Tara O'Brien's Minneapolis Real Estate Update: September 2011

It’s a highly competitive market for home sellers right now. More homes to compete with means that the impression your homes makes - from the curb, and on the inside - matter now more than ever. You can increase your chances of selling faster - and at today’s top dollar - by investing in a select few home improvement projects that have been shown to make a big impact on buyers.

Bad news alert: it might cost you a little time, effort and cash. The good news, though, is that the best projects for quickly increasing your home’s resale value tend to be cosmetic and fairly simple and inexpensive to do. Here are five projects with big-time return on investment for home sellers-to-be, in terms of their power to attract buyers, and to attract dollars from those buyers.

1. Painting: Adding a fresh coat of paint to ceilings and walls is a tried and true way to increase your home’s appeal to buyers. Go for white or neutral tones that help lighten your rooms. (Now is not the time to show off your fascination with fuschia and lime green.) Buyers will have an easier time envisioning how they will infuse their own personalities into your home if they’re looking at a relatively blank slate.

Painting lightens and brightens rooms, instantly removes scuffs and dings and gives every room a fresh, polished feel.

Fresh exterior paint - even if your time or cash budget limits your efforts to accents like eaves, shutters, doors and trims - is also a quick, inexpensive way to polish the look of your home from the curb.

2. Landscaping: Everything you’ve heard about curb appeal is true. First impressions matter - especially if your house is one of eight or nine a buyer has seen in one day. Buyers will be more excited to look at the inside your home if the outside looks clean, charming and inviting. Mow the lawn, trim the hedges, pull the weeds and plant some flowers, bushes or shrubs for the biggest impact - and be diligent about keeping your landscaping very well-manicured throughout the time your home is on the market.

Be sure to keep it low-key, relatively low maintenance and neutral, though. This is not the time to indulge your personal fantasies of living in an exotic paradise, unless that matches the existing look and feel of your home, nor is it the time to install a time-intensive English garden that buyers will love, but not want to take on. Think clean, simple and elegant for the biggest boost in value.

3. Cleaning and de-cluttering: Start by removing all your family photos from the walls and all sorts of tchochkes and clutter from the tops of tables, desks, dressers and counters. Buyers want to be able to envision their lives in the house, not yours. Personal items - and the visual clutter they create - have been shown time and time again to block buyers’ ability to create this vision.

Also, remember that buyers are coming to see the house and evaluate its space, not to bear witness to all the fabulous furniture that means so much to you (no matter how amazing your personal taste). Remove furniture that takes up too much space and fills up rooms. Get rid of clutter such as clothes, boxes, piles of mail and other items.

And then clean - and keep cleaning obsessively, the entire time your place is on the market. Kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms should look unlived in when they are shown. And don't forget to clean less obvious places like windows, walls, doors and and floors, to dust off shelves and furniture, and to polish appliances.

4. Plumbing repairs and water stain/damage repair: Paying a plumber to make a few stops throughout your home can be well worth the investment. Leaky faucet in the master bathroom? Get it fixed. Does the space under your kitchen sink look like a science experiment? Leaks and water stains definitely provoke disgust and exasperation on the part of the buyers you want and need to impress. And they can be pretty cost effective to fix - ask your agent for a referral, if you need one.

5. Staging: Staging your home can make a dramatic difference in the price for which your home sells. Good staging is equal parts:

(a) removing your personal belongings and replacing it with more artwork, decor and cleaner-looking furniture,

(b) and tweaking the home’s paint, wall coverings and even landscaping to show the place in its very best light.


When done well, staging can convert your home from just another listing on a buyer’s list to the setting for a fresh, new start to the fresh, new life of their dreams. Professional stagers, in particular, have special skills and materials they use, from convincing you to get rid of a bunch of things you value (but read: junk to a buyer), to items like mirrors, plants, art work, lamps, pillows and even furniture that tells a visual story of the life buyers can fantasize about living in your home.

Talk to your agent about staging - some agents have the skill to do this on their own, while others might have a professional stager they frequently work with.

In some cases, you might want to take on even larger projects. Before you go that route, talk with a local real estate agent; they are well-positioned to know what sort of updates and features will make the most impact on local buyers. Not all major, non-cosmetic upgrades to your home will create a significant difference in the price it commands, so take advantage of your agent’s expertise as you make decisions about whichproperty preparation investments to make (and which to forego).

-Trulia

"How's the Market?" (Elevator Edition): New listings remain subdued with 15 weeks in a row of year-over-year declines. Buyer activity is strong with 19 straight weeks of year-over-year gains. Inventory has posted 31 consecutive weeks of year-over-year decreases.

"How's the Market?" (Dinner Conversation Edition): New listings were down 22.5 percent to 1,311 and pending sales were up 40.6 percent to 883 contracts. The inventory bins contained 23,453 active listings at the start of last week – down 22.2 percent from last year. The Percent of Original List Price Received and Months Supply of Inventory metrics suggest a slowly improving landscape for sellers although they are still entrenched in buyer-favorable territory for the time being.

