By Melissa Dittmann Tracey, REALTOR® Magazine
Despite fears of a double-dip recession, home owners are choosing to invest more money in upgrading their homes. Home owners who can’t afford to sell their properties and buy new are realizing if they can’t move anytime soon, they want to fix up the home they have.
Remodeling activity reached a record high during July, according to the BuildFax Remodeling Index, which has tracked residential remodeling activity since 2004. The July index increased 24 percent year-over-year to 130.4, the highest to date. It was the 21st straight month the index increased.
“As millions of Americans believe that they will not be able to secure a new home due to a variety of factors including tight credit, limited buyers and challenging job prospects, they are more and more turning to renovating and remodeling their current properties, sending remodeling activity to record levels,” said Joe Emison, Vice President of Research and Development at BuildFax. “However, this remodeling boom is leaving many of these properties under-insured, as the value of these renovations are often not being captured by the home owners’ insurance companies.” Continue reading »
By Melissa Dittmann Tracey, REALTOR® Magazine
Many buyers are demanding perfection in home’s today.
A small stain on the carpet? Forget it. Distracting paint colors? They can’t look past it. No granite countertops? Onto the next house!
As home values drop, offering buyers some of the best bargains in years, more home buyers have realized they can get more choosy when home-shopping. And with inventories high in many areas, sellers realize their home needs to exude perfection if its going to stand out.
During the housing boom a few years ago, buyers were more willing to overlook flaws, or accept them, that is. They may have negotiated with the seller over repairs or upgrades, but some buyers were willing to even take the home “as-is” to win a bidding war or to get the home in the area they wanted.
Times have changed.
Even first-time buyers, who once were lured to the “starter home” (a.k.a. a fixer-upper), are getting choosier. A Coldwell Banker survey earlier this year found that 87 percent of first-time buyers say they want a “move-in” ready home over a fixer-upper–and they want it to be affordable too!
Buyers are “missing out on some excellent, older lived-in houses,” Holly Kirby Weatherwax, a real estate professional in Reston, Va., told the Toledo Blade. “It’s a shame, simply because they can’t overlook” flaws that wouldn’t have bothered most buyers in the previous two decades. Those flaws could be anything from minor imperfections like kitchen appliances by different manufacturers to the home’s color not matching the buyer’s furniture, Kirby notes. Continue reading »
By Melissa Dittmann Tracey, REALTOR® Magazine
Staging a home to perfection can certainly get buyers’ attention, but pricing the home to sell is what often will get them in the front door, housing experts say.
With home values dropping across the country, a few sellers are still struggling to come to terms that their home may not be worth what they previously thought. About 77 percent of home owners believe their home is worth more than the recommended listing price, according to real estate professionals surveyed in the HomeGain National Home Values Survey. Yet, about 67 percent of home buyers say home values are still overpriced.
Nearby foreclosures can certainly influence a seller’s asking price. Foreclosures in a community can actually reduce nearby property values, on average, by $20,300 per household, according to research by the Center for Responsible Lending.
But many sellers can’t accept that their home’s value may be lower because of the houses down the street.
The sellers who tend to be overpricing their homes the most are the ones who bought post-housing bubble too, according to a study earlier this summer by Zillow.
By Melissa Dittmann Tracey, REALTOR® Magazine
Home buyers are increasingly reporting they want more energy savings, and plenty of homes are promoting “Energy Star” home appliances to help satisfy that desire. But some say that too many appliances are earning the “Energy Star” designation, and it’s starting to lose its impact.
To counter that, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, which jointly run the Energy Star program, have recently announced the new “most efficient” label, which is reserved for the utmost energy efficient washers, dryers, and other appliances. Only the top 5 percent of energy-efficient products will earn the designation.
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