• Stage rooms with one purpose.  Rooms that have many uses can confuse or even deter homebuyers, so staging rooms with one purpose is vital.  Determine who your most likely target market will be, whether it’s young professionals with no kids, families, or even empty nesters.  Then present your areas to fit their needs.  If you’ve been using a room as a guest room/kids playroom/home office, pick the one use that best suits your buyers.
• Tackle the easy “do-it-yourself” projects. Spruce up your home by updating kitchen and bathroom fixtures and updating cabinet hardware.  Add a fresh coat of paint in a neutral palate that won’t distract from your home’s features.

• Focus on the living areas.  Potential buyers should envision themselves entertaining friends and family in the living areas of the home.  Make sure those areas feel as spacious as possible by removing any unnecessary furniture to allow for easy traffic flow.
• Make sure the master bedroom appeals to both sexes.  Remember that the master bedroom is a room that a couple will be sharing, so the décor should appeal to both sexes.  It should feel like a calm and peaceful refuge, not a frilly boudoir.  Remove any feature that seems too gender-specific and paint the walls a neutral colour.
• De-clutter & depersonalize. Buyers want to picture their family living in a home, not the previous owners.  You’re going to be moving anyway, so start now by packing away family photos, personal mementos knickknacks. Store away valuables under lock and key. Some property owners find they need to store some of their belongings off premises to create an open feel.
• Furnish the home, but don’t overdo it.  While an empty house may look spacious, it’s often hard for buyers to visualize their belongings in a home if they’re just looking at bare walls and floors. Leave the basic components that allow the viewer to define each room.
• Don’t forget the outside spaces.  First impressions can play a key role in a consumer’s decision-making process, so don’t neglect your home’s curb appeal.  Make sure the home’s exterior is inviting by trimming the bushes, mowing the lawn and painting faded window trim.  Buyers will appreciate the seller’s efforts with the yard work, and will tend to assume that the same attention to detail has been devoted throughout the property.

IF you are thinking of listing your home in the Spring, here are a few tips of things to do before that first “Open House”.

Outside February is a transitional month in much of the U.S. Winter storms may continue to cause damage to home exteriors and landscaping, but spring is in sight and you can begin working in the garden to prepare for warmer weather.

Check for storm damage. While you’re outside, walk around the house looking for missing or damaged siding and shingles. Remove fallen branches and storm debris from around the house.

Clean the gutters. It’s easier to scoop up the leaves and debris in your gutters when the stuff is wet, so pull out your ladder and clean the gutters after a soaking rain. You should do this at least twice a year, but may need to do it monthly if your home is surrounded by trees. For more information, see “Gutter cleaning and care.”

Mulch garden beds. By the end of the month, the ground has thawed in many parts of the country and it’s time to start warding off weeds. If you didn’t mulch in early winter, now is the time to add a layer to discourage weeds.

Prune ornamental grasses. Clean up pampas grass and other ornamental grasses by cutting them in early spring, before new green shoots get tall. Cut the old grass about 2 to 4 inches above the new green shoots. Wear gloves and use a chain saw on big, unwieldy pampas grasses. Tackle others with pruning shears or hedge clippers. Cut straight across the top of the clump and rake away the dead stalks to clean up the plant.

Try corn gluten meal on weedy garden paths. Corn gluten meal, a yellow powder or pellet, is used in livestock feed but it also is an organic “pre-emergent” weed control. You’ll find it in garden supply or agricultural supply stores. Spread it on garden paths (find inspiration for garden paths from this slide show on 16 beautiful garden paths) or beds where you do not want seeds to take root. Read label directions for correct application. Corn gluten meal stops seeds from forming roots when they are germinating. It also contains nitrogen that feeds the established plants in your garden. Apply it early in the season: If you wait until weeds have sprouted, it will be ineffective. Avoid using it on beds where you have seeded ornamentals or where you are counting on plants to self-seed from last year. Learn more at Iowa State University’s Department of Horticulture Corn Gluten Meal Research Page.

Making an impression

If strangers were to walk into your home, what would their first impression be? This is one thing that many people get wrong — even when they use a real estate agent.

