Real Estate Information Archive

U.S. housing permits rise for the third month in May 2012. The Commerce Department said builders broke ground on 3.2% more single-family homes and April figures revised up to 744,000 - fastest building pace since October 2008. 780,000 permits were requested by builders the largest number since September 2008.

South Florida has seen an increase in foreign spending on real estate and tourism, Canada, South America, and even Europeans have been actively buying properties in areas of distressed residential real estate.

Austin Texas homes prices rise 6.5%, home prices appreciating at a higher rate than the national average and this includes distressed sales according to a report by CoreLogic.

Las Vegas is beginning to see a glimmer of renewed hope with a 90.4 percent increase in building permits and new-home builders have started increasing their home prices by $1000-$5000.

 Arizona ranked third for construction job growth in May. It’s happening all over the country signs of renewed hope that the housing market is truly on the mend.

California, 44% percent of all properties sold had multiple offers this year. Orange County California, personally are sales are up, multiple offers, homes selling over listing price, and Open Houses with a continues flow of potential buyers. Inventories are at the lowest level in years. Brea California today: 44 active listings, 92 with offers to purchase accepted by sellers (pending sales or taking backup offers), and 141 closed home sales since the first of the year with an average of 26 per month.

Steady builder confidence in June good article atThe Natioanl Association of Home Builders (NAHB) webiste

Opportunities knocking, will you be the one to take advantage of it this time?

If you are thinking about buying or selling a home, give us a call at (714) 726-3166 or send us an email to explore your options and to find out when is the best time for you to make a move. Texting ok

You just found the perfect home on Zillow and pick up the phone to call your real estate agent and boy are you excited you want to go see it now! Your agent says let me look up the property to call the home owner. Sign on to CRMLS to look up the property on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and get the phone number and staring right at the top of the page is "PENDING SALE". Your shoulders visibly sag and you tell your client your dream home is already sold and everyone is disappointed.

I can’t tell you how many times this happens.  Unfortunately this is one problems looking for homes using internet homes for sale websites.  The only properties you can see on these websites are the active listings. What does the word active listing mean? An active listing is any property listed on our MLS that is NOT a closed sale.  Active listings include; Pending Sales, Taking backup offers, hold do not show,  properties do fall out after a contract is signed to purchase that is the reason they stay active. 

When you look at the chart on the right the first section “CRMLS” is the information out of our real estate Multiple Listing Service.  At that date and time these were all the active listings without; pending sales, taking backup offers, and hold do not show. When you look down the graph there are significant differences from the CRMLS making it impossible to really know what is active listing, doesn’t it. Prudentialproperties.com, site works different that the rest. It shows: “ Newly listed within the past 15 days”. So anything active more that 15 days are not shown in the search results, but it still has all the pending sales, taking backups, and hold do not show properties.  So in the end it doesn’t show all the active listings in the MLS. 

Now, you can see why when looking on the internet for homes for sales it can be disappointing.  What it is good for is picking out an area you would like to live in, see how much properties are listed for in specific area, and find out about the city you want to live in. Beyond that there can be a lot of heart ache.  It’s always better to receive your home search information directly from a real estate agent.  It will be up to date and should be accurate.

Reference:  this is my opinion below I’m sure other agents may have somewhat of a different view.

Active Listing:  any property listed for sale on MLS that is NOT a closed sale.

Taking Backups:  A property for sale that has an accepted contract to purchase, but the buyer has not yet removed all the buyers’ contingencies. Home inspections, appraisal, final loan approval, disclosures haven’t been approved, etc.

Pending Sale:  All contingencies have been removed waiting for loan docs to be drawn, signed and then to close.

Closed Sale:  Everything is done and buyer can move in the property they have purchased.

CRMLS: California Regional Multiple Listing Service, Inc. The member service I belong too.

If you are ready to start the process you will find our Home Buyers Guide Helpful

If you are thinking about buying or selling a home, give us a call at (714) 726-3166 or send us an email to explore your options and to find out when is the best time for you to make a move. Texting ok

I stopped by McDonalds today and their doors were locked at lunch time, a sign on the door said "Come back after 2PM" So I drove over to Carl's Jr.  and had lunch there. Afterward I headed to Best Buy and was told that 11-12 was not good time to stop in and it would be better if I came back after 3 pm.  Better yet, why don't you call next week and set up a time to stop in? Pretty absurd, right! Yet, home sellers do this all the time! 

I blame this on the sellers' real estate agent. As an agent we are supposed to council our home sellers on the comparable sales, pricing their home properly, preparing the house for show, and making the home available 9 AM - 7PM every day of the week until they have an accepted offer. Sellers should not negotiate the time that an agent would like to show the home. They are with their clients for a certain amount of time and have a route of showings planned. When a seller makes their home unavailable, they may have lost the one buyer that was willing to make an offer. Put a lock box on the property for easy access! I guarantee you will sell the home faster and for a higher price if you make the home available with a lock box.

A pet peeve, if you haven't guessed it, is sellers wanting the agent to come at a different time than they are requesting. Remember the agent isn't picking the time the "buyers" have available to see your property. I show a lot of property during the week at lunchtime and evenings. Showing during the week, you can sometimes be the first in on a new listing and beat the rush of the weekend.

You can learn a lot from new home builders. Most people enjoy looking at new homes because they are staged. Builders hire decorators and pay them huge amounts of money to make their homes look amazing.  Lights turned on, tables set, furniture is optimized to make rooms look bigger, grass is green, bushes trimmed and flowers planted. Everything is clean and its place.  Times may be tough but you still can scrub, clean, pickup, and remove the extra clutter. This will do a lot to help sell your home faster and for a higher price.

Home sellers, when than phone rings and agent wants to show your house remember that this may be the agent that may write you an offer. It only takes one buyer to buy your home and the one you turn away might have been that one. Make your home available! 

Reward the kids for keeping their rooms clean. We had some sellers that gave gold stars to their kids for picking up their rooms and making their beds. They had a schedule of goodies that were they could exhcange the gold stars for, this included  going to the show, a frozen yogurt, a trip to McDonalds, etc. Make it a game. Plan things to do on the weekend so that you will not be frustrated as the Realtors wander through your home trying to sell it for you. There are a thousand things you can do.  This will lower your stress level over selling.

If you are thinking about buying or selling a home, give us a call at (714) 726-3166 or send us an email to explore your options and to find out when is the best time for you to make a move. Texting ok