been the case in the two years since the market turned. We’ve had a glut of inventory, but much of that has been overpriced inventory.

Typically, the seller starts out with the price too high, then tries to chase the market down with a series of price reductions — usually too little and too late.

If your house is not showing, it cannot sell. But if it isn’t showing, this almost always means it is overpriced. The trick to getting it sold now is to price it under the competitive listings.

The natural impetus, in the face of advice like this, is to say, “I don’t want to give my house away!”

Who can blame you for feeling that way? But the important question is, “Would you rather hang onto it for a few more months, and then sell it for even less — if you are able to sell it at all?”

Racing the market down can be a painful decision. But the pain is likely to be a lot worse if you continue to try to chase the market down instead.

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January 21, 2008

Whatever you do, don’t dance: Pinal county restaurant fined $700 a day for encouraging its patrons to dance outdoors

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We’re in Phoenix, which is a megalopolis. You can drive in a straight line in the Phoenix metropolitan area for two solid hours and never run out of metropolitan area.

But much of Arizona is not just rural but virtually devoid of people. Scrub desert, dry as dust, where a very few hard-scrabble folks try to scratch out a hard-scrabble living.

You can be on a lonely old road at night and not see a car in either direction. There are no street lights, since someone would have to build, pay for and maintain them. There are no lights at all, and you will never know what it feels like to be shipwrecked or stranded alone on the moon until you look in vain in every direction for any sign of the works of man.

And then, far off in the distance, there’s a light. Just a glint at first, but it seems to grow brighter as you draw nearer. You can drive toward a light like that for half an hour, so thick is the darkness. And then you’re upon it. And then, just like that, you’re past it.

What was it? An electric sign. For what? A lonely little cowboy roadhouse. And what did the sign say? “Dancing, Saturday Nights.”

That’s real life in the real desert.

Here’s a Reason.TV story about authorities in Pinal County trying to shut down a little desert road house — for the crime of allowing its patrons to dance outdoors.

There’s a bit of speculation in the video that calls to mind the Lincoln County War — but that’s a different desert in a different state…

Hat tip: Thomas Johnson.

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January 19, 2008

Net-borne buyers create new burdens for listing agents

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Net-borne buyers create new burdens for listing agents

“Eighty percent of buyers start their home search on the internet.”

You don’t have to dig too deeply in the real estate world to unearth that statistic. There are two problems that I can see with the claim.

First, it’s based on an outrageously unreliable mail survey of recent home-buyers. Fewer than five percent of recipients returned the survey. How did the other 95% manage their home search? We don’t know.

Moreover, while the long-term trend, surely, is that more people are using the internet to shop for homes, what matters is not how they started their search, but, rather, how did they finish?

There’s more to think about, though, because it seems reasonable to me that people who are starting their home search without professional representation — without a Realtor — are continuing their search unrepresented as well.

What’s the implication? Like it or not, the listing Realtor’s responsibilities are increasing.

Realtors like to say — to each other — “If you list, you last.” What that means is that a listing, at least in a normal market, is a pretty secure paycheck, where working with buyers can be a lot riskier. This is the reason that the buyer’s Realtor often gets 60% or even 75% of the gross commission. The listing Realtor presumes that the buyer’s Realtor is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting.

But this is not as much the case in the age of the internet. If an unrepresented buyer clicks through to the listing Realtor from an on-line Realty.bot — or if that buyer simply makes a sign call — the listing Realtor is obliged to show the home, even if the original intent was to have buyer’s Realtors doing all the work. Moreover, the open house, long derided by Realtors, is suddenly much more important.

All of this creates new opportunities for dual agency, whereby the listing Realtor gets paid more — and incurs huge risks — while giving the buyer almost nothing in the way of representation. It’s hard to argue that this is an improvement, but it seems to be the way things are trending.

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January 12, 2008

Seller financing can give you an edge over your competition in the Phoenix real estate market

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Seller financing can give you an edge over your competition in the Phoenix real estate market

If you have significant equity in your home, you have a potent weapon at your disposal on resale.

