TheTucsonFoothills

good things come in small packages, I guess

There are a lot of really crummy pictures of homes on the internet.
But these are my favorite. Teeny-weeny little postage stamp size pictures, where you know there's something there, you just can't tell what it is. If you're trying to sell your home, having pictures like these is not the best way to go about it. 
But you see these little postage stamp size pictures all the time in the MLS and on the internet.

 

And if your agent hasn't figured this out yet, the internet is where home buyers are shopping for homes, and the pictures go a long way to determining which homes buyers go to see. 
It's the ad for your home, and it's the only one that really brings them in the door, or doesn't.
Check out the pictures of your home on the internet,
they should look something like this,  

so that home buyers can actually see what your home looks like

and maybe even decide that they just have to come see it in person,

and because it looks so nice in the pictures,

maybe they've already begun to picture themselves in it,
before they even walk in the front door 

see TheFoothillsToday.com
to search for and learn more about Tucson Foothills Homes

a picture is worth ...

When I bought my first house in 1981 the only way to find houses for sale and see what they looked like, was to hook up with a real estate agent and go see them in person. There was no MLS and no internet.
You had to make an appointment with an agent and go through the listing sheets one by one, pretty much guessing which houses you should see, because at best there was just one fuzzy picture of the outside of the house and none of the inside. So you couldn't tell much about the outside, and you had no idea what the inside looked like.
It was kinda like a blind date, the agent thought you'd be a good match, but you really had no idea what to expect.
Then the agent had to go through the rig-a-ma-roll of making appointments for each of the houses you wanted to see and getting the keys from each of the listing agents. They didn't use lockboxes in those days.
And finally, after all this preparation, you'd drive over to the house with the agent, and the second you pulled in the driveway, you knew, it wasn't for you. But you'd come this far, so you looked at it anyway, just because.
Today we're bombarded with real estate information, and technology has given us access to more choices than we can ever make use of.
We can easily find out just about anything we want to know about all the houses for sale, whether they're across the street or across the country, without leaving our chair.
Both traditional and new internet based real estate companies are doing their best to out-spend, out-think and out-innovate each other in providing cutting edge information technology to the consumer.
But with all this progress, sometimes it seems as if we're back in 1981, because so often we still have no way of knowing what a house that's listed for sale looks like.
Because there are no pictures. Or the pictures on the listing are so dismal that they're worthless. Or they're worse than worthless, because they make the house look so awful that only the most determined buyer would take the time to go see it.
Everybody loses in this situation, but by far the seller loses the most.
They're at a huge disadvantage because they're not getting the showings they should be getting, and the showings that they are getting are pretty much blind dates, because the buyers have no idea what to expect. So there's a lot of wasted time for the seller, the buyer and the agent, dealing with showings that are doomed to go nowhere.
Taking good pictures of a house is skill that not everyone has.
That's OK. There are photographers that'll do a very decent job for a a couple of hundred dollars. Pinching pennies? Forget about the ad in the Sunday paper, or certainly the magazine ad that won't see the light of day for maybe 45 to 60 days, after the house gets listed.
Get the biggest bang for your buck, and have good pictures of the house on the MLS and the internet. That's where the buyers are.
For a lot of reasons that I won't go into now, I'm not a big fan of Virtual Tours, but they are usually competently done, and provide a reasonably decent presentation of the home being sold. And they're cheap, about $69, and easy, just one phone call.
There's no excuse.

