5 Home Improvement Projects that Will Get You Top Dollar For Your Home

It’s a highly competitive market for home sellers right now. More homes to compete with means that the impression your homes makes – from the curb, and on the inside – matter now more than ever. You can increase your chances of selling faster – and at today’s top dollar – by investing in a select few home improvement projects that have been shown to make a big impact on buyers.

Bad news alert: it might cost you a little time, effort and cash.  The good news, though, is that the best projects for quickly increasing your home’s resale value tend to be cosmetic and fairly simple and inexpensive to do. Here are five projects with big-time return on investment for home sellers-to-be, in terms of their power to attract buyers, and to attract dollars from those buyers.

1. Painting:  Adding a fresh coat of paint to ceilings and walls is a tried and true way to increase your home’s appeal to buyers. Go for white or neutral tones that help lighten your rooms. (Now is not the time to show off your fascination with fuschia and lime green.) Buyers will have an easier time envisioning how they will infuse their own personalities into your home if they’re looking at a relatively blank slate.

Painting lightens and brightens rooms, instantly removes scuffs and dings and gives every room a fresh, polished feel.

Fresh exterior paint – even if your time or cash budget limits your efforts to accents like eaves, shutters, doors and trims – is also a quick, inexpensive way to polish the look of your home from the curb.

2. Landscaping:  Everything you’ve heard about curb appeal is true. First impressions matter – especially if your house is one of eight or nine a buyer has seen in one day. Buyers will be more excited to look at the inside your home if the outside looks clean, charming and inviting. Mow the lawn, trim the hedges, pull the weeds and plant some flowers, bushes or shrubs for the biggest impact – and be diligent about keeping your landscaping very well-manicured throughout the time your home is on the market.

Be sure to keep it low-key, relatively low maintenance and neutral, though. This is not the time to indulge your personal fantasies of living in an exotic paradise, unless that matches the existing look and feel of your home, nor is it the time to install a time-intensive English garden that buyers will love, but not want to take on. Think clean, simple and elegant for the biggest boost in value.

3. Cleaning and de-cluttering:  Start by removing all your family photos from the walls and all sorts of tchochkes and clutter from the tops of tables, desks, dressers and counters. Buyers want to be able to envision their lives in the house, not yours. Personal items – and the visual clutter they create – have been shown time and time again to block buyers’ ability to create this vision.

Also, remember that buyers are coming to see the house and evaluate its space, not to bear witness to all the fabulous furniture that means so much to you (no matter how amazing your personal taste). Remove furniture that takes up too much space and fills up rooms. Get rid of clutter such as clothes, boxes, piles of mail and other items.

And then clean – and keep cleaning obsessively, the entire time your place is on the market. Kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms should look unlived in when they are shown.  And don’t forget to clean less obvious places like windows, walls, doors and  and floors, to dust off shelves and furniture, and to polish appliances.

4. Plumbing repairs and water stain/damage repair: Paying a plumber to make a few stops throughout your home can be well worth the investment. Leaky faucet in the master bathroom? Get it fixed. Does the space under your kitchen sink look like a science experiment? Leaks and water stains definitely provoke disgust and exasperation on the part of the buyers you want and need to impress.  And they can be pretty cost effective to fix – ask your agent for a referral, if you need one.

5. Staging:  Staging your home can make a dramatic difference in the price for which your home sells. Good staging is equal parts:

(a)    removing your personal belongings and replacing it with more  artwork, decor and cleaner-looking furniture,

(b)    and tweaking the home’s paint, wall coverings and even landscaping to show the place in its very best light.

When done well, staging can convert your home from just another listing on a buyer’s list to the setting for a fresh, new start to the fresh, new life of their dreams. Professional stagers, in particular, have special skills and materials they use, from convincing you to get rid of a bunch of things you value (but read: junk to a buyer), to  items like mirrors, plants, art work, lamps, pillows and even furniture that tells a visual story of the life buyers can fantasize about living in your home.

Talk to your agent about staging – some agents have the skill to do this on their own, while others might have a professional stager they frequently work with.

In some cases, you might want to take on even larger projects. Before you go that route, talk with a local real estate agent; they are well-positioned to know what sort of updates and features will make the most impact on local buyers. Not all major, non-cosmetic upgrades to your home will create a significant difference in the price it commands, so take advantage of your agent’s expertise as you make decisions about whichproperty preparation investments to make (and which to forego).

Tara-Nicholle Nelson

Sellers Must Recognize That Housing Markets are Local

Home prices are like the weather — very different in different areas.