The big news this year is likely to be more and more stories of people with little or no equity trying to get their homes sold. Values for an average suburban Phoenix home were down 14.66% year-over-year. That doesn’t sound too bad, but prices were down almost six percent just in December. We’re down 24% from the peak in December of 2005, on average.

But here’s the silver lining: If you bought that average home in December of 2003, and if you resisted the impulse to refinance your loan, you’re still up over 40% from your purchase price.

That equity gives you a source of leverage on resale that you might not have considered.

First, as always, for your home to sell it must be priced right, prepared right and presented right to the marketplace. You can’t do any kind of elaborate negotiations if buyers don’t even see your house.

But because you have equity in the home, you have the ability to help a willing buyer navigate the suddenly-more-perilous shoals of the lending process.

Suppose your buyer has five percent for a down payment, but the lender is willing to make a much more attractive deal for ten percent down. If the lender is willing to accept the arrangement, you can offer to carry back a note for the extra five percent, using part of your equity as seller financing.

You’ll be taking a second or third position in the line of creditors, should the buyer default — and it’s always possible that you will lose every cent you are lending. But given the direction of the market, you could be a lot better off risking five percent now, rather than accepting ten percent less a few months from now.

As with everything, read the fine print, ideally in the company of your accountant. But seller financing is one more weapon you can deploy to set your home apart from the competition in this very competitive market.

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January 12, 2008

Will Super Bowl visitors buy Phoenix real estate?

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It’s an age-old strategy: Just get ’em down here. They’ll love the place. It could be how you came to buy a home in Metroplitan Phoenix.

Channel 15 News offers this:

The Phoenix Association of Realtors is hoping the Super Bowl will draw prospective homebuyers.  

President Nate Martinez says with plenty of homes on the market and low mortgage rates, Phoenix is a buyers market that could be enticing to out of town visitors. 

The hope is the tens of thousands of people who come to the Valley for the big game will love the weather and what Arizona has to offer.

They then might decide to invest in a home.

If you’re coming to Phoenix for the Super Bowl, or if you have friends coming to the Valley of the Sun for the game, it’s definitely a buyer’s market. There are plenty of homes to choose from, and sellers are negotiable.

The Super Bowl won’t be in Phoenix every year, but the weather’s always like this…

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January 8, 2008

Your real estate improvement goals for 2008 will be more financial than physical

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Your real estate improvement goals for 2008 will be more financial than physical

Do you want to set some workable real estate goals for 2008? If so, sharpen your pencil.

Does the house need a new roof? Does the kitchen need an update? Should the pool be resurfaced? Doing regular maintenance is usually not profitable on resale, but deferring those repairs and upgrades can be very costly.

But the most important real estate work you will do this year will be financial, not physical.

If you’ve been prudent enough to buy a home — and 70% of Americans have — you’ve done well for yourself. You have a roof over your head and an asset to fall back on if times get tough. But refinancing your home or getting a home equity line of credit is not as easy as it used to be.

If you’re a first-time buyer, you have an even steeper hill to climb. Most homeowners have at least some equity to borrow against, but many first-timers have little more to bank on than a willing heart and an eager smile. Two years ago, that was enough. Lately, not so much.

The problem is that loan underwriting guidelines are a lot tougher than they have been in the past few years. Verifiable income matters. Debt-to-income ratios matter. For most home loans, a down payment is no longer optional.

What’s changed? For one thing, lenders have lost a ton of money on nothing-down and limited-documentation loans. For now, at least, they would rather write fewer but more promising mortgages. But the real estate market has changed, too. Lenders were free and easy until lately because they assumed the appreciation of the home would make up for lax underwriting procedures.

So what should you be doing to prepare for these changed circumstances? Boost your income if you can. Cut your debt ratios any way you can. If you will be buying a home for the first time, start saving for that down payment. If you plan to sell and move-up or downsize, maintain your equity in your current home — and watch your credit rating like a hawk.

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January 2, 2008

The Phoenix finds its way back to the sky: We’re finally going vertical, but is it too little, too late — and too widely dispersed?