selling your home online

Yesterday the Arizona Daily Star online had an article titled
Selling home online can net a hefty gain. The author, Marshall Loeb, tells us ' Despite the recent housing market slump, many Americans are still paying a walloping 6 percent commission to real estate brokers'. He gets it wrong right out of the gate. It's not despite the recent housing market slump that many Americans are paying a walloping 6 percent - if anything, the slump has caused people to continue to use proven methods to try and sell their home & not experiment with methods that have been much less reliable, even in the best of times.
When many thousands of homes are listed for sale on MLS's all across the country, and sitting on the market for months, most home sellers would not choose to drastically reduce the amount of exposure that their home is getting to potential buyers on the chance that they may save a couple of percent in commission.
He then states that Many homeowners are now opting to market their property directly to the consumer using online services like Yahoo Real Estate and Craigslist. And he ties that in with- 80% of those searching for a home use the internet. Leaving you with the impression that it's simple to sell your home on the internet by using Yahoo and Craigslist, because, 80% of the home searches are being conducted on the internet, on sites like Yahoo and Craigslist.
In fact the great majority of the searches of those 80% searching online are doing so on real estate brokerage web sites and MLS's, not on Yahoo or Craigslist. Because those real estate brokerages and MLS's have made all their listings available for people to search on the internet. Yahoo and Craigslist are great sites, but they contain just a teeny tiny fraction of the homes for sale. 
Then, ' Six percent may not sound like much, but consider: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average price of a home is $313,000, which means the average seller has to pony up nearly $19,000 in broker fees. This is a hefty penalty for not selling your own home, one that more and more Americans are unwilling to pay'.
Mr. Loeb consistently uses 6 percent as the amount of commission charged by real estate brokers, leading you to believe - intentionally it seems since I'm sure he knows otherwise- that it's 6 percent, like it or not, with no choice for the consumer. 
In fact there is a whole range of choices in the services offered by various real estate brokerages and the cost of those services, just like in every other industry and business in this country.
But it's a very convenient omission on Loeb's part, since it allows him to tell the story the way he wants, without being hindered by the facts. And again simplifying beyond belief, the $19,000 savings is offered as a given, with no mention of the possible trade-offs involved, or the fact that this $19,000 savings assumes that the buyers are also not represented by an agent, hence no commission.
A very unlikely scenario.
And whether the commission is 6, 5 or 4 percent, or whatever it is, it's not a penalty, it's a fee that's paid for services rendered.
And the fee is only paid if the home sells. No sale, no fee.
In that same vein of characterizing a fee for services as a penalty, would it be correct to consider the cost of an ad in the Arizona Daily Star (which you pay for whether or not it works), or, the cost of a subscription to the Star, to be a penalty.
We can choose, and increasingly many of us do, to sell our cars, used furniture and other stuff on the internet for free, and not put an ad in the Star. And we can read the news all day long on the internet for free. Why pay a penalty to the Star to subsidize these fairy tales.
Then Mr Loeb talks with Colby Sambrotto, chief operating officer of ForSaleByOwner.com, a leading online home marketplace, who says
(surprise-surprise) "Selling your home online is simpler than you might think", and then goes on to list the three simple steps to sell your home online and on your own, and how to accomplish each of them. (For the details read the article HERE)
1. Find out what your home is worth
2. Market your property
and, 3. Transfer the title
That's it, it's childs play, easy as 1,2,3.
This article would be laughable really and it's hard to believe that anyone would take it seriously, nevertheless, the glaring omissions and blatant oversimplification misinform and mislead on a subject that's important to me and to lots of other people.

Free Harley

Apparently a lot of real estate agents have discovered email flyers. Everyday for the last couple of months my inbox is crammed with email flyers from Realtors advertising their listings. Like it or not I get 30, 40 or more of these things every day. And while they may be cheaper and easier to send than snail mail flyers, they're not very effective. 95% of them are for homes that are in areas of Tucson that I don't do business in - the Southwest, southeast, Vail, central Tucson, and on and on. So they mean nothing to me, they're just more meaningless advertising. And because there are so many of these untargeted flyers coming at me everyday, I have to just batch delete them, and in the process not get to see those few that may be of interest to me. Besides, the formatting and headlines are all just slight variations on the same theme, so they're really monotonous and very forgettable. Somebody sold these agents a bill of goods.

and my favorite, as opposed to Priced To Not Sell Like I said, I get 30 or 40 a day, so I just buzz through and delete delete delete But this next one caught my eye

FURNISHINGS FOR THEM / HARLEY FOR YOU!

I've never had a Harley, but every now and then I think about having one.
Furnishings For Them/Harley for you! A Must See!
Hmmm!
But what's the Must See? The Furnishings, The Harley, or what. The flyer goes on to explain that the buyers will get the furnishings that have been left behind in the house, supposedly a 20K value, and the agent will get the Harley Davidson motorcycle that's in the garage, a 5K value. And aside from the very glaring and cheap bribe, your first impression has to be that this must be a terrible house since the whole proposition is based on some leftover used furniture and a Harley. So now you're target is someone who's really smitten by this used furniture, digs Harleys, and is willing to take the house in the bargain.
How embarassing. It's hard to believe this ad got published.