In many markets, home prices have actually gone up from last year, says Dick Gaylord, president of the National Association of Realtors.

In addition, demand will change depending on the price range and even the neighborhood. What you need to know: What’s the demand for a house like yours in your area?

“You have to look at what’s being sold and at what price,” says Poorvu. “That’s important.”

Look at comparables for similar houses. Study prices and sales for one year ago, six months ago, three months ago and current numbers, says Gaylord.

What are the trends? Are prices going up or down — and by how much? How many days are homes staying on the market? If they are on the market longer, how much of that could be seasonal? In many areas, spring and summer are the busy seasons.

“An agent who works the market will be in the best position” to find “the tipping point between nice, attractive and interesting — and being sold,” Phipps says. You want to find the point between, “Hey, that’s interesting,” and “It’s too good to pass up.”

If you’re not using a real-estate agent, it’s especially important to use the Internet, visit open houses in your area and study home sales in your Sunday paper, says Greg Healy, vice president of operations for ForSaleByOwner.com.

But you also need to realize that the paperwork alone tells only part of the story. While sales and prices are public, many times seller concessions are not.

Royal Oak Housing Going Up :)

The 5 Most Common Complaints of Short Sale and REO Buyers (and How to Avoid Them)

Roughly forty percent of the homes for sale on today’s market are short sales and foreclosures! Distressed properties are well known for their value (a reputation which is sometimes accurate, andsometimes not), but they also have a reputation for causing buyers to become distressed, too!

Transactional snafus, last-minute surprises and long, drawn-out escrows that never close seem to be par for the course.

Instead of avoiding these properties altogether, get educated about the most common dramas that go down in these deals, and how you can avoid falling victim.

1.  Run-on (and on, and on) escrows.  When you’re buying a home (or selling one, for that matter), time is absolutely of the essence.  And buyers reasonably expect that the big time suck in real estate is in the house hunting process itself; seems like once you find a home you want to buy and the seller agrees to your price and terms, things should move pretty quickly, right?

Not so much, when it comes to some distressed property sales. I’ve heard tell of the occasional, swiftly-moving escrow on an REO (real estate owned – by the bank). But for the most part, these transactions take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks longer than “regular” sales, because of the extra signatures, supervisor-level approvals and even investor involvement required to seal the deal.  Banks don’t have the same sense of urgency individual home sellers do, and it’s not uncommon for the people who need to sign on the dotted line to be on vacation or scattered across the country, adding days’ or weeks’ worth of time to the escrow.

And short sales are also an entirely different animal when it comes to escrow timelines. While a standard sale from an individual seller to an individual buyer might take 45 days from contract to closing, a short sale can take anywhere from 45 days to 6 or 8 months (!) to get the deal closed, after the seller has accepted the contract.

Avoid the drama by: expecting your escrow to run long, and being pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t.  Expectation management is everything. Make sure you take these extended timelines into account when you’re working with your mortgage broker on the issue of when to lock your interest rate, and how long your rate locks will last. You might even need to plan on and/or set aside an allowance for the cost of extending your low interest rate, if rates are rising rapidly during the time you’re waiting for the deal to be done.

2.  Bank won’t take lowball offer.  If I had a dollar for every time I’ve received a question from an outraged reader to the effect that a buyer has had their short sale or REO offer rejected on grounds that it was too low,  even though the bank has no other offers, I could buy a foreclosure myself (admittedly, it’d be one of those $150 foreclosures in some blighted town with tax liens and no plumbing, but still).

Banks owe their shareholders and investors a duty to get as much as they can for these properties. Just because you see it’s on the market and listed as a short sale or a foreclosure doesn’t mean they’re going to give it to you for a fraction of its worth. The bank’s goal is to get a purchase price as close as possible to the home’s fair market value, as determined by the recent sales prices of similar, nearby homes, with some adjustments made for the property’s condition.  Fact is, many banks would rather see the listing agent reduce the price by a moderate amount, and wait to see what offers come in, than to accept an offer 30 percent below the asking price just because there are no other offers on the table.

Avoid the drama by:  working with your agent to make a realistic offer, based on recent comparable sales in the neighborhood, not just on what you think you can get away with.  You can waste a lot of time, spin a lot of wheels and lose out on a lot of properties making lowball offer after lowball offer on distressed homes. Sit down with your broker or agent, review the ‘comps’ and make a smart offer that reflects a good value for you, is within your budget and is not bizarrely out of the realm of the fair market value of the property.

