BE YOUR OWN DEVILS ADVOCATE IN LAS VEGAS REAL ESTATE DEALINGS
Today’s town real estate market is an alien landscape compared with what it was ten years ago, when it seemed as if a seller could just plant a sign in the front yard and wait for competing offers to roll in. This summer’s real estate scene is equally unlike that of five years ago when many properties could languish for long months with few showings and fewer legitimate offers. It’s been a welcome return to a more stable, predictable area real estate climate. With sale prices rising at a sustainable rate and the average days on market making a return to levels approaching historical norms, local real estate participants—both buyers and sellers—gain confidence on what to expect on both sides of home selling transactions. Particularly for town homeowners who are planning to list, that means that their properly prepared property is much more likely to garner a reasonable offer within a reasonable timeframe. This outcome is only likely when sellers prepare their properties in a deliberate manner. Fix up, de-clutter, renovate, clean—all the common tips that are touchstones for making a strong positive first impression apply. Doing it all before listing is a best practice, just as waiting for buyer feedback to tell you what’s awry is not. Be your own Devil’s Advocate when it comes to repair and maintenance issues as you assess whether you should sell the property as-is or order repairs. Careful, open-eyed preparation has real value. It makes it much less likely that a pre-closing home inspection will catch everyone by surprise. You put yourself in a solid negotiating position when your home hits the town real estate scene as ready as you can make it. Preparing the property is Job One, but Job One-and-a-Half is preparing yourself for what you are hoping to achieve. Make sure you have penciled out what the bottom line financial outcome is going to be, which includes what you owe, what price your home is likely to bring, and how the ensuing costs will work out as you move to your next destination. The biggest unknown is, of course, your property’s ultimate sale price. While online valuation models like Zillow’s are easy to use, they can yield results that are so wide of the mark as to be seriously misleading. Have your real estate agent create the up-to-the-minute comparative market analysis (CMA) which will set out how homes similar in location and amenities have performed in recent months. Those listing, and sales prices are the strongest indicators of how your home is likely to fare in this summer’s market—and provide a realistic pointer to what your asking price should be. Today’s consumers are inundated with information online. With 92% percent of real estate buyers searching via their iPhones, notepads, computers, and all the rest of our electronic paraphernalia, increasingly the tendency is to make quick decisions, often based on price and photos. In a world where consumers swipe or click through hundreds of pieces of information a day, it’s much more easy to be overlooked if your price seems out of line. That puts a premium on right-pricing the first time out. It’s also not a bad idea to have a firm idea in your mind of your absolute rock-bottom number should be—one that makes sense when your long term goals are taken into account. This summer promises to be a fine time to enter our town real estate market. I’ll be standing by to assist in all the ways that have proved to be most effective—so why not give me a call?
FILE UNDER NOW WEVE HEARD EVERYTHING ACTORS NEW LISTING
Putting together a Las Vegas listing is serious business. It has to be brief, to-the-point, and at the same time, engaging. The photos and language of a local listing is the tip of the marketing spear: if it’s dull, and just a repetition of the specifics that are enumerated in the columns of numbers that follow, it’s less likely to get more than a glance from potential buyers. At the same time, every Las Vegas listing has to be fastidiously accurate. If it exaggerates or mischaracterizes a property’s features, it will waste time and effort by creating traffic from prospects who were never going to be interested in the first place. They’ll be rightly annoyed. A well-crafted listing for a local home will highlight the distinctive features that make it stand out from the crowd. It will attract qualified buyers who will want to investigate further. As a matter, of course, we in the real estate profession check out lots of listings from many other areas. It’s part of the job, keeping abreast of what is new elsewhere—comparing how others in other areas meet the challenges of language and imagery. Of course, after years of experience, you encounter few surprises. But last week there was news of a listing unlike any other. I’m not sure that the details and language are going to be useful for describing many Las Vegas properties, since this detailed a foreign estate (on the Côte d’Azur) being put on the market by “a talented artist and musician.” The asking price is $33+ million, so it’s also a bit pricey for most buyers. But as an attention-getter, this listing ranks right up there at the top. First off, the talented artist and musician is Johnny Depp, whose comings and goings generate headlines at all times. The listing language, in fact, is most precisely quoted by the Australian Domain real estate site—rather than a French source. The Australian public has been keeping track of Depp because of his continuing brush with authorities there over alleged dog-smuggling activities (his Yorkies, Pistol, and Boo, are now safely out of the country). Domain tells us that the estate consists of “more than a dozen buildings, including a main house, several guest cottages, a chapel, bar & restaurant, a workshop/garage, a staff house and much more.” Students of listing lingo might decide that this descriptor belongs in the ‘subtly understated’ category, particularly when the “much more” is teased out: the estate, it turns out, is actually a small Provençal village. More than a decade ago, Depp bought an entire early-19th-century village. It may have been a bit run down—but it did include its church (the actor turned it into a guest cottage, with the confessional becoming a wardrobe). Depp took on the project as a sort of extreme DIY project. The restaurant became his dining room. He brought in a covered wagon for another guesthouse (it’s unclear how that worked out). Not every Las Vegas listing rates being quoted in a feature story in The Wall Street Journal, but this one surely did. “ wine cave in the main house has a Pirates of the Caribbean motif,” according to the Journal (as one reader commented, “Go get Sparrow!”). You don’t have to have a French village, though if you are thinking of adding your estate to this summer’s local listings. Just give me a call!
FORECLOSURE STARTS CONTINUE DOWNWARD MOMENTUM
If you are one of those Las Vegas homeowners who has been gladdened to see property values continuing to rebound, you have also been pleased at the steady decline in the wave of foreclosures that were part of the global financial crisis. When the subprime mortgage crisis triggered widespread financial dislocation, many homeowners felt the repercussions. Every Las Vegas foreclosure that resulted weighed on neighborhood property values, which reflect the dollar amounts paid when nearby homes change hands. Even most people whose livelihoods were unaffected—who kept their jobs or businesses and continued to make their mortgage payments without difficulty—could have suffered as a result. When the apparent equity of a home dwindled, so too was the amount lenders were willing to lend for refinancing. The comfort provided by fat home equity lines of credit (the HELOCs) suddenly melted when their maximums were cut, or even withdrawn altogether. HELOCs, after all, were a major component in the foreclosure phenomenon. The whole atmosphere caused confidence to be shaken. But ‘buy low, sell high’ is a proven investment strategy—and ‘buying low’ is an opportunity that typically arises when fear is in the air. Many large institutional investment outfits looked at the situation and apparently asked themselves, what’s more, “real” than real estate? They dived into the panic, buying up distressed residences in droves, paying rock-bottom foreclosure prices. For many homeowners, though, the real effect was psychological. After all, when your major asset is your home, any Las Vegas foreclosure can be seen as having the effect of bringing your apparent net worth down. RealtyTrac is the national scorekeeper for foreclosures and REOs (Real Estate Owned, or bank repossessions); and last month they continued to provide comforting news. Although there are ups and downs in the month-to-month stats, the overall trend continues to decline from the high in September 2013. In fact, there was a small uptick in REOs in April, which might seem like bad news, but REOs are completed foreclosures—at the same time, foreclosure starts continued their long slide downward. Daren Blomquist of RealtyTrac was quoted with more good news, confirming that “the overall increase in foreclosure activity in April is a continuation of the clean-up phase” of the housing crisis. But even better was this: “Foreclosure starts nationwide are now running consistently below pre-crisis levels.” It does seem as if this season is a choice time for sellers to enter the revived market. If you would like to explore the possibilities for your property, or are ready to start the search for a Las Vegas home of your own, please do give me a call!
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