List Your Home at the Right Price the First Time Around

When listing your home, it’s important that you price it right the first time around so it doesn’t sit on the market and become stale.

Looking to sell a home in Jupiter? Click here for a Home Price Evaluation

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It’s natural for homeowners to feel that their home is worth more than it actually is. Sometimes these homeowners can be right, but most of the time they’re wrong. As a homeowner, the most important thing to remember about selling your home is listing it right the first time. 

A trend I see happen often is people trying to list their home a little higher than it might be worth because they assume they can negotiate any differences of opinion. Unfortunately, this strategy just doesn’t seem to work. 

The value of your home is based on three simple things: its location, the comparable sales of similar properties, and its upgrades. It doesn’t matter what your neighbors say, nor does it matter how much they list their homes for. Just because their homes may be listed at a higher price doesn’t mean that you should list yours at a higher price too.

Prepare your home, do your homework, and list it right the first time.

It’s important to listen to outside advice. When your house is listed and just sits there, it becomes stale. If your house is priced too high, even if a buyer likes it a lot, they may not want to submit an offer because they’re afraid of offending you.  

In the end, your goals should be to prepare your home, do your homework, and list it right the first time. 

If you have any other questions about buying or selling a home, please feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you.

The Importance of Staging Your Home

We’ve added the services of two professional stagers in order to help us help you get your home sold quickly and for top dollar.

Looking to sell a home in Jupiter? Click here for a Home Price  Evaluation

Looking to buy a home in Jupiter? Click here to perform a full home search

One of the things I specialize in is decorating, and one of the reasons our listings typically sell much faster than other listings is because of the preparation we do before it even enters the MLS.  

That being said, we’re very excited to announce that, in addition to our growing team, we have a growing relationship with two professional stagers who we will be referring our clients to. The first is a designer who can use your belongings to spruce up your interior, and the other will bring furniture into a vacant home and turn it into a gorgeous showpiece. 

Our listings sell faster than others because of the work we put into them beforehand.

As an example of the difference staging makes, let me tell you about a vacant home I had that was sitting on the market for 60 days. People loved it, but they just couldn’t visualize it. My sellers then agreed that instead of lowering the price, we would invest in staging the home by furnishing the entire downstairs. Within one week of it being staged, it went under contract. 

As another service of our team, we also have staging affiliates that we feel comfortable working with and referring our clients to. This service will help bring out the best in your home and get top dollar for it.

If you have any questions about buying or selling a home, please give me a call or shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you. 

Beware of Zillow's Home Estimates in Jupiter

There are a variety of opportunities in the South Florida real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market, get a free home value report, right here.

As a real estate professional, I'm continually bombarded by the question, "Why does Zillow price my Jupiter home differently?"

If we go on Zillow's website, they say that the Zestimate is created by an automatic software process designed by statisticians, and there is no ability for humans to manually alter the Zestimate for a specific property.

To make that more clear, let's say a home is estimated to be worth $500,000. If the Zestimate is off by 10%, that's a difference of $50,000! If the home is under-priced, you're missing out on tens of thousands of dollars. If your home is overpriced by 10%, it will sit on the market for awhile, and you might have to drop the price, causing buyers to wonder what's wrong with the home.

It's been estimated that Zillow's home estimates are only right 7% of the time. That means that they are wrong 93% of the time! That is a terrible success rate.

Remember, Zillow can't take features or upgrades on your property and compare them to other recently closed homes in your area, even though doing so gives you a more updated value on your property. Zillow doesn't walk through your home, and that's where my team can come in and place an accurate value on your home with a comparative market analysis.

"A Realtor is your best bet for an accurate home value."

Ultimately, if you want the most accurate price for your home, make an appointment with a real estate professional. Skip the nonsense and have a real estate professional find the true market value of your home. We will factor in the condition, location, upgrades, and amenities of the home in order to find it. If you have any questions about how we can do that for you, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We would love to help!

If you have any questions, or if you're interested in a home valuation, give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you!

How to Successfully Show Your Listed Jupiter Home

There are a variety of opportunities in the South Florida real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market, get a free home value report, right here.

Today, we’ll talk about showing your home when it’s listed. When you sell your home, you need to list it on the MLS. Real estate agents will mention how they’ll help show your home. Lately, we’ve noticed that when we schedule a showing for buyers, it becomes challenging. Here are three reasons why.

1. Listing agents are often not available. As a seller, you might be missing showings because your listing agent doesn't have a flexible schedule.

