Brodie Stephens' Real Estate Blog

The ad looks too good to be true — a home with all the prerequisites you want is on the market in a fabulous neighborhood. The community is near work, the schools are great, there are lots of activities nearby — and the asking price is competitive.

When the prospective buyers approach the newly listed home, hopes plummet — the place is vacant. Unfortunately, a home which is merely “lived-in” when furnished and occupied may look bare and blemished when empty. But the good news is that selling a vacant home isn’t an impossible task, especially if you follow these pointers:

  Investors who time any market hope to buy at the nadir and sell at the zenith, but homebuyers have a trickier time knowing when to sit on the sidelines and when to jump in. The reason? There are several.

Buying a home is one of the largest financial investments a homebuyer will make. Transaction costs are expensive enough that homeowners remain in their homes approximately six years before trading up or down. As the recent buyer’s market shows, homes aren’t liquid, and may not find buyers at the price and in the time frame that sellers prefer.

On the other hand, homeownership provides significant benefits including property rights, tax benefits and other government subsidies including support for a mortgage lending market, quality of life, appreciation, and equity.

Since two factors move markets — fear and greed — it’s easy for buyers to be overanxious to buy in a seller’s market and reluctant in a buyer’s market. In a seller’s market, prices rise, sellers hold firm, inventories are short and days on market are short. In a buyer’s market, buyers are fearful that home prices will either flatten or drop below what they paid, causing inventories to rise, days on market to increase, prices to drop, and sellers to sweeten deals.

If buyers pay attention to housing news, they can be discouraged: interest rates are near year-ago highs, builder confidence is down, and some predict that housing will drop in value for the first time since 1968.

So is it the time to buy?

Here are a few factors for you to consider:

According to a recent article, “When The Housing Rebound Comes,” by George Mannes for Money Magazine, the time for buyers to jump in is when conditions improve. Mannes suggests that buyers look for four signposts: declining inventory (preferably under 6.5 months of inventory on hand); houses selling faster; Realtors opinions of local market conditions growing more favorable; and signs that sellers are less desperate, such as fewer incentives and homes selling closer to asking price.

For some buyers, the lesson that it’s time to buy is a hard one. They may wait so long that the home they hoped would go down in price sells to someone else. They have to start their search over finding that the remaining homes don’t compare to the “one that got away.” They may wait for interest rates to drop, and find that they stubbornly stay at higher rates. They’re knocked out of the neighborhood and price range they wanted to buy into and find themselves looking at homes with fewer features, less square footage, or more distance from work, family and friends.

When those scenarios happen, buyers learn that there’s an opportunity cost for waiting.

If you’re a buyer, you sadly realize that to get the home you want — at both the price and interest rate you want — will be nearly impossible. If you’re lucky, you’ll get two out of three. So, if you’re waiting to see what other buyers are going to do, you’ll soon find that once buyers move collectively, they will either drive prices down or drive them up. If prices are down, but likely to recover, do you really want to compete with other buyers on the way back up?

In other words, the price of feeling more comfortable about buying is inevitably paying higher prices and having less to choose from.

So here are some surefire ways to tell that it’s really time to buy:

Homeowners are always looking to fine-tune the look of their homes before they put their house on the market. But all too often an area that gets forgotten is the closet.

Everyone seems to have more stuff than ever before and a lot of that stuff gets crammed into the closets. Then when you list the home on the market, and Mr. and Mrs. Buyer come to have a look, they reach for a closet door and are greeted with an overstuffed, unorganized mess. The prospective buyers don’t see your valuables as prized possessions; instead what they see is too much stuff and too little space. Often buyers can’t picture their belongings in a home that’s filled with clutter. That’s why a lot of agents will recommend organizing, not just the space you see immediately upon entering the home, but also the closets.

“I think that instead of being kind of a luxury, now it’s something that everybody thinks they need,” says Paula Gallegos, co-owner of Conejo Closet Designs in Thousand Oaks, California. Gallegos says an organized, well-planned closet can be a huge attraction. “Who wants just a regular shelf and pole when you have all these capabilities of the hangers and the drawers and the belt racks, shoe shelves — everybody needs storage” she says.

The requests for closet organizers are growing in an interesting way. Closets are turning into spaces where people don’t just store their clothes. They’re also considered an important upgrade for many buyers. Just as a large renovated kitchen and bathroom area are typically more appealing to buyers, so too are organized closets.

“They’re getting bigger. They want more bells and whistles. They want more accessory items. There is one home we’re bidding (on the project) right now that has an upstairs bedroom and they’re putting a refrigerator in the closet,” says Gallegos.

At the top of every homeowner’s list is how to maximize space. “Sometimes that might be extending your organizers higher than what you have, maximizing the overhead space and sometimes it’s a matter of using the extra space you have below with baskets and shoe shelves and things like that,” says Gallegos.

One of the newest trends for closets is being borrowed from the dry cleaning industry. It’s a rotary closet device called Rotabob and it literally brings the clothes that are stuck in hard-to-reach places right to you.

“For instance, you probably see a lot of closets that are not too deep — you know a reach-in closet and they’ve got a real long return where you look down the side of it and it’s two or three feet of really hard-to-get-at space. So, with the Rotabob you can install one of those and just basically bring your clothes to you instead of having to reach in for them,” explains Gallegos.

They carry a price tag of about $900 to $1,200 for a unit with installation but after it’s put in there’s nothing else to do. “They are stainless steel units with ball bearings so there’s no maintenance and no electricity and they work for just about any closet,” says Gallegos.

These units are becoming popular not just for closets but also laundry rooms, storage spaces, and garages. “Someone actually put it in a utility closet and loaded it up with baskets and hung their mops and rags on the handles and put their cleaning supplies in the basket,” says Gallegos.

