These 3 Inspections Could Save You a Lot of Trouble Later On

Today I’m back talking about more home inspections I recommend you get before purchasing a property. 

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Today we’re back with part two of our coverage on home inspections. Like last time, I’ll be going over a few inspections I think are the most important if you’re buying a new home. Whenever you are about to make a home purchase, you need to know exactly what you’re getting into.

First of all, don’t underestimate the importance of a termite inspection. Termites can do a great deal of damage. You certainly wouldn’t want to purchase a home only to find out that you’ll be dealing with these pests.

Termites are also something homeowners should check for on an annual basis. For about $65, a termite inspection is well worth the cost. Mud tunnels or damage to the wood are two strong indicators that a home may have termites.

Secondly, I recommend a radon inspection. Radon is an odorless, colorless gas that seeps out from the Earth’s surface. This gas can come up through cracks in the basement or foundation, as well as through any holes.

You need to know exactly what you’re getting into when you purchase a home.

According to the EPA, a radon level higher than 4.0 picocuries per liter is a hazard. At this point the levels will need to be mitigated, since radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States.

Thankfully, there are ways to test for it. Certified radon inspectors can come out and set up a test that will monitor your home for two-and-a-half days. This test costs about $150 and will determine whether the radon level needs to be lowered.

The third inspection I recommend is to have an environmental inspection done. This is especially important if your family has allergies. Having a test for mold is one of the more common environmental inspections out there. Mold can be present anywhere in a home, and is especially likely if the property has taken on any water.

If you have any other questions or would like more information, feel free to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Which Home Inspections Should You Order?

What inspections should you have done on the home you’re buying? Here’s a few to get you started.

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Why should you have a home inspection when buying a home? Which inspections should you order? The first answer is obvious, but the second is not.

Home inspections protect your investment as a buyer. If your home has a plumbing issue that may cost you thousands of dollars to repair down the line, wouldn’t you want to know about it before committing to purchase it? That’s the idea of home inspections.

However, there are many different kinds of home inspections, so which is right for you? I’m going to go through a few of them today and explain how the process works.

For starters, every homebuyer should have a building inspection that is completed by a certified home inspector. They will give you an overview of any problems in the house you are buying. They aren’t plumbers or electricians, but they are very knowledgable and will be able to spot a problem when they find it.The inspector will take note of any and all problems. They can then refer you to a professional who can better estimate the repairs.

The inspector will spend at least a few hours in the home (around four hours for a 2,500 sq ft. house) and it’s important that you are with them every step of the way. It will help you better understand their findings and what you can do resolve any issues.

Every buyer should have a building inspection.

Aside from the building inspection, a gas inspection is another important one to consider. In the past, they were done by the local utility company. Now you can hire your own HVAC contractor to perform tests and make sure that any gas powered appliances are following the proper code.

The last inspection I wanted to mention today is the sewer lateral inspection. If you’re not buying a brand new home, there is a possibility that the plumbing underneath your home is made of old, clay pipes. A sewer lateral inspection will alert you to any creaks, leaks, or invasive roots blocking your sewage lines.

These are just a few of the many inspections you can choose to have done on a home. Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll cover even more ground. In the meantime, if you have any questions for me at all don’t hesitate to give me a call or send me an email at your convenience. I look forward to hearing from you

3 Tips for Winning a Bidding War

Winning a bidding war isn’t as hard as you think when you’ve got strategies like these.

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Would you like to win a bidding war in this hot market? I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it today.

Going to real estate school doesn’t teach you how to write a contract, as I’ve mentioned before. You need to hire an agent like you’d hire a lawyer, based on their track record of wins. This indicates that they can write quality offers. That’s one of the best tools an agent can have. Here are three things an agent can do with an offer to help you get the home of your dreams:

1. Remove all contingencies. Or, at least remove as many as you can. This includes financing contingencies, inspection contingencies, and home warranties.

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Remove as many contingencies as you can.

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2. Write an escalation clause. This says that you’ll beat any other offer by X number of dollars up to a certain max price. It’s very complicated, but can work like a charm in the right situation.

3. Writing a full-price offer prior to the house’s first available showing date. This would be contingent upon you being able to preview the house within 24 hours. An agent is obligated to present every written offer to their client, and one like this would certainly catch their eye. 

There you have it—my top three tips. If you have any questions about them or any questions about real estate in general, give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you!

What to Look for When Buying a Home

Today I wanted to spend some time on what to look for when buying a home.

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There are a lot of rehabs, also known as flips, in our market and although everything looks beautiful, you have to be careful about what you see on the outside of the house. I think it’s really important that you look at not just how beautiful a home is, but also at the critical components of the house.

