Simplistic Staging

You might think that professional home stagers in Portland are intent on aiming for the kind of look that would draw oooohs and ahhhhhs if it were featured in Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens. In fact, you’d likely be more on-target if the magazine you thought of was actually RealSimple. In case you haven’t been near a newsstand lately, that’s the top-selling magazine “about simplifying your life.”

RealSimple (“Life made Easier”) has articles like “31 Pro Tips to Control your Clutter” and “Get Organized for Fall: systems in place, stress in check.” If you are planning to have a Portland home for sale anytime soon you could do worse than picking up a copy—if for no other reason than to check out its editorial slant: Less is more. Open space attracts. Simplicity rules.

        Today’s home stagers in Portland (and just about […]

2015-12-20T00:30:53+00:00

The Truest Portland Listings are Right Here

Have you ever wondered about the way Portland listings appear on your screen when you search for houses for sale through one of the search engines? If you have already found a local Realtor’s® website (like this one!), it’s easy to search the Portland’s (and all the surrounding towns’) listings right from that site without bothering further. You’ll come up with the most current accurate information because it represents direct updated information from Portland’s multiple listing service.

But whenever you go searching for Portland area listings through Google, Bing, or any of the other search engines (there are scads of them), you will see that what comes up will be quite different. You may find individual house listings, alternating with real estate agency home pages, mixed in with aggregators like Zillow and real estate magazine ads. Depending upon which search engine and the way you phrase your inquiry, you might actually come up with an interesting listing…or one […]

2015-12-17T02:37:48+00:00

True Cost of ‘For Sale by Owner’ Signs

If you go down to any Portland hardware store, you’ll be able to find them. They are right there in the corner, somewhere on the rack that has all the ‘GARAGE SALE’ and ‘BEWARE OF DOG’ placards. They’re the ‘FOR SALE BY OWNER’ signs.

They cost about $8.99 ($17.98 for two). Or, it is also possible to buy a couple of “For Sale by Owner” signs online for about the same price (although getting them delivered to Portland might run extra).

No matter which way you would get hold of the signs, you should be alerted to some possible extra costs. I don’t mean ‘shipping and handling’ charges you sometimes find tacked onto other offers. These are extras that have cost other sign purchasers thousands of dollars.

Naturally, anyone who buys a ‘For Sale by Owner’ sign has decided to sell their house on their own rather than going with the crowd and listing through a Portland Realtor®

2015-12-10T23:39:37+00:00

Selling Your Home during the Holidays

Selling your home during the holiday season may sound like a less than ideal game plan, but there are some advantages now present only at this time of year. It’s true that some extra effort may be called for, but it can be worth the endeavor: there are several factors that make showings at this time of year particularly promising.

The first advantage is the flip side of the greatest disadvantage: the slowdown in real estate activity we usually expect over the holidays. That relative paucity of active prospects means fewer showings, so the number of times you’ll be called upon to put your Portland-metro area property in peak condition will be smaller. The other side of that disadvantage? The showings we do expect will be to particularly motivated buyers. If they are interrupting their own Christmas and New Year’s activities to go house hunting, they probably mean business. And it’s also likely that they are motivated by a timing deadline. This makes those showings especially promising.

Another positive […]

2015-12-08T00:28:18+00:00

Food for Thought on Buying in Portland

 

Last week, Portland residents who keep their eyes on real estate trends got some fresh information about one factor that seeks to put numbers to the relative benefits of buying versus renting. When real estate values head south, buying may seem to be a particularly risky proposition…even though later it’s clear that the value proposition was actually improving. The trade-offs are hard to quantify. Even now, if Portland listings reflect prices on the rise, renters who failed to lasso the most extreme bargains may assume they’ve missed the boat.