3.  Last minute postponements/cancellations.  These transactions have an uncanny way of being delayed at the last minute – or never going through at all, through no fault of the wanna-be buyer. You signed docs yesterday, put your dog in the crate this morning and just hopped in the moving truck, only to get a text from your broker that the deal didn’t close because the escrow company which was selected by the bank flubbed the checkboxes on a single sheet of paper (it happens). Or, you’ve been in contract (with the seller) on a short sale for four months, and the bank refuses the sale entirely because the seller refuses to kick even $1 of their own cash into the deal, despite having a flush savings account.

Avoid the drama by:  staying as flexible as possible with your moving plans as long as possible.  Best practice is to plan on some overlap between the time you can be in your last place and your scheduled move-in date.  Also, if you’re in contract on a short sale, you should take the point of view that you don’t have a firm deal until you get the bank’s approval of the transaction. So don’t even think about starting to make moving plans or paying for home inspections and appraisals until you know the bank has greenlit the deal and that the purchase price and terms they’ve approved work for both you and the seller.

4.  The bank’s black box.   Make an offer on a normal home and you’re likely to know what the outcome will be within a few hours or a few days, at the outside. If things take longer because the seller is out of town or some such, the listing agent tells you that, and you at least know what’s going on.

Make an offer on a bank-owned property or a short sale?  It’s a crap shoot – could be days, but could also, easily, be weeks or months before you know what’s going on.  And no amount of calling, pleading, prodding or nudging is likely to get you much information on how your offer or the seller’s short sale application is being handled or what (if any) progress is being made.  And that “black box” into which your offer disappears at the benk level is very frustrating.

Avoid the drama by:  continuing your house hunt until you have an answer back.  Maniacally pestering the listing agent for answers or harrassing your buyer’s broker into spending hours on hold with the bank is highly unlikely to get you any insight. (With that said, it does make sense for your agent to check in regularly – sometimes even daily –  with a short sale or REO listing agent to stay updated on any developments with the property and to make sure your offer/transaction stays in the front of their mind.)  

Most of the angst in these situations arises when a buyer feels they passed on properties that would have really worked for them when they pinned their hopes on a distressed home.  You can only control your efforts and activities, not the bank’s.  So, consult with your own broker or agent about staying proactive in viewing and even pursuing other properties until you have a firm “yes” from the bank on your short sale or REO offer.  Until that time, and usually for a short time after you get the bank’s approval, you have the right to back out of the transaction if you need to (make sure your broker briefs you on precisely when your right to rescind your offer or exercise contingencies – i.e., bail – will expire).

5.  Double standards. In a “regular” equity sale with no bank involvement, both buyer and seller are obligated to meet various timelines.  Seller has to provide disclosures by X date, open the property to inspections – with utilities on – by Y, and close and move out by Z.  REO and short sale buyers, on the other hand, are often dismayed to find that  even though the bank might take weeks or months to sign or handle its deliverables, the bank will insist that the buyer show up, sign or send a check quick-like.

Avoid the drama by: chalking it up to the (admittedly irritating) way things are – the price you pay to buy from the bank.  Realize that working with the bank on the bank’s terms is unavoidable when you buy a distressed property. Then, go into the deal with realistic expectations – including the expectation that the bank will drag its feet, despite expecting you to keep every deadline – and you’ll be less frustrated, and less likely to make poor decisions out of frustration.

Also, make sure you do respond in a timely manner to the bank’s requests and your obligations under the contract.  I’ve seen banks capitalize on buyer delays in returning signatures and removing contingencies to accept higher offers they received in the interim.  Don’t lose your home on a technicality because you assume that the bank’s lackadaisacal timelines apply to you as well.

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

Improving Your Home for $1,000 or Less

If moving to a bigger home or building an addition isn’t in the cards, here’s how to maximize the space you have – on a budget.

Some new kitchen paint on walls or cabinets works wonders Photo: flickr/la familia brophy

Make Over Cabinets, $1,000
Give your dowdy kitchen cabinetry a lift with paint and new hardware. Proper preparation — cleaning, sanding, priming and painting with an oil-based or 100% acrylic paint — is key to a good-looking, long-lasting result. Using a paint sprayer helps, too (rent one from a paint or home-improvement store). Pros charge an average of $547 to do the job with one coat of paint on 150 square feet of base and wall-hung wood cabinets, according to Do It Yourself or Not (www.diyornot.com).

