10 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Home Sale, Part 1

Here's part one of my two-part series on tips to ensure that you acquire the most money from your home sale this year.

Want to sell your Kansas City Home? Get a home value report here 

Want to buy a Kansas City home? Search all homes for sale here

If you’re selling your home this year, here are five of the 10 steps to follow:

1. Recognize that every real estate market is different. By having a deeper knowledge of the market itself, you’ll make well-informed decisions that other sellers won’t. Setting yourself apart in this way will allow you to maximize your equity and dollars acquired from the sale. Your agent should be constantly putting this information in front of you to assist you in your decision making.

2. Be sure to get your home inspected. Have a pre-inspection done on your home before it goes onto the market. This can be likened to a scenario where you’re buying a vehicle and you're trying to decide between two—are you more likely to purchase the road-ready, mechanic-certified car or the one that’s recently been traded in and has yet to be looked at by the mechanic? It’s no contest, right? The fact is a home that’s been pre-inspected is more apt to attract a higher offer.

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By having a deeper knowledge of the market itself, you’ll make well-informed decisions that other sellers won’t.

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3. Shape up before marketing. Simply put, be certain that your home is in tiptop shape before buyers view it. Using the car analogy above, a vehicle that sparkles inside and out, smells great, and would be a point of pride to own is sure to attract a higher offer than a dust- and dirt-coated car sitting on the lot. The same goes for your house. Some tips for preparing your home for sale include:

• A fresh coat of paint in areas such as the front door

• Maintain a super clean entryway

• Clean your windows and glass

• Replace any burnt out lightbulbs

• If possible, plant some flowers

4. Devise a great marketing plan. This is where an expert advisor comes in—their job is to guide you through the decision-making process to help you capture the highest price on your home sale.

5. Check into a company relocation assistance. If you work for a corporation or larger company, there may be some of this available to you.


Don’t forget to check back in a few weeks for part two! If you have any questions related to real estate, please get in touch with me. I look forward to talking to you!

5 More Tips for When Your Home Isn’t Selling

Welcome back to the second part of our series discussing what to do if your home just won’t sell.

Want to sell your Kansas City Home? Get a home value report here 

Want to buy a Kansas City home? Search all homes for sale here

If you missed our first installment, you can check it out here.

In continuation of my video last time, here are a few more tips if you’ve found it hard to get your home sold:

5. Offer your home on a lease option. There are a couple ways to do this: If you own your home outright, you can do an owner finance where, if you don’t have a mortgage on it, you can record that note at the county courthouse. This allows you to be the bank, so to speak, for the people buying your home. If your mortgage company allows it and your insurance company has been notified that your home is non-owner occupied, this can be a good option for those who aren’t able to sell

6. Ask your employer about relocation. There are a lot of corporate employer packages where relocation is an option. These can help with the expenses of selling your home.

7. Lower the price of your home. This will help make your home more competitive. For this to work, we need to do an analysis on the environment of your home’s price point and be sure that the condition, location, and marketing package you’ve chosen are competitive. This way, your home will be a clear pick for the buyers in your market.

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Our guaranteed sales plan for clients says that if we haven’t sold your home in 90 days, we will step in and buy your house from you so that you can go on to buy the next one without contingencies.

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8. Consider a real estate auction. My team does what’s called accelerated marketing, and there are four kinds of auctions that fit different strategies. The great thing about conventional marketing is that you can gauge the market and take your time to draw buyers in—there’s a lot of negotiation in a balanced market. With an auction, you set the terms up front, meaning you get to tell the buyer exactly what day the home is going to close, what terms are attached, and what inspection rights and financing rights the buyer has. The buyer who purchases your home will have to live with whatever terms you’ve set, and then they’ll pay commission. This option isn’t appropriate for every situation, but it is a conversation worth having.

9. Consider our guaranteed sale plan. We guarantee to clients that if we haven’t sold your home in 90 days, we will step in and buy your house from you so that you can go on to buy the next one without contingencies.

If you have any additional questions about what you can do to sell your home in a difficult market, feel free to reach out to me. I’d be glad to speak with you.

Thinking of Subdividing? Here Are the Factors You Need to Consider First

If you’re thinking of subdividing or developing a piece of property, there are several factors you need to consider to determine whether or not that will be economically feasible.

Want to sell your Kansas City Home? Get a home value report here 

Want to buy a Kansas City home? Search all homes for sale here

If you’re thinking about subdividing a piece of property or developing it and then selling it, you first need to determine whether taking this step is economically feasible.

Some parcels of land can be used for high-density development, but a lot of them can’t. This means you need to consider factors like how close your land is in proximity to the nearest city limits, whether your water lines and utilities are available and strong enough to service the number of rooftops you plan on building, how the land slopes in relation to the nearest sewer, etc.

Another factor to consider if your property is somewhat larger (50 acres or so) is whether the road accessing the property can handle the type of traffic that comes from being near the city limits. By and large, you can fit two and a half to three homes per acre on a developable property. By “developable”, I mean that the roads, sidewalks, and infrastructure can allow the fire and police departments to service the community properly.
 

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When a developer invests in a property, the most affordable part is the land, itself.

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It’s important for you to remember that when a developer invests in a property, the most affordable part is the land, itself. The expensive part is building the infrastructure and adding all the off-site improvements (i.e., water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, sidewalks).

