Curb Appeal – Setting the Tone, Attracting Home Buyers

Two important pieces of the marketing puzzle are web appeal and curb appeal. Getting both right is key to selling your home for top dollar in today’s market. I discussed web appeal in an earlier post entitled, “Web Appeal – Your Home’s First Impression to Buyers” (click on title to read). Today, we’re going to look at curb appeal.

Curb appeal sets the tone and attracts (or deters) home buyers. It makes your home stand out from the competition – hopefully in a good way. If done properly, it informs and attracts those just driving by as well as buyers/agents pulling up in their car to see the property in person. If done incorrectly, it will deter potential buyers and make your competition (aka similar homes for sale in the area) appear better and more appealing than yours which usually leads to the buyer placing an offer on your neighbor’s home rather than yours.

How do you go about getting an A+ grade on your home’s curb appeal? The same way you would go about getting your ready to sell. Give it a full detail. You won’t get top dollar of your car is dirty and doesn’t look well maintained. The same goes for your home.

Here’s a partial list of what should be done…

• power wash the exterior
• replace any damaged siding, bricks, wood, etc.
• give your home a landscaping facelift (mulch, shrubs, flowers, trees, grass, etc)
• fresh coat of paint if applicable
• bay and other window frames, shutter touch-up
• power wash (and possibly re-seal/stain) the deck

There’s more, but this gives you an idea of what I’m talking about.

One part of curb appeal which few agents/brokers talk about is the yard sign in the front yard. Why don’t they talk about it? Because the typical agent/broker yard sign does absolutely nothing to increase the curb appeal. In some cases, it detracts from the home’s curb appeal.

The typical agent/broker yard sign gives buyers only the following information…

• brokerage name and phone number
• agent name and phone number

The irony of it is that we, as agents and brokers are hired by you to market your home in the most effective manner possible in order to attract a ready, willing and able buyer with an offer acceptable to your terms. The bad news is that the typical yard sign gives no information about the property whatsoever which does nothing to attract a buyer which, in turn, does nothing to help sell your home.

The good news is that you don’t have to settle for the norm nor anything less than top of the line. Here’s why…

 

 

This is one example of a custom yard sign I made for a recent listing of mine. Here’s what this sign includes that others do not…

• price
• photos of the interior
• number of bedrooms and bathrooms
• description of other key interior features
• custom property web site URL

Why is this stuff on the sign? Because this is the type of information that buyers want and they want it right then and there. And as the saying goes, “If you got it, flaunt it” – inform potential buyers driving/walking by about your home, what it’s best features are and make them say, “I want to see this house!” This is key, because getting a buyer to want to see your home in person is the first step in getting an offer in your hands.

In the case of this particular listing, while the sitting at the settlement table, the buyer said, “We pulled up to the house and said, ‘Wow, that’s an awesome sign!’” That’s the kind of stuff that will make a buyer remember your home over others (i.e. “the home with the awesome sign”) which plays a part in getting your home sold for top dollar.

The bottom line is this… If you want to sell your home for top dollar in today’s market, you must have excellent and “stand out from the rest” web appeal and curb appeal. If you don’t your home will sit on the market while those around you sell or you lower the price. If your home’s web appeal and curb appeal is better than the rest, your yard sign will look like this,

 

 

Mortgage Rates at Historical Lows, More Financing Options

If you haven’t heard the news, mortgage rates hit new historical lows this week. Depending on the area you’re in and your credit worthiness, mortgage rates are at 4 percent, if not under 4 percent. That’s just cheap money – plain and simple.

Not only are mortgage rates at all time lows, monthly payment amounts have come down substantially since the beginning of the year. Check it out…

Mortgage payments based on the conforming loan limit of $417,000 are now 9% cheaper as compared to the start of the year:

• January 2011 : A $417,000 mortgage cost $2,180.30 per month
• October 2011 : A $417,000 mortgage cost $1,976.42 per month

That’s over $200 per month saved for bills, home repairs, eating out or your vacation fund.

In addition to record-low mortgage rates and lower monthly payments, lenders are beginning to increase the number and types of financing options available to borrowers.

For example, I recently received an offer on a listing and could hardly believe my eyes…the buyer’s lender letter stated the type of loan as being “100% financing, no PMI”! Now this lender letter wasn’t from just any mom-and-pop mortgage shop – it was BB&T.

I could hardly believe it so I called the loan officer to verify and get the 411 on the loan program. Here’s the scoop,

• It’s a BB&T in-house program
• 100% financing
• no PMI (mortgage insurance)
• credit score of at least 660
• little or no credit history OK
• income cap of $84K based on the property being in Loudoun County, VA
• interest rate, points and closing costs were competitive with traditional financing programs

In case you’re wondering, “What’s the catch?” (I did too)…there’s no catch. There were no “hidden fees” and no last-minute hurdles for the buyer (or seller). We settled on time with no problems. At settlement, the buyer told me they were extremely satisfied with the entire financing process.