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Hi-rise condos are selling — kindasorta. If you put your ear to the ground, you’ll hear all kinds of doom and gloom about luxury condos, but in the long run all of these new units will sell. The problem is that construction costs push sales prices to $300 per square foot and above, so there probably will never be hi-rise living in Phoenix, Scottsdale or Tempe for the less-than-affluent.

But: Hope springs eternal in North Phoenix. CityNorth is lo-rise residential with a paired retail district. This is one worth watching, if only because it will tell us if people are willing to pursue a facsimile of urban living in what is, for now at least, a fairly remote location. The dirt on that branch of the SR-101 Freeway is hugely underdeveloped, so it will also be interesting to see if CityNorth can induce a more-vertical Phoenix up north. The big question might be: Why open a sales office now, with the real estate market in the doldrums? The answer is that the developer is betting that the market will have turned by the time it gets up to speed.

Don’t snicker, but Avondale also has vertical ambitions. This is not as silly as it might seem at first glance. The confluence of the I-10 and the SR-101 Freeways is rich with people, and neither Phoenix nor Tolleson seems to be taking advantage of that opportunity. Avondale is close to being built out in its current footprint, and Goodyear has sucked all the oxygen out of the annexation possibilities. As with Tempe, that leaves Avondale with one direction for growth: Up.

The Phoenix Metropolitan area has zoning — which disperses development — but it lacks any sort of regional vision to concentrate big-budget building all in one or two places. Downtown Phoenix may eventually suck up enough tax-money and government takings and giveaways to come to life, a costly proof of the Frankenstein principle. Uptown Scottsdale has the money to do whatever it wants. The only real, organic urban vertical development is in Tempe, and Tempe is still my bet for the most-downtownlike undowntown in the Phoenix area. But scattering our vertical development in the same way that we scattered our suburban development may not be the best strategy for getting the Phoenix Thunderbird back to the sky.

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January 1, 2008

For real estate in Metropolitan Phoenix, the pain of currency inflation may be enduring

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). It’s important to understand that the long-run prognosis for the Phoenix area is good. We’re the fastest-growing major metropolitan market in the United States, adding 200,000 new residents a year. The short-run is not great, however, and the help the Federal government is proposing to provide will probably do more harm than good. Next week, I’ll be talking about some financial goals you can adopt to put yourself on a sound footing for the current real estate market.

 
For real estate in Metropolitan Phoenix, the pain of currency inflation may be enduring

The universal punch-line, the killer finish to an infinite number of jokes, might just be, “Sure, but it feels so good when you stop!”

If you had been banging your head against the wall, it might be true. For most things in life, though, no matter how painful they might be, the real pain doesn’t even start until you stop.

Want proof? Quit smoking. Smoking is a dirty, costly habit, we all know this. If you don’t quit, there’s a good chance it will kill you. But if you do, you’re looking at three truly agonizing days, followed by three pretty awful weeks, followed by three grim months. It might be three years before you’re complete rid of cigarettes.

The same goes for other physical addictions. The addiction can have painful consequences, but the sharpest pain comes when you go cold turkey.

This is exactly what happens to the economy when the Federal Reserve Bank stops inflating the currency. Practically speaking, we’ve spent much of the last ten years “high” on funny money. In consequence, we made “investments” that had nothing to do with anticipated returns, first with dot.com stocks and then with residential real estate.

Here’s the worst part, though: We’re not going cold turkey. A recession occurs when we wake up and stop despoiling the currency. The immediate effect is that the bad investments we made while we were drunk on free money lose their artificially-inflated value. This is very painful, but it only lasts about three years — eighteen months peak to trough, eighteen months trough to peak.

But instead, the Fed is attempting to keep the economy going with maintenance doses of funny money — sort of like the methadone treatment for heroin addiction.

Will it work? Maybe. The economy is out-performing currency inflation in many market categories. But real estate is not one of them. We’re already two years into our market correction, with no signs of a reversal in direction. So will the whole thing be over by this time next year? I wish I could say yes, but I don’t believe it.