For example, in the A&E television series “Sell This House,” potential buyers are videotaped as they tour houses that the homeowners are desperate to sell. As a general rule, homeowners are shocked by strangers’ first impressions of their homes. A home is largely a reflection of its owner, so it’s hard for an owner to accept that other people find the décor, cleanliness or even the smell of the home distasteful.

A real estate agent is often the sounding board for buyers and their complaints about the homes they visit, and she is therefore more likely to address important deficiencies in her own home.

According to the National Association of Realtors, the second-biggest reason a home won’t sell is because the homeowner hasn’t taken care of details like ensuring the house is clean and uncluttered, the décor is neutral and the house has been “staged” to play up its best features. The biggest reason a home won’t sell is, of course, the price. We’ll get to that next.

Evaluating your property

One of the top reasons Realtors seem to get top dollar for their own homes, according to real estate news provider Realty Times, is that real estate agents know how to evaluate a property in terms of what is likely to garner the highest resale price. Therefore, they are likely to analyze the resale values of the properties they buy for themselves in an attempt to ensure a higher resale value.

Setting a price

According to the National Association of Realtors, people selling their homes often choose a price based on one of three factors: need, ego or greed. Particularly in a tough real estate market like the one we’re seeing in the United States now, sellers often want to price their homes according to how much they need to get out of the sale in order to purchase a new property.

Unfortunately, what a seller needs to make on a property has nothing to do with market conditions, which are generally governed by supply and demand, along with other economic factors. The same goes for sale prices that are dictated by ego or greed. Just because a neighbor’s house sold for an attractive price doesn’t mean yours should as well, unless your home truly is more valuable or market conditions have changed.

Accepting an offer

The final piece of the puzzle in selling a house is deciding which offer to take. When an agent is selling a client’s home, that seller is in the driver’s seat. The agent must balance his desire to get a price that will please the seller with the need to ensure that the home actually sells in a timely manner — or at all.

When selling his own house, an agent can afford to gamble on the fact that a better offer might come along — even though this plan will often fall through, particularly if the house stays on the market too long. This is much the same as when your stockbroker makes more money trading for herself than for you: She’s willing to take more risks in her own account than she feels are appropriate in a client’s account.

In addition, a common practice for real estate agents is to relist a home that isn’t selling.  Some real estate agents “test” the market to see if their home will sell at a certain price.  Most sellers do not want to do this, for the outcome could be no sale at all.

The bottom line

Price rules.  If a buyer likes the price, he is more likely to view the property and make an offer.

Parts of article reported by Tara Struyk for Investopedia

Led by multifamily construction, housing starts and building permits increased in November. Analysts see light at the end of the tunnel, but it could be a long tunnel.

The number of new homes that began construction rose 9.3% in March, and the stock market went wild over the news.

• Builders report more optimism

Other analysts were a bit more subdued over the uptick, which was led by multifamily construction. But we heard more than one suggestion that perhaps the end of the housing slump is in sight.

“While we still have a long way to go back to normal, the latest numbers are one more indication that housing is slowly turning the corner,” Bob Nielsen, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, said in a news release.

Housing starts jumped 9.3% from October to November, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 685,000, the highest number since April 2010. Multifamily construction leaped 25.3%, while the number of single-family homes started rose 2.3%, the Commerce Department reported.

The number of building permits issued rose 5.7%, to the highest rate since March 2010.

• Homeownership at most affordable level in 15 years

The numbers were higher than analysts had predicted, which always makes the stock market happy.

“It’s a solid report,” Brian Jones, a senior economist at Societe Generale in New York, told Bloomberg. “For months we’ve been flagging the strength in multifamily construction, but now we’re starting to get signs that single-family is pulling itself off the canvas.  Several factors have brought some cheerier housing numbers lately:

• The inventory of homes for sale has fallen to its lowest level since the housing bust began in 2006.
• The prices of nondistressed homes are stabilizing and rising in some areas.
• The number of existing homes sold so far this year is slightly above the number sold last year.

But does it mean the beginning of the end of the crisis? Once again, the big question is how much more shadow inventory is still to hit the market, and at what pace. Another important issue is the economy as a whole: When will people feel secure enough in their jobs to buy homes or move up to new homes?