Being organized on the outside of your home creates curb appeal that gets prospective buyers in the door. Then keeping them there long enough to decide they can’t live without your home requires careful, well-thought-out organization inside your home including those areas that you don’t notice right away but your prospective buyers most certainly will.

Written by Phoebe Chongchua

Eighty percent of existing housing was built before 1980. Most of those houses are ranch-style. You know — the shoe-box house with the living and dining rooms on the front, the kitchen on the back and the bedrooms all together down the same hallway.

If you’re a homebuyer, you either love ranch-style homes or they bore you. Either way, here are a few things you didn’t know that will help you appreciate them more.

Housing is like the rings of a tree that show the age of a community. As you move further away from your town’s center, you have neighborhoods of Victorian homes, then Tudor cottages, and then ranch-style homes.

All housing reflects the culture of the day. Designed for economy and functionality, ranch-style homes were mass-produced to serve post World War II families and they stayed popular while 78 million baby boomers matured into homebuyers. The 1950s through the ’70s were also the age of the automobile. Ranch-style homes were built in sprawling communities, away from town centers, and mostly accessed by highways. Land was plentiful, so most of these single story or split-level homes are situated on fairly large lots.

But ranch-style homes have their downsides. They lack charm and they’re so ubiquitous, they seem less than special.

But let’s rethink that. These were homes designed as machines for living. They’re modern, part of the design cycle of the jet age. The only thing these mid-century homes need is a little 21st century flair.

Ranch homes are easy to remodel or expand. Most load-bearing walls are on the perimeter, which makes knocking out or moving interior walls easy.

Take the kitchen, for example. In the family-centered ’50s, the kitchen was the mother’s magic kingdom. She would work her magic and emerge wearing her pearls and high-heels with dinner on a tray like there’s nothing to it.

Fast forward 50 years, and you have frantic, two-income families. Time together is precious. Instead of being walled off, the kitchen has become part of the family room now.

When you preview a ranch-style home, don’t think about what’s out of date. Think about how this home can serve your needs today. These homes were built to last. Just replace those Jetson-era Formica countertops with polished concrete, hammered copper or honed granite. Install elegant French doors in place of the sliding glass patio doors. Raise the 8-foot ceilings to nine or ten feet.

Have fun decorating with the latest furniture. Open any furniture catalog and you’ll see a trend toward retro low-slung modern designs, with an emphasis on machines (flat-panel TVs, computers), and family-gathering places like dens, just like the 1950s.

Retro is in because it works, and maybe you’ll find the ranch-style home can work for you.

Written by Blanche Evans

  We’re a nation of super-sized everything — from food to homes — but developers are scaling down in some areas of the country in an effort to make houses more affordable.

“Over the years the size of homes has expanded as the market grew hotter and hotter. But now that the market is going through an adjustment period and costs have ramped up, builders are exploring different ways of reducing costs. One of those is to reduce the size of the homes in terms of overall square footage in different sections of the home,” says Joseph Narkiewicz, executive vice president of the Tampa Bay Builders Association.

According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, builders are shrinking homes. Some are scaling back from 2,200 square feet to 1,800. They are even building two-bedroom houses that only offer a little more than 1,000 square feet. The down-size allows for homes to be reduced to more feasible prices.

Lest you think the news is all bad, Narkiewicz says this is just a strategic move — not a sign that times are taking a turn for the worst. “The state of the economy is improving somewhat so there is some degree of optimism that we’re looking forward to. In fact, one of our economists in Florida estimates that as we work through 2008, things should get better as the year progresses,” says Narkiewicz.

In fact, Narkiewicz says there will still be super-sized homes for those whose lifestyles demand it and incomes support it. However, for others things may be getting a bit back to normal.

“Some things may have gone to the extreme and I think buyers are now going through a realty check and finding they don’t really need those huge bathrooms like developers were building. They don’t really need all the extra space that developers were building and, to try to mitigate the higher pricing, they’re bringing the square footage down,” says Narkiewicz.

So is this a passing trend that will fade as market conditions improve?

“I don’t believe it’s going to be a passing fad. I think that homes will be down-sized somewhat and that will probably remain there until people decide they want more space. But this is probably going to become a more permanent thing,” says Narkiewicz.

Also on the way out are some amenities, “The large clubhouse with the elaborate swimming pools in certain communities may be gone simply as a cost-saving measure as well as people may not want to have the maintenance costs of those facilities through homeowner’s association dues,” says Narkiewicz. He also says gated communities may be on the decline in certain markets.

He says buyers are also opting for less expensive materials in their homes. “There are some people who may forgo granite countertops in favor of the Formica tops — the less costly countertops — for the initial construction phase. Later on they can always replace them as money becomes more available,” says Narkiewicz.

Another challenge adding to the current real estate conditions is dealing with growth management laws. Narkiewicz says some planners and neighborhood activists oppose land-use plan changes or zoning that would increase population density.

Narkiewicz says, “Sometimes it’s a matter of the numbers game. At two units to the acre, the lot costs X. At four units to the acre the lot might cost half that amount.”

He adds that some of the growth management trends are to establish urban service boundaries. “So that within those boundaries is where all the growth is to occur, which then artificially limits the supply of land that is available for development — and when you limit the supply of something it just bids the price up. When you bid up the price of raw land, obviously, the price of finished lots goes up and therefore the price of the finished homes goes up. So government has a tendency, through its regulatory process, to artificially inflate the cost of housing and these are some of the issues that we’ve been battling throughout the country,” says Narkiewicz.

Written by Phoebe Chongchua