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December 26, 2007

Time of the signs: Let there be light

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This is my column for last week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). Since I wrote this, Cathleen found a solar-powered flood light solution, which we’re testing now. At some point — ideally when there is more sunlight and when electrons aren’t quite as sluggish outdoors — I’ll let you know how it’s working out.

 
Time of the signs: Let there be light

We’ve been playing with sign lights.

Signs matter. If you’re trying to sell your home, the yard sign just might swing the balance. A whopping 63% of home buyers discover homes they’re interested in seeing from yard signs, and the sign can be the first “salesman” for the home in one out of every six home sales.

Our signs are custom-made for each home we list, with big photos of the interior of the home. The idea is to swing the balance toward our sellers by whatever means we can think of.

But I cannot imagine a more profound enemy of custom real estate signs than darkness. During the day, you can spot the signs, see the photos, read the copy. At night, our signs, like all real estate signs, are silhouettes against the void.

So we’ve been looking for lighting systems that will extend the hours our signs are visible — from twilight to 9 pm at least, although all night would be ideal.

Our first swing at the ball is a device called the Listing Light. It uses six C-cell batteries to set two light-emitting diodes ablaze. It actually works in the sense that the signs seem to be aglow from a distance, and they are completely readable up close. But the effect is a lot like reading by flash-light — doable, but not to be preferred.


(That’s a flash photo. We wish out lights were this bright!)

My friend Teri Lussier, a Realtor in Dayton, Ohio, has set her husband loose on the problem of lighting signs. His first invention builds the lights into the underside of the crossbar of the sign post. By now, he’s playing with the idea of building a box composed of two translucent signs with fluorescent tubes inside, much like a commercial sign.

I like what ground-mounted flood lights do for a home, so I’d like to make a deal with a seller to get an electrician to illuminate the home, building in two additional flood lights for our signs. This would not be cheap — but as our massive unsold inventory makes plain — cheap efforts don’t get the job done.

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December 15, 2007

Government interference will prolong housing woes

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This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Government interference will prolong housing woes

Want to make an economic problem worse? Interfere with it.

As I write this, the Federal Reserve Bank just cut the Federal Funds Rate by another quarter-point. Why? To try to stimulate the housing market.

Last week President Bush put together an attestedly voluntary agreement among lenders to freeze interest rates on certain adjustable rate mortgages for five years. The plan is voluntary in the same way that your rowdy Uncle Sid volunteered for the Marines instead of serving 90 days in the clink. Even so, Congress is still rumbling about involuntary solutions to the housing crisis.

So what’s the beef? Everybody’s just tying to help, right?

The problem is that all investment is based on planning. Before I risk my capital, I need a reasonable assurance that it will be returned to me — ideally with a healthy profit. There is always some risk in investing, but if the government can change the rules of the game at any moment, then the risk of investing soars. Doing anything else becomes much more attractive.

Consider: If I plant the right seeds and cultivate them properly, I can expect a bountiful harvest. But if the government were able to control the weather, and if it announced that it might or might not schedule a hard freeze for mid-July, I would be better off doing almost anything other than farming.

If I have capital available to lend, should I lend it where I know for sure I’ll get five percent interest, or should I lend it to a borrower who will promise to pay me eight percent — until Big Mother cuts that back to four percent as an act of mercy. If it were your money — and in many cases it is, in the form of insurance and pension funds — what would you do?

It’s plausible that we’ll go through the same amount of economic pain, with or without government involvement. But free markets self-correct quickly, liquidating bad investments and getting back to business. Government interference will almost certainly prolong our agony — to no good end, and therefore probably to our net detriment.

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December 10, 2007

Half-empty or half-full? Appearances to the contrary, the Valley’s real estate market doesn’t totally suck

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In Sunday’s Arizona Republic comes news that tabulating gross median home prices is not the best way to judge the housing market. Who knew? Oh, wait. That would be everyone except academics and reporters.

The fact is, most sub-markets in the Valley have had a slow leak in prices since December of 2005. High-end markets tended to do better, so the Republic has been wearing ASU-fitted rose-colored glasses through much of the down-turn. In any case, the paper is getting a new prescription:

Tracking the housing market by median home prices has become more controversial, particularly as homes have gotten bigger and skewed price comparisons in recent years.

