Make a Splash When Selling

Our Oahu real estate market is moving!  Just when you thought homes couldn’t sell any faster, they do!  March sales of single family homes were up more than 20%  over last year.  The same was true for condos.  And prices continue to climb, though not at the astronomical rates we’ve seen in the past.  Year over year median sale prices are up just under 4%.  Clearly, your Oahu real estate is your best investment.

In this kind of market, it is important to think strategically when selling your home.  You’ll want to sell quickly with a minimum of inconvenience and you’ll want to walk away with as much cash in your pocket as possible.  How can you accomplish that?  Some thoughts:

Know where you’re going.  Understand that houses on Oahu sell quickly if they are properly priced.  Right now the median priced single family home is taking less than 20 days to go under contract for sale!  Closing can take an additional 30 – 45 days.  In this environment, it is not wise to put your home on the market until you have somewhere else to go within 60 days.

Price properly.  That means at market value.  It’s tempting when homes are selling so fast to push the price up, ask for a little more, try to cash in big.  But that strategy fails over and over.  Home buyers have lots of tools today to spot overpriced listings and most avoid them.  Your aggressive price will limit showings and encourage low offers.  Instead, price at market value and then let the market set the price.  What you’ll find is that a great home in a good location will produce offers over and above asking price.  And wouldn’t that be a nice situation!

Prepare the property.  The day your home goes on the market it becomes a product that has to compete with other similar products.  Before you make your home available for showing, make sure it is breathtakingly clean, neat and staged.  You want every person who sees your home to dream of living there and the best way to do that is to make the home dreamy.

Plan to make a splash.  Sometimes it’s smart to create urgency and anticipation when selling.  ‘Coming Soon’ signs prior to the actual listing period can accomplish this, but I sometimes suggest other strategies.  Having the first day of showing coincide with a well promoted open house – a Grand Open House – can ensure that the largest number of potential buyers see the property on that first day.  Sometimes I suggest that we hold off reviewing offers until the end of the first week.  This creates a sense of urgency, a deadline, and sets the expectation that there may be a bidding war for the home.

Listen to your agent.  When you hire one of the professionals at Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties, you’re teaming up with a trusted consultant.  We know this business and this market and there is no one better qualified to advise you every step of the way.  Sometimes the emotion of selling can nudge you into poor strategic thinking.  Our job is to help you stay focused on the business decision that selling a home should be.

Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties is a full service real estate company that provides exceptional service while charging less than ordinary Realtors.  We’ve been successfully helping buyers and sellers all over Oahu for more than 12 years and we’d be delighted to help you achieve your housing dreams.  Contact us at (808) 593-8811, or visit our website.  

The Truth About Trulia, Zillow and Searching for a Home Online

Many of the homebuyers I work with have looked at homes for sale online on sites like Zillow and Trulia.  They often have questions about the information they are getting online, so I thought I’d take a moment to explain who and what these large real estate sites are.

Zillow and Trulia are National Property Portals.  They collect and aggregate information about housing and houses for sale from all over the U.S. and offer it up to consumers in a searchable database. They make money by selling advertising.  The Portals sell premium placement of agent and broker information throughout their websites, in theory giving those agents an edge in securing buyer and seller leads.

The information on houses for sale comes from a variety of data feeds.  It is possible for an agent or broker to physically input a listing into the National Portals, but in reality this rarely happens.  Instead, the agent or broker inputs the listing into the local MLS, that then ‘feeds’ the listing information to the Portal.  In their quest to have as much housing information as possible, the Portals also ‘pull’ feeds – sometimes containing the same, but perhaps not exactly the same, information – from other sources.  For example, if the real estate office is a member of one of the large franchises, their franchisor may feed listings to the portals as well.  Or a large, multi-office firm may have its own feed.

As many home buyers quickly realize there are frequent inaccuracies in the data on the large portals. It is a conundrum for the portals for which there is no easy solution.  

Essentially they are trying to do what is a local job with a national platform.  They receive tons of data from multiple sources and, because they are removed from the local market, their methods of discerning what is accurate, and what is not, are somewhat flawed.  So you have duplicate listings with different prices, homes for sale that were actually sold weeks, even months ago and price estimates that consider only the average value in an area – which can be skewed by one very big sale or one that is very small. It can be very frustrating for the consumer.

Of course, there is a better way to search for homes for sale on Oahu or anywhere in Hawaii.   At Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties, we approach the homebuying process as a partnership.  We want our buyer clients to be as involved in the search as they’d like to be, and we want them to have access to the most up-to-date and accurate information as possible.  

That’s why our website pulls data from the LOCAL MLS every day and makes it available to consumers in an easily searchable format.  When you search for homes for sale at HUSHawaii.com, you are looking at he same data that local real estate agents use.  It is accurate, current and easy to understand.

If you are just starting your search or deeply into it – or if you’re just curious about local homes for sale – we’d be pleased to show you how our local home search site can make the process easier.  You can search to your heart’s content, and when you need more information on a property, on financing, or on qualifying, we will be right there with you.