2. Buyers want to be alone when previewing homes. They want the opportunity to talk openly and freely without the seller or listing agent present. They should ask questions they otherwise wouldn’t feel comfortable with.

3. You may not know you’re missing showings. For instance, if a listing agent isn’t available for a showing, they won’t tell you that.

If a buyer is serious, listing agents typically want to be there to answer questions, ensure they feel comfortable before submitting an offer, and so forth. However, we want to assure you it’s okay if the listing agent isn’t present! The buyer’s agent should be licensed and leave a business card to let you know they were there. You should have a lockbox for the key with automatic registration. Allow them the time to relax in your home and get a feel for it.

If you’re thinking about buying or selling a home in the surrounding area, give me a call or send me an email. I’d be happy to answer your questions about this topic or more!

How Can We Market Your Jupiter Home More Effectively?

There are a variety of opportunities in the South Florida real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market, get a free home value report, right here.

We've been asking for feedback about our services in Jupiter, and what we found was that our clients were most concerned with how their homes were being marketed. They said that they sometimes worried whether enough people knew about their homes. Getting the word out to local residents is important, as that's where a majority of our sales are coming from.

That's why we've gone ahead and hired a full time sales associate whose sole job is to call people to get the word out about your home. We've already started this with some current listings and the results have been fantastic. Thank you for your feedback! It really does help to improve our business.

As always, if you need to buy or sell in Jupiter, please don't hesitate to contact us!

Happy Holidays!

How Do Realtors Get Paid?

There are a variety of opportunities in the South Florida real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market, get a free home value report, right here.

Hey everyone, today we are talking about Realtor fees. Most people I meet with don't have a clear understanding of how Realtors get paid for a living in terms of the commission they take.

When you are selling your home with an agent, you are going to pay a commission, usually a percentage of the final sale price. The standard commission in our area is 6%, with 3% going to the buyer's agent and 3% going to the listing agent.

All of our time, marketing, and advertising is invested upfront on our behalf until our client's property closes. For practical purposes, let's say we earn 3% on your sale. Of that 3%, 15-25% will go to our broker, Keller Williams. An addition, costs we incur is our marketing fees, which will be about 10% of that 3% commission. 50 cents out of every dollar we make goes back into our business and our clients. When you hire a Realtor, you want to find someone who will work for you, and that's what we do. If investing half of our earnings back into our clients doesn't demonstrate that, I don't know what does.

If you have any questions or are looking to buy or sell here in Jupiter, give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to speaking with you soon!

How Do Realtors Get Paid?

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There are a variety of opportunities in the South Florida real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market, get a free home value report, right here.

Hey everyone, today we are talking about Realtor fees. Most people I meet with don't have a clear understanding of how Realtors get paid for a living in terms of the commission they  take. 

When you are selling your home with an agent, you are going to pay a commission, usually a percentage of the final sale price. The standard commission in our area is 6%, with 3% going to the buyer's agent and 3% going to the listing agent.  

All of our time, marketing, and advertising is invested upfront on our behalf until our client's property closes. For practical purposes, let's say we earn 3% on your sale. Of that 3%, 15-25% will go to our broker, Keller Williams. An addition, costs we incur is our marketing fees, which will be about 10% of that 3% commission. 50 cents out of every dollar we make goes back into our business and our clients. When you hire a Realtor, you want to find someone who will work for you, and that's what we do. If investing half of our earnings back into our clients doesn't demonstrate that, I don't know what does. 

If you have any questions or are looking to buy or sell here in Jupiter, give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to speaking with you soon!

What You Need to Know About Appraisals in Jupiter

There are a variety of opportunities in the South Florida real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market, get a free home value report, right here.

We've recently been having some issues with appraisals on homes in Jupiter, and I'd like to clear up these issues in this video. 

When a home doesn't appraise to the market value that's being asked for it, what happens and who pays the price? Typically the rule is that if you are financing and you bring less than a 20% down payment on a home that does not appraise, then the terms of the loan will likely change. You can then use the appraisal to bargain with, or opt-out of, the contract. 

However, if you are only financing 50% or 60% of the home, then the seller does not have to come off of their asking price. If the seller is pushy enough, they can force you to purchase the home or lose your escrow deposit. The only way to protect yourself in a situation like this is to have an appraisal contingency written into your contract. This way, if it doesn't appraise, you can opt out any contract no matter what type of financing you have on the home.

This is a very shortened version of what you should do if your home doesn't appraise, but please come to me with questions if you have them.