On a 50-acre property, you can build anywhere from 100 to 150 homes. If you add that much traffic—say, two cars per household—to a county road that doesn’t have curbs, gutters, and proper stormwater planning, that can create a plethora of problems. Adding stoplights and turning lanes can cost up to $250,000, so that alone can make a property economically unfeasible for development.

Every property is different, and there are many other things to consider before you decide to subdivide and/or develop yours, but these are just a few factors to educate yourself about before moving forward.

If you have any other questions about this topic or you’re curious about what’s going on in our market, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d be glad to help you.

How to Buy and Sell at the Same Time

If you’d like to buy a house but you also need to sell your current house, you need to design a smart buying and selling strategy. Here’s how you can do that.

Want to sell your Kansas City Home? Get a home value report here 

Want to buy a Kansas City home? Search all homes for sale here

If you need to sell your current home to buy another home you’re interested in, there are several strategies you can use.

To design a smart home buying and selling strategy, you should first look at your overall goals and what your financial situation is. What kind of equity will you be rolling into the new home? What kind of mortgage payments are you looking for?

You should also consider implementing contingencies. In this type of situation, we oftentimes work with clients who buy a home that’s contingent on the closing of their current home. You can also use bridge and swing loans that will give you more time between buying one home and selling the other and help you avoid the crunch of a simultaneous closing.
 

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You have a much better chance at influencing all of these moving parts if you put together a great team behind you.

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Whether you’re buying or selling, there are about 75 people who are either directly or indirectly involved in the transaction, and you have a much better chance at influencing all of these moving parts if you put together a great team behind you. With everything that’s happening, coordinating both transactions can seem like threading a needle. This is why, when we work with homeowners in this situation, we sit down with them, go over every possible strategy, review their financial situation, and look at the market itself. Whether we’re in a buyer’s market or a seller’s market will affect your strategy.

As long as you take the time to put together a plan with your real estate agent and put together a great team behind you, you can make buying and selling at the same time a stress-free situation.

If you have any questions about this topic or you have a topic you’d like us to discuss in a future video, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to speak to you.

Are Zestimates Really a Good Way to Value Your Home?

Even though a lot of people think that the value Zestimates place on their home is accurate, the truth is that this is one area that computers can’t replace people.

Want to sell your Kansas City Home? Get a home value report here 

Want to buy a Kansas City home? Search all homes for sale here

What exactly is Zillow’s Zestimate? A lot of clients have called me with questions about them, so I thought I’d relay my overall feelings about them.

Zestimates are what we call an AVM, an automated valuation model. They use algorithms to pull data from the county public tax records and they look at legacy MLS sold, pending, active, expired, and cancelled data. They take that data and apply to each one of our homes.

The problem with the methods that Zestimates use to value your home is that a computer algorithm has never walked inside of your home. Zillow doesn’t know if your home smells like a pet, if your carpet needs replaced, if the roof needs to be replaced, or if your backyard is steep or gentle graded. The website can’t take into account various factors about your home’s upgrades, the neighborhood, the general traffic, or public events that may take place near the property.

Zestimates can be off when they value your home by as much as 20%. This is problematic because a lot of the public thinks that these are accurate, and they end up leaving a lot of money on the table or potentially overpaying for a home in certain situations.

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A Zestimate cannot walk into your home and check out the condition of the property.

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This is what I recommend: If you’re thinking very seriously about the value of your home or what a potential house might be worth, call Glennon Real Estate Experts and get a trusted professional who can do a real, thorough market analysis to make sure that you’re not leaving any money on the table.

I’ve found often that, oftentimes, the fees for our services more than compensate for the amount of money that people sometimes leave on the table when they sell their home as For Sale By Owner (FSBO). Most real estate agents sell fewer than seven homes a year. They really aren’t getting enough experience and practice selling homes to really know how to advise you on the 50-page contracts we have to deal with or to get you through the inspection process and make sure that the lender is properly doing their job, along with supplying the appraiser with the information they need to properly value a property.

I’ve found often that, oftentimes, the fees for our services more than compensate for the amount of money that people sometimes leave on the table when they sell their home as For Sale By Owner (FSBO). Most real estate agents sell fewer than seven homes a year. They really aren’t getting enough experience and practice selling homes to really know how to advise you on the 50-page contracts we have to deal with or to get you through the inspection process and make sure that the lender is properly doing their job, along with supplying the appraiser with the information they need to properly value a property.

If you want expert advice and solid legal protection, you wouldn’t go to sites like WebMd or LegalZoom, and it’s the same thing with real estate—to really know where you stand, you’d need to contact a professional who’s trained and experienced in these matters to give you their take. If you have further questions or are in need of expert advice on real estate topics, give us a shout. Feel free to give us a call or send us an email. There’s no obligation or cost, and we’d love to help you figure out what the actual market value of your home is.

How We Helped Heather Quickly Sell Her Home

"Glennon Real Estate Experts sold our house quickly after it had been on the market 6 months with another agent. They had very good results, and knew exactly what to expect. Both Chip, Amanda, and Will knew the procedures extensively. If we called, they called us back. If we had questions, they either answered them or found them out within a 24 hour time period. They went above and beyond what was expected!" - Heather Cummings, Home Seller

How We Helped Don Sell His Home Using Our Great Communication Skills

"They were good! We sold the house in less than two weeks. The customer service was good. The agent, Will Ward, was really good. It was an easy sale for us with him. Any time I text him, he texted me right back. His communication was pretty impressive. I think as whole, the entire team did well!" - Dpn Nethicumara, Home Seller