You want to know how old the HVAC and the roof are because you don’t want to empty your pocketbook the first year that you live there. Knowing the life expectancy of those items and how old they are is important.

Walk around the exterior of the home and look for damage, cracks, offset bricks, or rotted columns on the front porch. These are all signs of neglect, so even if the house looks beautiful on the inside, a poorly-maintained exterior is a red flag. 

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Not maintaining the outside of the home is a red flag.

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Open windows and doors to make sure they do so smoothly and check for tight seals on the windows. If any of the doors don’t close properly, check the top of the frame. If the doors are rubbing there, it could mean that the house is settling. 

There are lots of ways to protect yourself before you spend money on inspections, like by looking for red flags that should be obvious to you and your agent. Work with an agent who has the experience of many sales and knows what to look for, because they don’t teach us that in real estate class.

If you have any other questions or you’re looking to buy or sell a home, please give me a call. I’d be happy to help!

BUYING A HOME? Step #1 is ...

The first step of the home buying process isn’t looking at homes. It’s figuring out which homes you can actually afford.

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I know that there are many people who think you should start the home buying process by taking a look at homes online. However, that’s not what your first step should be.

The first step when buying a home should be to speak with a mortgage professional. They will look at your credit score, let you know if there is anything you need to fix, and issue that all-important pre-approval letter once they have gone through all of your financial information. You need that pre-approval letter when you make an offer on a home. Sellers likely won’t entertain an offer without one.

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Meet with a mortgage professional first.

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Give me a call or send me an email today and I can connect you with my preferred lenders to get you started. These are professionals you can count on with competitive rates and fees. I would be happy to help.

If you have any other questions about the real estate market, don’t hesitate to reach out by phone or email. I would love to hear from you.

4 Reasons You Should Overlook Home Decor in Online Photos

Although it can be tempting to get turned off by bad home decor, I urge you to see past it. Here are four reasons why.

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When browsing homes online, you should look at photos with a careful eye. Just because there is some ugly decor in a home’s pictures shouldn’t make it a dealbreaker. Today I’ve got four reasons why you should overlook home decor in online photos for your benefit. 

1. Bones are more important. You might not love the grandma-type house with lots of plaid and ornate furniture, but guess what? Grandma is the one who puts the new furnace and new AC in. These homes have great bones, they just might look a little unappealing from the outside. You should be able to see past that.

2. HGTV is overrated. That’s Hollywood, folks. It’s not how buyers buy houses. You don’t have to have the granite countertops and the latest furniture because those people on the show that have it are probably up to their eyeballs in debt.

3. Square footage means more than home decor. When an appraiser comes to your home, the value they give you is mostly based on your square footage. They don’t care about designer window treatments, artwork, colors, or anything else. It’s all about the square footage.

4. Home decor doesn’t come with the house. This is the most important one to remember. When you buy a home and have that final walkthrough, you will get to see a house with four walls and empty floors. That’s when you can truly get an idea of how to make the space your own.

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The decor doesn’t come with the home.

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If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to give me a call or send me an email. I would love to hear from you.

How Our Buyers Gain Leverage While Also Selling

Buying and selling at the same time can be tricky. Here’s one way we help make the process easier for our clients.

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If you plan on selling your home and buying a new one, do you have a “plan B” in place for when your home sells in the next 30 to 45 days? This is a question I recently asked a client of mine who is relocating to Chicago and needed to sell their St. Louis home. 

I told them that if I listed their house and it sold quickly, they would need a place to go even if they hadn’t found their new home yet. They didn’t have an answer, so I laid out some steps for them.

The first thing I told them to do was get a home equity line of credit. On a home equity line of credit, you can’t have your current home on the market but you can take roughly 80% of its value and use it for the purchase of a new home. That gave my client leverage with the seller in Chicago because they were basically a cash buyer with no financing or sale contingencies.

It’s a win-win situation for them because it takes the pressure off of them having to sell their house in St. Louis right away. Now, my client will be able to buy their new house in Chicago and wait for the right offer to come along in St. Louis. There won’t be pressure to take the first offer that comes along like there would have been if they decided to sell before buying a new home. This is just one example of how we can find a solution for you no matter what your real estate goals are.

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It was a win-win situation for this client.

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I can help you out with buying and selling homes no matter your situation. If you have any questions for me at all, don’t hesitate to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

How to Determine the Right Offer to Make

Making an offer on a home is a delicate process. Here’s how you should go about it.

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I often get asked the same question by buyers who are unaware of what a home’s value really is. They ask me, “How much should I offer on this house?” They love the house and don’t want to lose it, but they don’t want to overpay for it, either.