Arizona State University has developed a new index to track the Valley’s housing market.

Researchers at ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business have created a single-family housing price index based on repeat sales.
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The index tracks the sales price of the same house over and over, which is like the S&P/Case-Shiller index and similar to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s House Price Index.

ASU real-estate Professor Karl Guntermann says median home prices aren’t always reliable because the housing market is different and “heterogeneous.” He put together the index with research associate Alex Horenstein.

Crocker Liu, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at ASU’s business school, said one month the most expensive homes can sell in a neighborhood, and the next month a subdivision with less expensive homes dominates sales.

The median for the area would be down, but “it would mean nothing at all about true home-price appreciation,” he said.

“The problem with median home prices is like having your head in the freezer and your toes in the oven. You get an average body temperature, but it really doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Okayfine. But what the heck does this say?

The index, like median-home-price trends, shows that metropolitan Phoenix’s housing appreciation peaked around September 2005, although prices continued to climb after that but at a much slower rate.

Appreciation peaked, but prices continued to rise. We continued climbing for months after we got to the top? I don’t have the math skills necessary to parse a nonsensical sentence, I’m afraid.

And, sight unseen, I already don’t trust the new index. If they’re measuring sale-over-sale on particular homes, then the sample size is probably too small to be meaningful. Moreover, extraneous factors — stadium-related construction on the west side near the SR-101 or the completion of the SR-202 in the southeast valley — will affect prices in anomalous ways.

We have our own alternative, which is not to say that it is beyond criticism. We have been publishing the BloodhoundRealty.com Market Basket of Homes for nearly four years. We’re working from tightly-defined criteria for a fairly large sample of homes, so we’re getting what we hope is a clear idea of what is going on in the middle of the bell curve. The Market Basket won’t tell you much about luxury homes or stately historics, nor about slovenly hovels, but it does a decent job of tracking the kind of middle class homes that form the bulk of the Phoenix-area real estate market.

So what’s going on? In November, very few homes sold — the glass half-empty — but prices held steady and days on market declined — the glass half-full. Market Basket prices are down 19.3% from their peak in December of 2005, but they’re still up 47.3% from January of 2004.

When will the market turn? Ask me three months after it happens. We haven’t suffered nearly as much as was predicted, but that doesn’t mean the pain is over. But if you subscribe to the RSS feed for BloodhoundRealty.com, the Market Basket of Homes will provide you with a reliable indicator to how the market is performing.

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December 8, 2007

Web site demonstrates how much goes into staging a home for sale

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This is my column this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Web site demonstrates how much goes into staging a home for sale

Week after week, I hammer away on the idea that the only homes that will sell in our current market are the ones that are priced right, prepared right and presented right.

But here’s an unwelcome fact about the real estate market: Home-sellers can be bull-headed. I don’t know how many times I’ve had sellers tell me all about what is wrong with the other houses for sale in their neighborhood.

My answer? I agree. But we’re not talking about those houses. We’re talking about what it will take to sell the sellers’ house.

And that’s when I get to hear about all the improvements the sellers have made — some of which are actually worth what they think they’re worth.

But what I really want is for my sellers to look at their own home with the same critical eye they bring to the neighbors’ homes. It’s motes and beams, surely, but seeing your home through a buyer’s eyes is a very instructive exercise.

It’s fun for me, because one of the things I tell sellers is, “You know what’s wrong with this house. You know exactly what you would frown over — or your mother-in-law would frown over — if you were seeing this home for the first time. Those are the issues we need to address before we can try to sell this house.”

This is the threshold of staging, which entails a lot more, in most cases, than laying out a few decorator items. A home that is prepared for sale is in complete turn-key condition, with no obvious defects left uncorrected.

One of our listings in North Central Phoenix just sold. We made a before-and-after record of the staging process, so you can see what we’re aiming for. You can view this demonstration by clicking here.

Staging is all the rage right now, and preparation is only one part of a sound marketing plan. But staging is a wasted effort if the home is dirty or in palpable disrepair. Our slide show illustrates a more robust idea of home staging.

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