Welcome to the largest Sequim Real Estate Blog with over 1,900 articles.
17 Dec
A double contingency exists when a buyer makes an offer on a home (“Home A”) contingent upon the sale of the buyer’s own home (“Home B”), and when another buyer makes an offer on Home B contingent on the sale of their home (“Home C”).
Would a seller be willing to sign an offer with a double contingency? That depends on the strength of the other two offers. In a recent transaction I handled with a double contingency, Home B had already passed all the due diligence inspections and an appraisal came in satisfactorily. The offer on Home C was also a clean offer with the main contingency being approval of the buyer’s loan, and we had a pre-approval letter on that buyer. So this double contingency still made a strong offer for the seller of Home A.
Almost every offer on a home has at least one contingency, such as financing, the home inspection, the well inspection, and the septic inspection. An additional contingency, such as the sale of the buyer’s home, complicates a transaction. A double contingency increases the probability of failure when you have two transactions that must successfully close in order for the final home (Home A) to close.
A double contingency must be done precisely, and all three transactions have to line up like dominoes to close one after the other. And the Realtors need exemplary knowledge of the correct addendums, the correct contract language, and how to facilitate every step involved. It’s no small challenge, but a double contingency can be done.
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16 Jan
How to sell my home is a question that many homeowners have been asking. The challenge for a homeowner without hands on experience within the real estate industry is that there are many myths about selling homes, and real estate professionals propagate some of these myths.
If you plan to sell your home, this is a must read. The subtitle is “20 Secrets You Need to Know.” They are secrets only because the vast majority of homeowners don’t know them. This book reveals what the author has learned over three decades in the real estate business as a real estate attorney and a real estate broker. How can you do a mind meld and soak up all this information and experience? Simply buy this book. Just one of the chapters could save you from common traps for the unwary and save you tens of thousands of dollars. This book would be especially valuable for anyone who is planning to sell their home and retire, because at that phase in your life, you cannot afford big mistakes, and you need maximize your net proceeds from the sale of your home. This book will help answer your search on “How to Sell My Home.”
Here are the chapter titles, which gives you a peek into the contents about “How to Sell My Home.”
Myth 1: Traditional Advertising is All You Need
Myth 2: You Need a Listing Agent to Sell
Myth 3: List With the Highest Bidder
Myth 4: Every Agent Has the Best System
Myth 5: If It Doesn’t Sell, Try Something Different
Myth 6: Just Keep Reducing the Price
Myth 7: It’s Easy to Sell Your Own Home Today
Chapter 8: 26-Point Interview Checklist
Chapter 9: Never Let an Offer Die
Chapter 10: How Important Are Photographs?
Chapter 11: Accept Only Unambiguous Offers
Chapter 12: Handling The Home Inspection
Chapter 13: The Biggest Problem for Buyers
Chapter 14: The Closing Date is a Moving Target
Chapter 15: The 353 Day Short Sale
Chapter 16: MLS Marketing & The Twilight Zone
Chapter 17: What is Good Customer Service?
Chapter 18: How to Have a Great Relationship With Your Agent
The concepts and secrets in this book are relevant in any State in America. If you are selling where you live now in order to retire in Sequim or Port Angeles, this book could be very helpful. You will be able to answer the question, “How to Sell My Home” after reading this book, and you’ll learn what you don’t know about marketing your home, listing your home, and much more. To get a preview of Seven Myths or to purchase a copy, go to Seven Myths of Selling Your Home or to How to Sell My Home.
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27 Aug
Believe it or not some homeowners are hoping that luck will sell their homes. But luck is not a good strategy. Let me explain why I say that. There are several elements to guessing, or hoping, or relying on a shot in the dark to sell a home. Here are some of the common ones I see homeowners using in this real estate recession:
Number 1. Listing with any real estate agent without due diligence on their experience or success (and may I add “integrity”) is not a good strategy. Do you think education, experience, and integrity matter? I’ll let you answer that. The point is that just picking any agent out of the air and hiring that agent is shooting from the hip. Not a good method for getting the most effective counsel you can get to sell your home in challenging times. There are some very experienced agents with integrity. Find one.
Number 2. Guessing at what is effective today to market a home is not a good strategy. For example, some homeowners do not know what advertising methods are effective. They may not be tuned into what no longer works as well or what no longer works at all, and they may not be tuned into the latest and most powerful Internet marketing strategies. Simply putting a listing in the Sunday issue classifieds is not an effective strategy anymore. Or “maybe I should use Craigslist,” or “I think I’ll run an ad in . . .”
Number 3. Wasting time on open houses is not a good strategy. Read more about Why Open Houses Don’t Sell Homes.
