Real Estate Investing

Last night was the annual, very festive Oscar celebration honoring the top people in the motion picture industry.  I think it’s only fair to honor the best advice for buyers and sellers with our own Oscar awards!

Best Costume Design - For the seller who heeds the advice of staging a home - remove personal belongings and make it a house where someone feels like they can make it their own rather than moving into someone else’s dirt.

Runner Up:  Clean the house, Landscape entryway

Best Actress -Becky Hill, President of the Women’s Council of Realtors.  Becky has been a Realtor for 25 years and offers some advise to agents in a slow market,

When you’re working with clients, you want to communicate more frequently than you might otherwise. Let sellers know what you’re doing, because it might not be evident to them. You also want to think outside the box when it comes to marketing. We’re starting to see more listings appear on social networking sites and YouTube. Many young consumers are involved here, and it’s a great way to increase exposure.

Best Actor -Ty Pennington of Extreme Home Makeover.  I mean, come on!  His enthusiasm is fantastic, he has a generous heart, and who wouldn’t be thrilled to either have him roll into your yard in his camper to re-do your home or to go and help him with someone else’s home?! Ty is great!

Best Director - Josh Dorkin of BiggerPockets.com.  This is a great site that features writers from different industries related to real estate: mortgages, investors, marketing, rehab specialist, and more.  Bigger Pockets also has a forum for open discussions that looks to be pretty lively. In addition, it serves as a portal for real estate agents ot write their own blogs, features listings, and much more.

Best of Show - President Barack Obama for signing housing stimulus plan to help us cast aside the real estate blues!

Congratulations to our winners - and by “our” I mean “my picks.”

Photo from the Bangkok Post.

We’re all pretty much inundated with news about the housing stimulus plan, the economic recovery efforts, the diving job and stock markets, how bad Barack Obama is as President, how great Barack Obama is as President..

Also reading how the housing plan will help and won’t help homeowners.  In any market and with any selling situation, however, there are always three keys to selling your home quickly:  Location, Price, Condition.

If you live in an unpopular area - a bad location - you’ll simply have a harder time selling your home unless it’s PRICED to that specific neighborhood and if it’s good condition.  If you live in a fabulous neighborhood - you’ll have a harder time selling your home unless it’s PRICED to that specific neighborhood and it’s in good condition.

Want to sell fast?  Be the best priced home and have it move-in ready.

Want to sell slow?  Price your home somewhere in the middle or highest in the neighborhood when compared to other properties, don’t make your beds, don’t worry about the giant yellow stain on the carpet or where the kids melted crayons to the window sill!  You’ll surely sell slowly!  (Now say that really fast five times… you’ll surely sell slowly…).

If you’re confused about how to make your home look great (or staging), here’s a great video that includes before and after pictures and other tips.

Have a wonderful weekend!

I’ve always dreamed of having a hidden room after reading The Diary of Anne Frank and The Underground Railroad as a child.  My imagination took me to weird places sometimes - I’d scare myself into thinking, “What if a robber broke in? Where would I hide?” and I always ended up in an enchanted attic space through an opening in the top of the linen closet (told you … weird places!)

An Indiana man recently found a *real* hidden room as he was renovating his 1890’s home in Terre Haute.

A friend of Carl Thoms was working recently on plumbing in the 1890 home’s basement when he noticed that he could see around those pipes into a hidden room covered in tiles.

He also spotted a staircase — a discovery that led Thoms to a bedroom off of the home’s kitchen, where he pried up some floorboards and accessed those stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, Thoms found himself in a walled-off 10-foot-square room covered in tiles that at first made him think the room might have once been a tiled sauna.

Further in the article, the home owner speculates it could’ve been a bootlegging room built during prohibition.

A friend of mine bought a home last year and although she hasn’t found any hidden rooms, it did have some mysterious outbuildings.  One was a workshop that took me back to my grandpa’s old machine shop… I just wanted to stand in it all day and live in the past.  Another was a run-down greenhouse* about 100 feet back from another mysterious building that took us some time to figure out.  Her Daddy said it was a pump house, but  I like to think of it now as the house where the ghost of her backyard resides.

Another friend had a her home built.  What should have been a door to the upstairs unfinished bonus room was changed in the plans to a bookcase… the bookcase quietly slides open to reveal an amazing storage space (or place to escape).

I want a hidden room.