Putting numbers to the problem is a complicated, pencil-snapping exercise. In addition to current dollars spent, it involves speculating on future market values. But Portland readers who checked into CoreLogic’s Insights blog found some new data toward the end of last week, presented in an interesting way. It arrived in an article that looked at one particular aspect of today’s national real estate landscape “seven years after the last […]

2015-12-05T03:44:17+00:00

Changing Tastes in Luxury Homes

When it comes to selling Portland luxury homes, you really can’t pigeonhole who the ‘typical’ buyer is likely to be. The 9% of buyers that make up the pool of ‘affluent’ prospects are themselves pretty much profile-proof—and the dollar value that 9% represents fluctuates substantially from one end of the country to the other. On the other hand, it is possible to take advantage of features that are growing in popularity with today’s luxury home buyers.

Realtytimes researchers found that affluent buyers are increasingly attracted to features that belong in the smart-home technology category. Smart thermostats that owners control right from their smartphones, wireless homes security camera arrays, and fully tricked-out home theaters are draws. To qualify at the high end, an entertainment center really should be controlled by a single device. Let’s face it: no matter how fancy a home theater might be, if three or four remote controls are visible, they’re certain to draw scowls!

Kitchen tech—of the kind that marries function with fashion—continues to gain […]

2015-11-30T19:48:59+00:00

Investment Property for Dummies

Being in real estate, it’s probable that Portland investment property popups hit our screens more often than yours. Nonetheless, I bet that every Portland web user knows the phenomenon: you’re trying to accomplish something on the internet, and these ads keep bouncing up, doing their best to distract you. It seems to take more time to continually patrol your browser settings than to just X the pop-ups.

In any case, the other day while stuck waiting for something to process, I noticed the headline on one of those ads (they seem to be news items or features, but they all turn out to be ads). It showed a pretty model looking into the snout of a piggy bank under the headline, “How to Use Real Estate Investments to Cover Student Loan Debt, Car Payments & More.”

It occurred to me that this wouldn’t even make the first draft of any decent Investment Property for Dummies book (there seem to be several). […]

2015-11-24T04:25:05+00:00

Home Searches Include This Elastic Parameter

Once a home search gets underway, even prospective buyers who hadn’t hardened up the prices they were aiming for begin to hone in on a target range. Even a cursory excursion into the Portland listings forces the issue. Anyone who is at all serious about finding a new home sees the correlation between the listed asking prices and ‘how much house’ is available in that range. In most cases, lower prices denote features that are, for one reason or another, not very popular. Higher prices can mean the opposite: top-of-the-line quality… (or an overly optimistic seller).

So once a home search has narrowed the field to the Portland offerings that meet at least the minimum physical requirements, the lower number of the price range is established. If a realistic family budget shows more to spare, more expensive possibilities can be explored. But first, it’s also a good idea to make at least one revision to those budgetary assumptions, because there’s one area where the actual costs of home ownership can […]

2015-11-21T20:17:18+00:00

Portland Lease Option Possibilities

You usually can’t find as many Portland lease option opportunities being offered as you would have a few years ago. Because the more normal marketplace has given buyers more confidence and sellers more and better offers, some of the usual reasons that Portland lease options come about rarely develop.

One of the appeals to renters that a local lease option conveys is that it provides some financial wiggle room. Back when housing values in the Portland metro area were in freefall, buying seemed like a much more risky proposition than it does today. After all, nobody rushes out to buy something they think is going to be on sale in a month or two—and for a long stretch during the financial crisis, that did seem to be more likely than not. Especially for would-be buyers unnerved by the press reports of that period, renting for a while longer seemed the prudent course…even if bargain real estate prices made it tempting.

A lease option (short […]

2015-11-16T05:34:49+00:00

Feature Plusses May be Minuses

There are many generalizations that can be truly instructive for homeowners with Portland homes for sale. The undeniable importance of “location, location, location!” is a good one; de-clutter! as a main order of business is another…as is the wisdom of researching neighborhood comparables.

Anybody with homes for sale in Portland can usually visit the National Association of Realtors® website for useful nuggets of that kind of information. However, one article that appeared there last week seemed to me to be less than real estate gospel—although it was thought-provoking. It dealt with features that might make some homes for sale harder to sell; features that most people might assume would improve rather than curtail a home’s appeal.

The article named seven otherwise “awesome” features that the author, Jamie Wiebe, thought belonged in that category.

First was a school next door, for the main reason […]

2015-11-12T23:12:42+00:00