Seller Information

If you do a quick Google search, you can (literally) find a million different sites with tips on how to stage your home to sell it quickly. Upon doing a little digging however, you find that each one offers contradictory advice. You’re supposed to either make your home look lived-in (like they could raise their family there) or a clean slate (so they can imagine themselves there). So what’s a home owner to do? There’s a simple answer: Curb Appeal We all know the quote, “You will never get a second chance to make a first impression.” When we’re talking about homes, that means when they pull up to the house. And trust me, I’ve been with many a would-be […]

Now that we’ve had our fill of Thanksgiving turkey, it’s time to turn our attention back to real estate. One of the questions I hear most often from homeowners as they prepare to put their home on the market is, “What can I do to increase my chances of a sale?” This is a great question, and the answer I give surprises a lot of people. My response, in a nutshell, is that aesthetic repairs are not necessarily as important as those addressing the more stringent lender requirements and inspection hurdles. Most of us have seen enough shows on HGTV to know that there are many easy, relatively affordable ways to increase a home’s curb appeal before listing: sprucing up […]

If you’ve traveled anywhere in Europe or Latin America in the past few months, you’ve enjoyed the dollar’s strength against many foreign currencies—a departure from years past, when our bucks didn’t stretch far in cities like London, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. The dollar still lags behind in regions like Great Britain, Japan and China, but virtually everywhere else in the world, U.S. currency is very strong. So what does that mean for foreign buyers, who account for a substantial part of the Miami real estate market? If you look at market data comparing financial real estate data from 2015 and 2007, you get a sense of how changes in official foreign currency rates have affected prices for those buyers […]

If you’ve spent any time in the home market—buying or selling or “just looking”—you’ve probably been to Zillow’s website. Its trademarked Zestimate tool seems like a handy way to research homes in a given area; you can compare similar properties on the same street or from neighborhood to neighborhood. But what many people don’t realize is just how inaccurate its automated estimates can be. As a real estate professional, I have experienced the disappointment and frustration Zestimates can cause when outcomes don’t match the estimated amounts. One recent article reported that Zillow’s official nationwide “median error rate” is 8 percent, but studies of specific markets show error rates that are often much, much higher—for example, 19.9 percent in Manhattan; 11.6 […]