Number 4. Spinning your wheels trying to come up with brilliant new ideas is re-creating the wheel. That’s not a good strategy when experts know precisely what works and doesn’t work and how to effectively market your home.
Number 5. Dropping the price when you don’t know what else to do is not a good strategy in and of itself. If your home isn’t being effectively marketed to reach the most qualified buyers, then dropping the price may be a good way to leave money on the table.
These approaches are relying on luck. Luck is not a good strategy. Selling your home should involve a great marketing plan based on effective strategies that work.
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6 Aug
How to Sell Your Home in This Market is a one hour seminar for Sequim homeowners who want an eye-opening honest perspective on what it takes to sell a home today. Real estate broker, attorney, and author Chuck Marunde will share 37 years of experience and the secrets of his online marketing system, including:
There will be a Q&A session at the end of this short one hour seminar, so bring your questions. You’re welcome to take notes with a pen and paper, but no recording devices are allowed. This seminar is specifically for homeowners who are not in the real estate business and who do not have a member of the family in the real estate business. Chuck offers a separate seminar for Realtors.
The seminar is Wednesday the 8th of August at 6:00 p.m. at the Sequim Library. If you can’t attend this seminar, you can still register for the next one. To attend, please register online at SequimForSale.com.
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16 Oct
The question on how to price a home for sale in this market is perhaps the preeminent question of the day for sellers. Everyone has an opinion, but not everyone gets it right. I’ve examined thousands of homes that have sold and have not sold. I’ve analyzed original listing prices, various price reductions, the timing of those price reductions, the days on market (DOM), and the final selling prices for those that actually sold.
Opinions are often worth what we pay for them. But this question about how to price a home for sale is critical. Get it wrong and you may be stuck with your home for a long long time, and worse, you may actually end up selling it for a lot less than you could have had you priced it right from the beginning. This is not an argument that you should sell your home at a garage sale price. Anyone could do that if they were foolish. This is an argument that there is an intelligent and wise approach on how to price a home for sale. I’ll try to compact this entire article within this one long blog, but for a serious home seller who is grappling with these issues, I strongly urge you to sit down with me so we can have a two hour discussion to unpack these concepts and so I can give you a more detailed proof of these conclusions.
The issue is how to price a home for sale so it will sell within a reasonable period of time. There are two keys: 1.) the original listing price must be right, and 2.) the price must be maintained throughout the term of the listing without irrational price reductions. This doesn’t mean you cannot ever have a price reduction, but you should avoid irrational price reductions. Selling your home is not just about selling it within a reasonable period of time, but selling it for the highest possible price.
Altos Research, a Mountain View, Calif., company that analyzes data for the real-estate industry, routinely compares initial listing prices around the country with final sales prices. “Sellers generally start out with prices a bit too high, forcing them to later offer discounts to get a deal done,” said Scott Sambucci, Altos’ Vice President of Sales and Analytics.
“The amount of traffic that a listing gets in its first week is five to seven times what it gets in its ensuing weeks,” says Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage and listings site. “Let’s say you lower the price (later). No one will notice. You really are broadcasting that discount to a much smaller audience of buyers and will have the perception it is damaged goods.”
Every homeowner should have their listing agent explain how to price a home for sale.
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2 Oct
We know home sellers are frustrated because their homes are not selling, because there are so few buyers right now. We know many sellers have reduced their listing price once, twice, and sometimes several times. And yet many homes remain unsold. It’s as though buyers are just not showing up, which they aren’t. None of this is front page news anymore. We read everyday in the newspapers what sellers are going through: the stress, the financial strain, the uncertainty, and for some a foreclosure if the home doesn’t sell fast.
But what is it like for Realtors? If you read my blog often, you know that I like to tell my readers the truth. Of course, what I write is colored by my limited knowledge and experiences, just like everyone else. But my readers constantly express their appreciation for my open writing, honest expressions of the challenges home sellers and home buyers face, and for insights they often do not get from others. By the way, I do get some heat periodically from other real estate agents in the area and from newspaper publishers, so I must be doing something right. After all, I’m not writing here to make other professionals like me. I hope they do. I’m a sensitive person. I do write to help my clients and to help others who are buying and selling real estate. That would be you.
The question today is what is it like from a real estate agent’s perspective to have many listings in this market?
An agent can only manage so many listings at one time, because of all the administrative work associated with each listing, and because of the level of customer service required to keep each client satisfied. How many listings can an agent manage practically? You’ll hear different numbers, but an agent can effectively manage a dozen listings, plus or minus. That number could be increased to two or three dozen, provided the agent has one or two assistants. But there is much more to the story. (more…)
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