by Amy Hoak
Sunday, January 2, 2011

If your New Year’s resolution involves selling a home in 2011, you’ve got some work to do: There’s lots of inventory out there and in a buyer’s market like this one, getting an offer on a home can be challenging.

Still, for the committed seller willing to do some prep work and come to terms with the current value of his or her home, locking in a buyer isn’t impossible.

By listing in early January, you might be able to catch some of those early birds who start browsing in the winter so that they can find a new home before school starts in the fall, said Louis Cammarosano, general manager of HomeGain.com, a real-estate website. In fact, many buyers tend to start their searches online right after Christmas, and continue throughout January and February, he said.

“If you hit the ground running and you’re a fresh listing that has done everything right, you’ve got the best shot,” said Cammarosano.

Consider the following tips to give your home the best chance to get noticed — and sold — in 2011.

Price It Right from the Start
Many sellers suffer from attachment bias, said Tara-Nicholle Nelson, consumer educator for real-estate website Trulia.com. They believe that their home is worth more than they’d pay for it in another context. While it’s always a bad idea to overprice a home, it’s especially dangerous in times like this because there is so much competing inventory in many local markets.

Nelson’s advice: Give yourself a reality check by looking inside comparable homes during open houses. That can help you get a clearer idea of your home’s value.

Read the rest of the article

Seattle Real Estate Tyler Freed

One of Australia’s largest homebuilders is entering the U.S. market with a bet on King, Snohomish and Pierce counties.
By Eric Pryne

Seattle Times business reporter

One of Australia’s largest homebuilders is jumping into the Seattle market.

Henley Properties said Monday it plans to build 500 houses in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties by the end of 2012. That would make it one of the area’s largest builders.

This is the firm’s first U.S. venture. “Henley is making a bet the region is poised for recovery,” said Peter Hayes, the company’s managing director.

Local real-estate observers said Henley’s arrival is a vote of confidence in the Seattle market, where new-home construction fell sharply during the recession and is just beginning to recover.

“All the fundamentals are strong here, even though we’re still working our way through the recovery,” said Allison Butcher, spokeswoman for the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties.

Land-use economist Matthew Gardner said Henley’s announcement is encouraging, but he cautioned that new construction must compete for the foreseeable future with a growing number of bank-repossessed homes now for sale that are depressing prices.

But Hayes said lower construction costs allow Henley to build new houses at competitive prices.

Henley is 50 percent owned by Sumitomo Forestry, a giant Japanese homebuilder that has been active in the Seattle area for several years through a joint venture with longtime Bellevue builder Bennett Homes.

Sumitomo ended up with full ownership of the joint-venture properties as a consequence of the housing downturn, Hayes said, and is transferring management of those parcels to Henley. The Australian firm is building out those subdivisions at a pace of 15 to 20 houses per month, he said.

Henley also plans to start building houses under its own brand, starting with a 54-lot subdivision in Kent that it bought in October for $5.55 million from Kirkland developer Yarrow Bay Communities.

Twelve model homes will be built there to showcase Henley’s designs, Hayes said. Henley also is buying other properties in Renton and elsewhere, he said.

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com

Seattle Real Estate Tyler Freed

Housing market is ripe for ‘fixer-uppers’
Fix-up buyers are largely rare birds in a market with a huge supply of houses for sale and a continuing shortage of takers — tax credit notwithstanding.

By Alan J. Heave

The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — If you look at the trends among homebuyers in the Philadelphia market, the Dolans appear to be a bit out of step:

Daniel Dolan, a chemical engineer, and wife Shaliz, an ob-gyn physician at Temple University Hospital, have just remodeled the kitchen in the town house they bought in July.

Instead of the “perfection” real-estate experts say today’s buyers crave, the Dolans chose a house that needed work — a “fixer-upper,” for want of a better description.

“It let us buy more house,” Daniel Dolan said, and, just as important, “lets us put our personal stamp on it.”

Fix-up buyers are largely rare birds in a market with a huge supply of houses for sale and a continuing shortage of takers — tax credit notwithstanding.

.

But for the most part, observers say, house hunters know a buyer’s market when they see one and want perfection without working for it.

Ruth Feldman, of Weichert Realtors’ Mount Airy, Pa., office, described what the Dolans bought as an “in-between,” a four-story town house that had been for sale for seven months.

About $445,000, “it is priced $100,000 below the very same style house next door, which sold in June for $549,000,” Feldman said. Yet “every buyer who looks at it (and we’ve had lots of showings) says it’s priced too high and needs too much work.”

These days, she said, buyers “want the totally redone, tasteful décor, granite-and-stainless-steel kitchens and fancy tile baths — which are everywhere, even in much-lower-priced rehabs. These buyers all watch too much HGTV.”

Patrick Campbell has an unusual perspective because he sells real estate and, in the late summer, chose to buy a fixer-upper as his primary residence.

The house was owned by Penn professors who had rented it out for 30 years, he said.

What sold him was the house’s location and price, said Campbell, who paid $370,000 — $20,000 over list price — to outmaneuver two other prospective buyers. He considered the block, especially its proximity to Rittenhouse Square, “perfect.”

But the house was “falling apart,” he said. The ensuing months have been spent tearing out drywall to create an open floor plan; refinishing the hardwood floors; redoing both bathrooms, the kitchen and the basement; and upgrading the electrical work.