This is just one example of how lenders are easing their restraints on financing. I am by no means saying nor wishing that lenders get as lax as they did 2003 through 2006. But I am happy that they’re getting away from the overly-strict lending guidelines of the latter part of the last decade.

With mortgage money being cheaper than ever and financing options becoming more abundant, you’ve got a lot of good things going for you if you’re in the market to sell or buy a home. If you would like to discuss your financing options in more detail, click here to contact me and I will send you names of some great lenders so you can pick their brains and see what’s available to you.

photo credit

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Web Appeal – Your Home’s First Impression to Buyers

 

Many factors go into selling your home, two of them being web appeal and curb appeal. In the first part of this two part series, we’re going to talk about web appeal. How important is web appeal? The COO of Zillow, Spencer Rascoff said it well in an article on ABCNews,

Sellers used to have to worry about curb appeal: How does the grass look, etc. Now a seller needs to worry about Web Appeal: When a buyer is browsing on the Web, what is their first impression.

With over 90 percent of local home buyers saying that they start their search for homes online, there’s a 90 percent chance that a home buyer’s very first impression of your home will be what they see of it online.

If your home makes a lousy first impression on the web, the chance of a home buyer coming to see your home in person is seriously diminished. And if a buyer doesn’t see your home in person, there’s about a zero percent chance that buyer is going to buy it.

Are you starting to follow me now?

So how do you get your home to make an A+ first impression and have awesome web appeal? Take full advantage of every possible aspect of online marketing. And I’m not just talking about some photos, a generic virtual tour and a few search platforms. I’m talking about great photos, video, virtual tours/shows, e-flyers, directories, a custom property web site, blog posts, aggregating your listing to all pertinent search platforms and using as many available tools as possible to expose your property to potential buyers.

Ask yourself the following,

• Does my listing include a virtual tour/show?
• Were the photos professionally done and edited before going up on the web?
• Do I have at least 30 photos of my property and subdivision/community up on the web?
• Is my listing aggregated to all of the pertinent search platforms buyers use to search for home for sale?
• Does my home have a custom single property web site?
• Is my custom single property web site as in-depth and clean yet, robust as this – http://45BerkeleyCt.com?
• Do I have the proper SEO and visitor tracking/analytics built in to my custom single property web site?
• Is social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, etc) a part of my home’s/listing agent’s marketing plan?

There’s more to it than just the examples above. But, if you answered anything but “yes” to all of the basic examples above, you have not taken advantage of all of the available tools to expose your home to potential buyers nor have you done so in the most appealing way. And that will cost you grief, stress and money by increasing the time it takes you to sell your home and decreasing the amount of money it sells for.

This is why I take online marketing very seriously – and so should you. New platforms and methods of marketing come out regularly and I make sure to stay on top of them and constantly learn in order to provide the best possible service to my clients. Real estate is no longer just about knowing a neighborhood or properly negotiating a contract…staying on top of technology and successfully marketing a property in today’s environment is key.

The next part of this two part series talks about curb appeal, another key component to successfully selling your home. Keep an eye out for it next week.

Does Your Home’s Web and Curb Appeal Get an A+? It had better.

There are many pieces to the puzzle when selling your home in today’s market. Two of them are web appeal and curb appeal. Both are extremely important and should be a main focus when selling your home. If either are not done well, you may turn away potential buyers and/or get a lower priced offer than you had hoped for.

Web Appeal

If your home’s web appeal is not A+, your home will fall into the “possibilities” and “discarded” folders of buyers’ searches. If your home stands out from the crowd and makes buyers say, “That looks nice!”, then your home goes into the “favorites” or “must see” folders.

Speaking from experience along with countless studies done on the topic, if your home is not in the top 3 to 5 of a buyers’ “favorites” folder, the buyer will most likely not want to see your home in person. And you can’t sell a home to a buyer who doesn’t come to see the home in person.

Curb Appeal

Once a buyer drives past your home or arrives to see it in person, your curb appeal is your home’s first impression to the buyer. The first impression can attract or deter the buyer within a matter of seconds. If your curb appeal is lower than an A+, someone driving past your home may say, “Bleh. The other house around the corner looks better”.

And someone coming to see the house in person will have a less than positive outlook on the entire property if the curb appeal isn’t excellent. You may either deter a potential buyer from seeing (and buying) the house or you may lose money because anything negative equals less money that a buyer will offer.

If you have your home on the market or about to put your home on the market, what grade would your home get for web appeal and curb appeal? If it’s not an A+, there’s something wrong. No, getting an A+ in web appeal and curb appeal is not like acing a master’s level class. And it can be done by even the busiest of sellers and listing agents.

So how do you get an A+ in web appeal and curb appeal? I’m going to go into detail about web appeal and curb appeal each in a separate blog post. The blog posts will be coming out over the next 10 days so grab the RSS feed, add this blog to your Google home page/reader/Google+ or other service you are using or just check back.

Regardless of how you access the posts, make sure you read them. Though the posts are free for everyone to read, what you get out of reading them may be the difference in whether you sell your home or not and/or may make you thousands of extra dollars when selling your home.