-MAAR
www.taraobrien.com

With the Labor Day slowdown in the mix for the current round of numbers, new listings were down 21.2 percent compared to the 12.9 percent average decline over the past three months. At 1,248 new homes, that now marks 14 consecutive weeks of year-over-year declines in new listings. Inventory levels were also down 21.2 percent to 23,481 active listings, marking 30 consecutive week of declines.

Conversely, buyer activity was up 53.0 percent over the same week last year. That’s a fairly hefty increase, but we can’t call it a one-week anomaly because the three-month average shows an impressive 41.7 percent average increase over the equivalent three months in 2010. The 823 purchase agreements mark 18 consecutive weeks of year-over-year increases in pending sales.
Southwest Minneapolis real estate for sale, minneapolis homes for sale.
The Percent of Original List Price Received and Months Supply of Inventory metrics suggest a slowly changing landscape.
-MAAR

SouthwestMinneapolisTaraOBrien

While lenders have resumed foreclosures after putting them on hold as a result of an investigation into "robo-signing" a year ago, snags remain in the process.

1010data Inc, and CoreLogic Inc. report a drop in the number of foreclosed homes liquidated to 3.6% in June from 5.7% in August 2010. The number of homes entering the foreclosure pipeline tops the number being sold by banks.

The delays help home owners hang onto their properties longer and aid the economy in the short term, but make it difficult for new buyers to close on foreclosed properties.

source "Effort on Home Loans Stalls" The Wall Street Journal

www.taraobriencom

Labels: foreclosed homes, foreclosure, minneapolis real estate

Buying a home on today's market takes a lot of work! After the stress of financing and the rush of closing, the move-in can be a let-down. But one of the true joys of homeownership is your ability to truly make your home yours - customizing and personalizing it to suit your tastes, your family and your lifestyle to a t.

Here are four smart strategies for customizing your new home (even if new just means new to you!):

1. Paint to create the feel you want, inside and out. Painting your home with the colors and effects of your choice is one of the most cost-effective ways to create a completely personalized living space. And studies show that color choices, in particular, can have a massive impact on the mood and even the happiness of a home’s residents!

There are several ways - across a wide spectrum of cost and time required - you can use paint to personalize your property:

Exterior. The single fastest way to change your home’s look to match your personal preferences is to paint its exeterior. What did your lifelong dream home look like? What color was it? Repainting your home can make a massive change to its look and curb appeal, and can turn the home you can afford into the home you've always dreamed of.
Front door, shutters and fences. If you bought a home that has a relatively fresh paint job or an overall color you like, consider painting just the front door to inject some color and your personal touch. Aquas and greens, rusty or brick reds and even chic greys and blacks all make for a polished entrance – and the addition of a kick plate or engraved knocker can create a 100 percent personalized look. Painting shutters, fences, eaves and other exterior accents a contrasting color of your choice are additional quick and inexpensive – but powerful – tweaks that can also make your home look buttoned up and, well, yours.
Interior. The individual inhabitants of different rooms can pick their colors and custom effects, like harlequin diamonds or fun, personalized murals for kids’ rooms. Aim to match colors to a room’s purpose, so that bedrooms have a sense of restful sanctuary, bathroom walls read “clean,” and common living areas are warm or energizing, as you wish! Glidden has a fabulous interactive inspiration tool with amazing suggested palettes that coordinate with the various uses of individual rooms, like Growing Up Colors, for kids' rooms, Fresh Baked Kitchen palettes and my personal favorite: the palette dedicated to Man Cave Colors.

If you have a limited time or budget, or you're afraid you'll regret bold color choices, try accent walls - a single wall of color in every otherwise neutral room can go a long way toward customizing your home.

2. Inventory your space and your stuff before you unpack. Many people are buying smaller homes in an effort to manage costs of ownership and live closer to where their jobs are (gas prices certainly don’t look to be getting cheaper any time soon!). Even if you’re not moving into a small place, moving in – period – presents an opportunity to truly customize your living spaces for the activities you want to do and things you want to “live” in them.

There's no rule that says the table and chairs have to go in the dining room just because it’s called that; it's your house - take control! Maybe it’d be better as an office for you and homework space for the kids, and you can ‘dine’ in the kitchen or part of the living room. The windowless “extra” room might make for the perfect yoga room, craft room or space to plot your fantasy football world domination schemes.

Make a chart that divides all your home’s spaces – all of them, including any seemingly wasted spaces or nook-ey areas under the stairs or in the garage, before you move in. Then, decide what you want to (a) do, and (b) store in each area. This approach empowers you to make sure every person, activity and thing in your home has the right amount and type of space.

3. Build organization in. Built-ins make a world of difference, and I’m not just talking about the ones your home’s builder installed. It’s relatively low-cost and low-effort to build in items like:
a. closet organizers,
b. window seats,
c. desktops and bookshelves,
d. pantry-optimizing shelves, spinners and drawers, and
e. medicine and linen cabinets.