One of the first things I do after going through the home a few times is finding comparable properties in the neighborhood. I take a look back at least six months to determine what similar homes have sold for in the area. I look at the house like an appraiser, comparing its features and condition with the other homes that have recently sold.

Let’s say a home is priced at $300,000. If you try to apply a percentage to that and say you’re going to offer 5% or 10% below asking price, you could end up paying more than you need to. What if the home is already 10% overpriced? You’re not really getting a deal in that case. By knowing what similar homes in the neighborhood have sold for, you will be able to make a valid comparison and a fair offer.

If you’re going to live in the house for seven or more years, don’t let the price keep you from making an offer. If you really love the house, you should go for it. In the long run, you’ll be significantly happier with the house you love than a house you had to settle on because of budget constraints.

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If you really love the house, go for it.

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If you have any questions for me about this topic or anything else related to real estate, give me a call or send me an email. I would love to hear from you.

How Accurate Is Your Online Home Search?

When it comes to searching for homes, there are a lot of online resources that can serve you well, but you can’t do better than working with an actual real estate agent.

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As a homebuyer, how can you be sure that you’re seeing all the available houses out there that are for sale? I know that at least one of you watching the video above or reading this article is searching sites like Homes.com, Remax.com, or Realtor.com, and thinking that if you don’t check each and every website, you will miss out on your dream home. 

Today I wanted to talk about three questions that might be on your mind when it comes to browsing these websites: 

1. Where does all that data come from? It comes from Realtors like me who snag appointments with sellers, go out to those listing appointments, and get a listing agreement signed. After that, we use a proprietary application called the multiple listing service—or MLS for short—to put all that information in. Remember, though—garbage in, garbage out. If the agent doesn’t put everything into the fields like they’re supposed to, there’s a good chance that some of that criteria might be overlooked in a search.

2. How do other sites acquire that data? Think of it like Amazon.com. They have an aggregate of sellers who are trying to hawk all of their products, and that’s exactly what’s happening here. Realtor.com was the first that ever came out on the market, and that was our association. After that, Zillow, Trulia, and Homes.com all decided to jump on the bandwagon and help us push our listings out to the public. We actually upload to those public websites. Keep in mind, though, that this information sometimes gets lost in translation. The data might be corrupted, there might be photos missing, and the status changes might not always be up to date. You could be looking at a listing that’s for sale on one of those public websites that, in reality, isn’t for sale anymore. It could be sold, but more than likely, it’s under contract at this time to another buyer. 

3. How can you be assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information? Work with a real estate agent. We have the latest up-to-the-minute information, and if we set you up on an automatic email campaign that sends you all the houses for sale as they come on the market, you will see those within an hour of when we submit them to the MLS. You’ll have the most current information from us, not a third-party website. Those websites are great, but they’re not the best way to find a home.

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We don’t want you to be shortchanged.

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We don’t want you to be shortchanged—we want to make your home buying experience exceptional. If this isn’t the service you’re getting currently, give me a call and I’d be happy to help. If there’s a video topic you’d like to see, feel free to send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you! 

5 Reasons You Should Buy a Home During the Holidays

If you’re a home buyer thinking you should pull back because the holidays are coming, don’t. The holidays are a great time to buy a home, for more reasons than you might think.

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The holidays are coming, but if you’re a home buyer, you shouldn’t pull back on securing that new home. Why? Because the holidays are a great time to buy a house. Here are the top five reasons why:

1. There is less market activity. This is because people are typically busier at the end of the year with other things like school, work, etc. Your preferred house, naturally, is going to have less competition. This will also give you as a buyer a lot more leverage to do your thing without having to finagle your way through a multiple offer situation.

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A holiday buyer has more leverage and less competition to deal with.

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2. Sellers are motivated. Perhaps they’ve had their house listed since the summer and are dying to move out of it. Perhaps they have a job transfer coming up and the clock is ticking. In any case, their incentive to sell is through the roof. 

3. Potential tax advantages. You’re going to get to write off any points, any real estate taxes, and any mortgage interest that you have before the end of the year. If you itemize your deductions, that’s something else to consider.

4. Better interest rates. Historically, interest rates are much better during the slower winter months because there is more competition among lenders to offer incentives for you to buy a home before the end of the year.

5. Faster closings. Just like you, the sellers want to be in their new house before the holidays. Not only that, but lenders want to close out their books and real estate agents want to get paid before year’s end. Plus, there are less closings in general during this time, so I estimate that you would be able to be in your house in 30 days versus a typical 45-day closing.

If you need help buying or selling a home or there is a question I can answer for you in an upcoming video, please feel free to call me or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you!