Found 66 blog entries tagged as joyce peterson.

People today use Facebook to share all of life's little ups and downs with friends, often forgetting that good friends are not the only ones who might be looking at their Facebook page. When you’re buying or selling a home that could be dangerous.

If your home is for sale, you want the world to know, so do post good photos. Do tell your friends how to reach your agent to make an appointment for a tour. You can even state the list price.

After that, you can talk about your favorite features in the home – how the sun comes in the kitchen window in the morning, or how you enjoy your outdoor kitchen.

If you’re buying, you can tell your friends that you’re looking for a home in a specific neighborhood and even describe the perfect home.

What…

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Before I get into the monthly market statistics let’s talk about what many potential home sellers are asking; should they sell now or wait until next spring. As always, I wish I had a crystal ball and trying to time any market whether it’s the real estate market or the stock market is tricky. I also want to say you can always reach out to me to talk about your specific situation with no pressure. One of the nice things about our company is we have plenty of business so we don’t need to scare you into selling now if that’s not what’s best for you.

Here is something you should consider. To a large extent real estate comes down to supply and demand. When buyers have fewer homes to choose from prices tend to go up. When buyers have more homes…

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I’m going to talk about changes we are seeing in the Austin real estate market, review the most recent real estate statistics and talk about what we expect to see in the near future.

We do know why prices have risen so dramatically this year. It’s because there have been so few homes for sale, that’s no secret. When a home is called “Active” it means it is not under contract, you can actually buy that house. If we go back 2 years there were 7,133 Active homes for sale in June, 2019. In June, 2020 we dropped to 5,300. By January of this year, we were barely over 1,000 but slowly the inventory of homes is increasing. In June, 2021 there were 2,265 Active homes.As I shoot this video in mid-July there are over 3,000 Active homes on…

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Let’s get into it and talk about the most recent sales statistics for the Austin real estate housing market. In May there were 4,033 sales which is up 40.5% from last year. This is a misleading statistic. Of course, we know last year many sellers held off putting their homes on the market and so the number of sales from last year was artificially low. If you look at the last two years the sales in May were essentially flat from May, 2019.

The pending number of sales was down 33.8% from 4,370 in 2020 to only 2,895 homes under contract in May, 2021. That will probably mean when we get the final statistics for June sales those numbers will be well below last year and many of the headlines will talk about how the sales market is dropping,…

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If you talk with anyone who has been trying to buy a home you will hear stories saying it’s almost impossible. It is hard, but most buyers are making the process much harder on themselves by taking an approach that has very little chance to succeed.

I only take on a very small number of buyer clients, but I talk with dozens of buyers ever weekend at our open houses. Between talking with all those buyers and seeing the offers we receive on our listings here are some of the big mistakes that will prevent you from ever buying a home in the Austin area. I feel bad for those buyers and so I thought I would talk about a few things I see buyers doing and explain why they are causing you not to be able to buy a home.

Focus On The Small Things

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That seems like a silly question to ask but every day home sellers decide to sell for less.

In April I was having lunch with a friend at The League in Avery Ranch. My friend said the real estate market must be hot because his neighbor didn’t even need to list his home and they sold it off market for $900,000. He was surprised when I said his neighbor could have sold it for at least $200,000 more if they put it on the market.

You can’t blame most home sellers for not keeping up with real estate prices. In many cases homes are selling for significantly over recent comps that sold only a month before. We are in an area where the demand is higher than the supply and it can be unpredictable how much someone may pay for your home.

That’s why…

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People often ask me what I would do in their situation. We just bought a home 3 weeks ago. My wife found out a Realtor was selling his own home off market. It turns out it is the exact home we had been looking for. I’m a very analytical person, probably like many of you watching this video. Analytical people have a tendency to be indecisive. Because I recognize I can be too analytical I force myself to be more decisive. We had already decided this was the type of home we wanted to buy. Before this home became available, I had thought about what I hoped to buy a home for and the maximum I would pay. That allowed us to decide quickly to make an offer and get it accepted before it hit the market.

One of the challenges many buyers have,…

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Austin Real Estate Housing Market Update March 2021

When people ask me if they should sell their home I say “Only if you want to sell it for more than it’s worth.”

The best way I have found to describe what’s happening in the Austin real estate market is to compare the value of your home to an ice cream sundae. Think about your home’s value being 3 scoops of ice cream. That’s what it should be worth.

However, because we are seeing the number of active listings being down 78% from a year ago buyers are more and more desperate. We are seeing buyers lose out on 6,7,10 homes and getting to a point of desperation they throw a ton of extra money at the next offer. This desperation is like the whipped cream and cherry on top of the ice cream…

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The Williamson County Appraisal District just mailed out the Notice of Appraised Value for 2021. Look for your notice in the mailbox or search your address on the WCAD website.

Prepare yourself before you open the envelope because you are going to be shocked by the value. Especially for those who own rental properties with no Homestead Cap you will see huge jumps in the value you will pay taxes on this year.

When you see your value if you think to yourself “If someone would pay that much for my home, I would sell it” let me tell you something even more surprising…Your tax value is probably $125,000 or more below what your home can sell for in today’s market. That’s a conservative estimate because there’s a home we will be selling that I…

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Because we offer free home staging and help coordinate make ready for landlords our company attracts a large number of homeowners who call when they decide to sell a rental property. This year more than ever we are getting calls from landlords who want to sell properties with a tenant living in the home prior to the lease ending.

Why Are Landlords Selling?

With the eviction moratorium landlords are concerned about tenants not paying rent. We have had several landlords contact us who are ready to throw in the towel because despite not getting rent they still are required to pay property taxes, insurance and make repairs. Several others are selling because the tenants won’t move out after their lease has expired and they have been given…

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