Because of the tax credits for qualified first-time and move-up buyers, the market’s sweet spot remains $350,000 and below, while $850,000 houses just aren’t selling.

Campbell learned his lesson as an investor in Northern Liberties, where he and a business partner did a project and lost money on it.

“Real estate remains about location and price,” he said.

The Dolans relocated to Philadelphia more than 18 months ago from the Worcester, Mass., area, and rented until they sold their rancher in April.

“We’d gone through the whole experience [of renovating],” said Daniel Dolan, adding that proceeds from the rancher’s sale didn’t match prices in the new neighborhood.

They looked at 20 properties before finding their $442,100 town house.

“It was a location issue, primarily,” he said. “We also weren’t looking to gut a place. This house not only had good bones; it was one we could move in first, upgrade later.”

The first floor had been broken into four rooms. With a contractor’s help, the Dolans took down all the non-load-bearing walls and created an open plan with kitchen and great room.

“We think it looks fantastic,” said Daniel Dolan, who has set his sights on redoing the master bath — at some point

Seattle Real Estate Tyler Freed

More Seattle neighborhoods considered affordable
The King County housing slump made six geographic areas affordable for those earning the county’s median household income of $68,821 in 2008. When the market was sizzling in 2007, only Auburn was considered affordable, a Seattle Times analysis showed.

By Lisa Pemberton Butler; and Justin Mayo

Special to The Seattle Times; Seattle Times staff reporter

Demi Troncoso commuted to Seattle from a Tacoma rental for nearly three years before buying a home in Auburn’s Lakeland Hills subdivision last October.

“I was waiting until the bubble burst,” said Troncoso, a safety consultant for the state Department of Labor and Industries. “I wanted to catch it before things started normalizing again.”

The newly built, four-bedroom home was bank-owned, and at the height of the real-estate market fetched a price of $410,000. Troncoso paid $330,000.

For middle-class folks such as Troncoso, the burst in the regional housing bubble means more homes and neighborhoods are within their financial reach.

King County’s median household income in 2008 was $68,832, according to estimates by the state’s Office of Financial Management. At that income level, buyers had easy accessibility to six geographic areas whose median home prices were between $248,450 and $290,500, a Seattle Times home-price analysis showed. Median means half are more, and half are less. But in 2007, when the market was sizzling, only one area — Auburn, where the median price was $266,750 that year — was considered affordable. And in 2005, median wage earners could afford to buy in 14 neighborhoods, including Seattle’s Georgetown/Delridge area.

“It was unsustainably unaffordable in 2006 and 2007, and it has come back to where it’s looking more normal now,” said Todd Sinai, an associate professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “These pendulums tend to swing from one side to pretty far over to the other side. The pendulum should swing to the side of increasingly affordable in the next year or so.”

But the lower home prices are offset by a struggling economy, Sinai said. The state’s unemployment rate climbed to 9.1 percent in April, with at least 317,890 people looking for work. As a result, many would-be buyers are taking pay cuts, or are afraid their jobs could be axed next.

Meantime, lenders have clamped down on their mortgage requirements.

“That begs the question: ‘Affordable to whom?’ ” Sinai said. “Housing is affordable if you can attain credit, but that’s not always easy.”

In 2008, all of the King County neighborhoods with affordable median prices were south of Seattle.

Auburn topped the list, with a median home price of $248,450, followed by North Burien, Des Moines/West Kent, Algona/Pacific, Enumclaw and Twin Lakes.

“All of those areas, except for Enumclaw, have always kind of been lower (in price),” said Laura Papritz, an agent with John L. Scott Real Estate’s Kent North office. “But because everything moved up, you were out of that first-time homebuyer’s price range. Now that everything has self-corrected, you’re seeing some of those areas drop down.”

South King County has been deluged with foreclosures and short sales, which have driven home prices down even further, said Loren Ellingson, an agent with Redfin.

In Auburn alone, prices have declined nearly 25 percent since the summer of 2007, according to the online brokerage.

“My investment home has nearly lost its entire equity due to the comparables of bank-owned properties and short-sale listings selling for well below what the sellers originally bought the home for,” Ellingson said. “I do feel, though, that a buyer can take advantage of these drops in home prices and get a screaming deal on homes in most of South King County.”

That’s what Haris and Rasema Svraka were hoping to take advantage of when they set out three years ago to find a home that boasted a family-friendly neighborhood, good schools for their children and an easy commute to their jobs in South King County.

“I just felt like the money they were asking for the houses wasn’t worth it,” said Haris Svraka, a fueling supervisor at Sea-Tac Airport. “I was patiently waiting.” And that wait paid off.

Last May, the couple snagged a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Des Moines for $228,000. The one-story, 1,500-square-foot home was built in 1964.

“The best deal at the time was in Des Moines,” Haris Svraka said. “It was a foreclosed house. … A great neighborhood. It’s nice and quiet.”

Although Troncoso’s new 2,600-square-foot home was priced slightly more than the Auburn area’s median home price, it boasted everything he wanted: plenty of room, walking distance to his children’s schools and a short drive to the Sounder train station.

The home also features several construction upgrades, such as premium appliances and hardwood floors, that he hopes will help the property hold its value.

“It was a great school system, a great neighborhood, and the commute was a lot easier,” he said.

“I wish I would have held off a little longer. But I still believe I made a good decision.”

Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company

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Seattle Real Estate Tyler Freed

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Seattle Real Estate Tyler Freed