If you’re looking for some inspiration as to what sorts of custom organization systems are even possible, and/or you’re intimidated at the mere prospect of doing-anything-yourself, master carpenter and home improvement show host Karl Champley just released a great book on the subject, Same Place, More Space (Chronicle Books, 2011).

4. Match your furniture to your space, your activities and your stuff. Remember the space issues you couldn’t stand in your last place? Anticipate them, and as you plan to buy your furniture, look for things that offer extra organizational or storage features. I have a little “issue” with shoes at my house – they’re always everywhere! So, we put a cubby in the entryway for shoes, and each bedroom has a specific place to store them (an ottoman in mine, shoe shelves for my son.)

Also, if your space inventory (see #1 on this list) showed up lots of stuff with no place to go, make an effort to buy armoires, storage closets and sheds. To give your home a polished look that reflects your (perhaps newly!) organized personal style, a good rule of thumb is to make an effort to have a closed storage space for every item that has a label or would otherwise have to sit on top of a table or counter.
-Trulia post

SouthwestMinneapolisHomesTaraOBrien

With some September data in the mix, seller activity showed a continuation of its intermediate-term holding pattern, with 14.3 percent fewer listings than the same week in 2010. The 1,313 new listings were more or less on pace with their 3-month 12.0 percent average decline.

Similarly, buyer activity continued to post large gains over the 2010 slowdown. This time, Twin Cities home buyers entered into 976 purchase agreements or 35.6 percent more than the same week last year. Edina Realty, Minneapolis real estate for sale

As we've previously pointed out, shrinking inventory levels can be an important market signal. There are currently 23,849 active listings from which buyers can choose, 20.9 percent fewer than last year at this time. Southwest Minneapolis Real Estate agent
Next week, watch for a changing story with absorption rates and seller concessions. As supply and demand attempt to find neutral ground, sellers are making fewer concessions in order to sell their homes.
-MAAR

MinneapolisCondosTaraOBrien

Check out this new format and view all my listings. Pretty cool.

We are now up to 14 consecutive weeks of accelerating inventory attrition. Let's go out on a limb and call this a pattern. For the current period, the number of active listings was down 20.6 percent to 24,047 properties. That's the largest inventory decline in nearly eight years. The metric is now back around first-quarter 2006 levels.

It's plain to see what's driving these declines. Sales are up and listings are down, allowing buyers to absorb the active supply of homes. Buyer activity was up 43.3 percent to 957 purchase agreements signed. While those 957 contracts are reminiscent of 2007, 2008 and even 2009 purchase levels, they far exceed the 2010 summer slowdown.
We have now reached 16 consecutive weeks of double-digit gains in buyer activity. Once again, it feels safe to call that a trend. These undercurrents are flowing into other metrics, such as month’s supply and measures of seller concessions. Month’s supply of inventory was down to 7.7 months, the first year-over-year decline since June 2010. On average, sellers are receiving more of their asking price. August's monthly figures, due to be released next Tuesday, should show a continuation pattern of the trends reported for July.
-MAAR

MinneapolisCondosTaraOBrien

Spring buying pushed home prices up for a third straight month in most major U.S. cities in June. But the housing market remains shaky, and further price declines are expected this year.

The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home-price index, released Tuesday, shows prices increased in June from May in 19 of the 20 cities tracked. A separate figure shows prices rose 3.6 percent in the April-June quarter from the previous quarter. Those numbers aren't adjusted for seasonal factors. Edina Realty, Minneapolis realtor and real estate for sale.

..“Part of what we’re seeing here is seasonal, but not all of it,” David Blitzer, chairman of S&P's Index Committee, told CNBC. “So this is a pretty thin river of hope.”

Over the past 12 months, home prices have declined in all 20 cities after adjusting for seasonal factors.

Chicago, Minneapolis Washington and Boston posted the biggest monthly increases. Metro areas hit hardest by the housing crisis, including Las Vegas and Phoenix, reported small seasonal increases.

"Broadly it looks like home prices have flattened out,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities in Stamford, Ct. "That's good news. Earlier this year, it had looked like we were looking for another leg down. You would like to see prices to go up, but we take what we can get.”

Stanley pointed to an interesting bifurcation in the market: Distressed property values remain depressed -- a drag on home prices. But non-distressed home sales are starting to rise.

S&P's Blitzer noted that he expects housing to remain subdued for the foreseeable future with no big upswings in prices.

There was a big pickup in consumer spending in July, which means people are willing to make big purchases, he explained. But home buyers are finding it’s more difficult to get a mortgage or home financing, and that is likely to temper any gains in the housing market.
--associated press and Tara O'Brien, Edina Realty

MinneapolisCondosTaraOBrien

Labels: homes for sale in minneapolis, market news, minneapolis real estate