Now that we have all been “Sheltering in Place” for the last several weeks, you might have discovered you really need a little more space in your home and you might be considering getting a larger place – maybe one with 2 living areas or a home office!

You can use these last couple of weeks of sheltering to prepare your home for the market.

 Deep clean your home

First, start with a deep clean – baseboards, windows, moving furniture out of the way and cleaning under it, the whole bit. Spray touchable surfaces with a disinfectant product if you have it on hand. In doing a deep clean you will discover flaws or items in need of repair – keep a list. You will also be making your home more inviting to any prospective Buyer who may have residual fears about the virus.…

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I love this time of year because the industry folks start predicting what the trends for next year are going to be! The coming year’s hot housing trend is predicted to be kitchens!! Even small kitchen renovations can decrease your homes market time should you sell, and a blue kitchen brings $5000 in value more than any other color! How interesting is that?

 Trends

I love kitchens because I love to cook and especially bake, and I get to spend extra time in my kitchen cleaning up after my husband’s cooking!! A little insight into the Carroll household there!

 From what they are saying, you are just not going to believe what passes for “neutral” these days! First, the all-white kitchen is now pretty much a thing of the past. I’ve been seeing the trend…

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GIMMICKS - GIMMICKS - GIMMICKS

In Tyler, Texas real estate there are several real estate companies and agents that are endorsed by television or financial celebrities or they offer to buy your home or enroll it in a special program to encourage a quick sale. Do these gimmicks work? If you are asking if the gimmicks work to get them listings – the answer is yes. If you are asking if the gimmicks work to get your home sold the quickest and at the highest price – that answer may surprise you – because it is a resounding NO!

As far as celebrity endorsements, those agents pay a lot of money for that celebrity to endorse them. Those agents may have to promise to do business a certain way, or provide testimonials, but they basically pay for the…

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LOCATION, AMENITIES AND AGE…OH MY!

Last week I went on a listing appointment with a past client. She had done her homework. She had been on a popular website to check her “estimate”, had researched to see what the median price per square foot was for our city, what the average price of homes were running the last several months and reading articles about how there was a shortage of inventory and prices were going up. Based upon this information, she had a price in mind for what she was going to ask for her home because she knew she had an above average home.

I did my research on home sales for the last 6 months in her specific neighborhood, knew the ages of the houses that had sold and what updates and amenities they had and how long they had…

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Do You Have the Will or Don't You?

Get a Will

First let me say I am NOT an attorney. I am a Real Estate Broker with well over a thousand transactions of experience. The most heartbreaking thing I deal with is selling a home after a death in the family.

Somewhere in the past there became a misconception about the evils of probating wills. This led a great number of people to believe that the best way to keep the government out of their business was to not have a will at all - or the legal term, to die intestate. That is all well and good if you just have personal property. But a huge problem arises if you have real property - a home or land. Without a will stipulating who it is to go to, it will be divided among your heirs. This is where it gets tricky.

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Though not the housing boom many other parts of the country are experiencing or as reported in the national media, the Tyler market has picked up in 2015 over 2014 but is not experiencing tons of multi-offer situations.  It is currently very advantageous to be a buyer in the Tyler market today.  Inventory is lower but the number of qualified buyers is lower too, sales rates have picked up a bit and interest rates are still at near historical lows.  The pool of qualified buyers is smaller making for less competition to purchase a home – the days of multiple offers and bidding wars are rarer though do exist for homes in great condition in the under $175,000 price range.  Needless to say, it is making it a bit harder for buyers to find the right home and…

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I would like to know when the mindset became that we are not responsible for replacing our worn out roofs; that we must wait for a hail storm to come along so we can make an insurance claim and then somehow work it out so we don’t even have to pay a deductible.  We get a free roof courtesy of the insurance company.


Damaged Roof

I have had 2 instances lately where the roof had issues and the Seller did not want to make repairs.  We negotiated roof replacements on both but the sellers are still whining.  IT’S CALLED ROUTINE MAINTENANCE PEOPLE!!!  We must take care of our homes and keeping a solid, non-leaking roof over our heads is one of the best ways to start!

Insurance companies are getting weird about roofs and I can certainly see why.  I think they are being…

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