Many analysts expressed cautious optimism. Nathan Snyder, portfolio manager at Snow Capital Management, told Reuters:

“The housing stuff seems like it’s bottoming, which is obviously the first step to recovery. How long it bottoms will be anybody’s guess, but we needed it to bottom. … So this is something that is a chicken and the egg issue: Obviously construction drives employment, employment drives housing. And there is a virtuous cycle there, if we can ever reach a bottom and start building off of that. The main hope is that we are at least near that bottom, but the bottom could last awhile. So it could start to turn up in the next six months or 18 months, but the next leg is up, not down, from here.”

To many buyers, a house that’s been on the market a long time must have hidden problems. And that could lead to unnecessary and endless price reductions. Luckily, even in a distressed market, there are ways to prevent roots from sprouting under the ‘for sale’ sign.

Real-estate agent Vince Romano could have sold his client’s house in a month if not for a little paint.

The single-family house in suburban Chicago looked great, except for some graffiti on the walls in the two teenagers’ rooms and in the basement. The homeowner wasn’t stupid. She’d taken good care of the home and knew buyers could easily see past a little spray paint.

Except she was wrong.

“It looks phenomenal online. I had 17 or 18 showings in the first two months,” Romano recalls. But buyers — and often it’s subconscious — actually aren’t good at overlooking even superficial flaws, particularly if those flaws so boldly announce they’ll need a redo.

“Buyers don’t want to do that,” Romano says. “There are homes that are decked out to the nines. Maybe this home isn’t ready, but the one down the street is.”

In the end, this seller not only lost time, she lost big in the math. Had she listened to her agent and spent the $1,200 to repaint, Romano is certain he could have sold the home quickly for its $350,000 asking price. As it is, he’ll likely fetch $310,000, and only after several months of viewings.

• ‘Listed’: Prices of nondistressed homes stabilizing

Leave it to the pros Welcome to the wacky world of home sales, where a little stubborn behavior can be costly. But there’s a tried-and-true solution that can be summed up with two basic points:

• Find a seller’s agent whom you like and trust.  “Make sure you interview three great agents that focus on your area,” says Alan Mark, president of the Mark Co., a real-estate marketing and consulting company in San Francisco. “Then realize that you’re hiring a professional who knows how to do this.”
• Listen to that agent. More on that below, but the key is to separate the emotional qualities of your home from the basic functional qualities of the house.

“To start with, your house is unique — and so is everybody else’s,” Mark says. “Everybody thinks their house is unique. Get over it.”

• Find homes for sale in great neighborhoods

It’s never easy to relinquish control, particularly when it’s your home and your money. But if the goal is to sell, and to sell fast, then you’re better off trusting the expert, even if his advice appears trivial — like the paint on a couple of walls — or counterintuitive, such as undercutting the price.

To get a sense of what we mean, see the five tips below, all from experienced agents who say these are areas where home sellers often need some persuading.

1. Price it right; price it low Some may find Katya Dennis a bit offbeat — or at least bold — in her pricing strategy, which at first blush appears to be undervaluing the property. But Dennis, an agent in Northern California with David Lyng Real Estate, swears by her method.

“I always tell my sellers, you can never price a house too low, because the market will take care of it,” she explains.

Dennis recently listed a home for $535,000, even though it had been appraised at $560,000. The house sold within weeks — for $575,000. The reasoning is simple, she says. The low price drew quick and competing bids.

Had she listed the home for $560,000, she’s certain the sale would have dragged and brought in even less than the valuation.

“If you start high and start lowering it, you will never get to the number that you will get to by starting low and going up,” Dennis says. “Because when you start lowering the price, people will start wondering what’s wrong with the house. … And if it’s been sitting awhile, people will try and lowball.”

Read:  Home-sale incentives help, but price is key

When Janice Leis, an agent in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida, meets resistance from sellers determined to price high, she will suggest and agree only to the following: Get an independent, certified appraisal and we’ll list it there, no more.

“Sellers will say, ‘Let’s put it 20% higher, then during negotiation we’ll have room,’” Leis says. “No. The rule of thumb is you should go where the last (comparable home) sold, or right below that.” Too high, and buyers will be scared off.

-Taken from real estate.msn.com