Palm Beach Real Estate and Loans

If that title didn't catch your eye, I don't know what will......

You and your family have decided to sell your Palm Beach Gardens real estate and I'm going to cover some things that should help make the process smoother and faster.

The most important thing is pricing the home correctly.  If you didn't hear me, I said

PRICING

One of the biggest problems facing Palm Beach Gardens real estate right now is the fact that so much of it is soooooo overpriced!

As I've said to many people, when you're considering what your property is worth NOW:

• What you paid for it doesn't matter
• How great you think it is doesn't matter
• What you owe on it doesn't matter
• And what it was worth 2 years ago doesn't matter either.

That might sound rough, but I've got no reason to sugarcoat things.

When I meet with you to to get the listing on your home I'm going to recommend a price based on the following:

• Comparable sales: what homes similar to yours and in the same neighborhood as yours have sold for in the last 6 months
• Comparable listings: what are homes just like yours currently listed for
• Since no 2 homes are exactly the same, those #'s will be adjusted for any variations- water view or not, on the golf course or not, pool, etc
• How quickly do you want to sell?
  

In addition, I always suggest having a formal appraisal done if you'd like a second opinion.

Based on that information you and I will decide the exact listing price.

Too many Palm Beach agents will take a listing - regardless of how overpriced it is - and then hope that you will go for huge price drops in the future.  Will they sell the property?  Maybe - but only after it's been on the market for a long time and the price is dropped to what it should have been in the first place!

Don't get me wrong, price adjustments are not always bad as long as you start with a realistic price to begin with and update accordingly based on new / changed listings and market conditions.

Laurie Manny recently wrote an article - Chasing the Market Down - Are You Guilty?.  In it she discusses the problems with REACTIVE price changes.  As she demonstrates that's NOT the way to go.  Proactive = GOOD, reactive = BAD.

OK - we've beat up on price enough for now.

CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN

Next we need to talk about the cleanliness of your Home.  Some people just don't understand!  Just because you and your spouse think the home looks good, does not mean that someone that's going to pay several hundred thousand dollars + for it will think the same way. 

• Unless you are almost surgically neat, pay a service to clean the house up AND KEEP IT THAT WAY. 
  
• If you are a smoker, you MUST get a service to come in and remove the cigarette  / cigar stench from the house!  You don't smell it anymore - but prospective Buyers will and 99% of the time they'll walk in the front door, take one whiff and leave without even looking.
• There is no such thing as too clean - I'll use a current listing of mine as an example: in a recent showing the prospective Buyer asked me how long the Owners had been gone for.  They were actually outside walking their dog - they live there almost full-time and the house is ALWAYS immaculate.

Again - turn the tables on yourself, if YOU walked into a dirty home, would YOU buy it?

DO NOT RESTRICT SHOWING DAYS

Lastly, restricting showing days.  This is just plain stupid.  Sorry - I meant it's not a good thing to do.

This is another basic that can really wreck your prospects.  If you were to ask for say, 24 hours notice because you always have to straighten up, you're shooting yourself in the foot.  An entire day's notice is not always possible - think about it this way, what if a serious Buyer was in town just for that day, wanted to see your house....  you say NO, but would tomorrow be OK?  Probably not.

One of the worst requests I've ever had was to not show a home on the weekend, not just ONE weekend, but NEVER on the weekend!

In a perfect world all appointments would be locked in stone and they would always be made several days in advance. Not going to happen.

Don't give a Buyer ANY reason to even think about looking at another house !

So remember - price it right, keep it clean and don't restrict showing times!  So simple, yet so often ignored.

I'm running out of coffee..... I'll go over a few tips for Buyers tomorrow.