More from Kiplinger.com » 8 Easy Projects That Add Value to Your Home » QUIZ: How Smart a Home Owner Are You? » 10 Energy Efficient Moves to do in a Weekend

You can cut the cost of painting to about $200, regardless of size, if you do it yourself. For inspiration, visit Web sites such as Better Homes and Gardens (www.bhg.com; see “30 Low-Cost Cabinet Makeovers”) and www.houzz.com. Add touches by removing selected cabinet doors and painting the interior a contrasting color, adding glass panes to solid doors, and using beadboard for texture.

Hardware — knobs and handles — is the jewelry of cabinetry, and the Internet provides endless options. You can spend from a few dollars to $50 or much more per knob or handle. Anyone for a door handle in silver plate and Swarovski crystals for $120? You’ll find a fine discounted selection at www.knobsforless.com.

Optimize space by building an office nook into a basement wall Photo: flickr/AdamSelwood

Create An Office Nook, $250
Don’t have an entire room to make into a dedicated home office? Create an office nook by redoing a corner of a room or repurposing a closet. If you use a closet, first remove existing shelves and the hanging pole, then paint.

Closet kits provide quick and easy storage, with shelves and brackets attached to tracks that screw into wall studs. Elfa’s “Office in a Closet” ($232 if you do it yourself or $412 installed from www.containerstore.com) comes with five solid (not wire mesh), 30-inch-long shelves, including a deeper shelf to use as a desk, and hanging hardware. Add a rolling file cart to store under the desk shelf. Elfa sells one for $99 with a hanging-file frame and two drawers, but you can get cheaper ones at discount stores. Hiring an electrician to install an electrical outlet for office equipment, if needed, will add $75 to $250 to the price.

Organizing a garage is a low cost, high yield project Photo: Storewall

Reclaim Your Garage, $1,000
Many homeowners have a no-car garage because it’s so full of stuff that there’s no room to park a vehicle. Look for a slatwall system that uses molded plastic panels with slots from which you can hang hooks, shelves and baskets. Fasten the panels to your garage walls via one of several methods, such as drywall screws into studs.

You can order a starter kit directly from manufacturer storeWALL ($529 at www.storewall.com). The kit includes six panels (4 feet by 15 inches) totaling 30 square feet, plus two shelves with brackets, two shoe shelves, six hooks, two baskets, trim, caulk and screws. At www.mygaragestore.com you can buy individual storeWALL components (six 4-foot panels totaling 30 square feet for $189, or four 8-foot panels totaling 40 square feet for $283), as well as hooks ($6 to $19), baskets and shoe shelves ($18 to $59), and shelving ($49 to $60).

MyGarageStore.com also sells kits for different applications, such as the WorkCenter kit, with an assortment of shelves, bins and racks for tools and hardware ($130), the Golf Sports kit ($72) and the Bike Sports kit ($39). And put the overhead space to use, too. Lift and store bicycles, canoes and bins of gear using a Harken ceiling hoist. A manual hoist ($29 to $180 at www.mygaragestore.com) can lift from 45 to 250 pounds; an electric one, from 70 to 220 pounds ($169 to $229).

Closet organizers are modular and cheaper than built-ins Photo: flickr/markomni

Organize Your Closet, $500
Has your closet become an avalanche waiting to happen? You need a closet organizer. First, empty the closet and decide what to keep, toss, donate, consign or sell. Once you know what stays, you can pick a system accordingly.

Most manufacturers of closet organizers offer an online tool with customer support. At www.rubbermaid.com, choose a layout similar to your closet’s and enter measurements, then drag and drop closet kits onto the rendering. The tool will generate a shopping list of appropriate components available directly from Rubbermaid, and at Lowe’s (where it’s sold as the HomeFree brand) and Menards stores. For example, a walk-in closet with two 6-foot-long walls and one 8-foot-long wall would require three kits totaling $440. (Accessories, such as a two-drawer unit, would push the total above $500.)

Add Value

Make your house more efficient and comfortable with small projects that pay off when you sell.

Replace A Window, $500
Do you have a window that’s especially leaky or tough to open or close? Replace it. If the framing is fine (try poking a screwdriver into the sill to see if it has rotted and use a level to see if it’s reasonably square), you can install a replacement window into the original opening, replacing the sashes, side jambs and trim. Expect to spend $100 to $500, depending on the material and features (vinyl is cheaper than wood). A handyman may charge about $30 to $100 to install it, and as much as twice that if he must rebuild the frame (called a new construction frame). If you buy an Energy Star-qualified window through December 30, 2011, you can claim a tax credit for 10% of the cost (excluding installation) up to $200.

The Web sites of window manufacturers, such as Andersen, Marvin and Pella, include guides to selection also see Everything You Need to Know About Replacement Windows).

Hard-Wire A Room, $1,000
As the electronic gadgets in your home grow in number and appetite for data, you may want to replace a wireless network with one that is hard-wired and cabled. Such a system will provide faster data and video transmission that’s more secure and reliable. Your images will be clearer, and you’ll be able to move massive files from a laptop to a desktop computer in a tenth of the time it would otherwise take. You could also connect a game system to the Internet to play video games remotely with friends — and watch the action on your flat-panel HDTV.

Start with your most-used room — say, a family room or home office. An electrician will pull wire and cable through the walls, attic and basement as needed to create multiple outlets. The cabling will serve your computer, laptop, peripherals, HDTV, DVR and game system and run back to wherever phone and Internet service enters the house.

Look for a licensed and insured electrician who specializes in residential service and home networking. The more wiring that’s required and the more difficult it is to access the wall space, the greater the cost, says Marcus Smith, owner of SmithLudwig Electric, in Austin, Tex. Hourly labor rates vary widely, so in some markets this project may exceed $1,000. Save money by obtaining permits and patching walls yourself.

Add Style

These projects will let you enjoy your home more if you’re staying put, or add curb appeal if you’re planning to sell.

Remake An Entrance, $250
If your home’s front entrance presents a sad face to the world, brighten it up by painting the front door with an accent color. Benjamin Moore’s Aura Exterior, about $20 per quart, is a good choice; it hides imperfections, is easy to apply, dries quickly and resists fading and weathering.

Finish the door with new hardware. A new lock set could easily eat up half your budget or more, so look for one on sale. At www.handlesets.com you’ll find a good selection at discounted prices, often almost half off suggested retail. (Installation is an easy job, but if you lack the time, a handyman will charge $30 to $100). Add kick plates (screw-on or magnetic, $25 to $112) and door knockers ($10 to $226) from the huge selection at www.signaturehardware.com.

Replace a beaten-up mailbox with one from www.seattleluxe.com, which carries almost 1,200 boxes, wall- and post-mounted, in many styles, materials and finishes. They run from $29 all the way up to $3,960 for a German-made, lord-of-the-manor model. Add pizzazz or character with house numbers from www.housenumberconnection.com. You’ll find styles from Craftsman to the Age of Aquarius in copper, brass, aluminum, steel and tile ($11 to $47 apiece).

Electrical installations aren’t for everyone, but they do shine! Photo: Lithonia Lighting, an Acuity Brands Co.

Update Your Lighting, $500
Are you living with outdated light fixtures that aren’t yet fashionably retro? Switch out one or more, especially in a prominent place, such as over your dining-room table. To get a feel for styles, visit www.lampsplus.com or the Web sites of home-furnishings retailers, such as www.westelm.com. Look for Energy Star-rated fixtures, which use one-fourth the energy of traditional lighting. Lithonia Lighting (www.lightahome.com) makes several styles of energy-efficient chandeliers. A five-light chandelier goes for $199 in antique bronze and $258 in brushed nickel. Installation costs $60 to $100.

By Pat Metz Esswein kiplinger.com

Tips for a First-time Home Buyer

Benefits for a First-Time Home Buyer

ou should buy a home. That’s what you’ve been hearing from friends and family, right? So, by now you have likely already weighed the benefits and decided that home ownership was the best decision for you. That’s a major hurdle now passed. You are focused and certain. Good.

The “Red Shoes” Experience for a Home Buyer

Women will relate to this. Say, you need a new pair of red shoes. You go to the mall. At the first shoe store, you find a fabulous pair of red shoes. You try them on. They fit perfectly. They are glamorous. Priced right, too. Do you buy them? Of course not! You go to every other store in the mall trying on red shoes until you are ready to drop from exhaustion. Then you return to the first store and buy those red shoes. Do not shop for a home this way. When you find the perfect home, buy it.

Making the Selection To Buy a Home

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I generally know which home a buyer is going to choose, and I suspect most other agents operate the same way. It’s an intuition. But I make it a practice not to steer buyers, and I insist that buyers choose the home without interference from me. It’s not my choice to make.

Real estate agents are required, however, to point out defects and should help buyers feel confident that the home selected meets the buyer’s search parameters.

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