What sets apart the best real estate agents in Jacksonville?

The best real estate agents in Jacksonville know selling a home is an art form just like a great painter it involves many skills that only come with experience and constant training. The fundamentals are easy, sign listing, place yard sign, enter data in multiple listing service, but how these things are done is the difference between 90+ days on the market with a low ball offer or solid offers in the first couple of weeks.

Think of selling a home like a grand opening to a new restaurant…anyone who knows how to cook can start a restaurant but as anyone familiar with business knows this industry has the highest failure rate. To succeed takes months of preparation before the doors are even open, and you have one chance to wow you customers and critics. Consider walking into a new restaurant and there are no chairs, that’s kind of like listing a home with no photos or proper staging. The people who have been waiting for you to open are going to walk right back out and move on to their new favorite spot down the road.

Enough with the restaurant analogies, I think you get the point. After selling homes for over a decade I have put together a step by step program that gets the best results and most of the best real estate agents in Jacksonville have their own marketing plans and that’s what makes them the best. In my opinion the home is sold before the listing ever hits the market, my average prelisting time period is one and half weeks. During this time a strategy is put into place to prepare the home for its “grand opening”. Often a home stager is utilized to best place furniture and make color recommendations, minor repairs are address and professional photography is done. Social media is a buzz with an impending new home listing. Blog posts are written, virtual tours are created and inviting descriptions are brought to life. During the first 2 weeks of the home hitting the market the element of surprise is on the sellers side, buyers are wowed by the impressive performance during their first “online showing” they are compelled to make an appointment for their actual second home tour, please note I said their first showing was online…home buyers eliminate hundreds of home by their online appearance and never come to view the actual property making it a case in point that the actual first “showing” is online. Once the flood of buyers rush in the excitement of this new prospect overwhelms them and they are unsure of how the competition will react prompting them to make larger than usual offers, often leading to multiple offer situations. After the first two weeks the buyers start to realize this property may not be worth the asking price or question why it hasn’t sold and are under much less pressure to outbid other buyers.

In closing I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to make that first impression absolutely perfect because once the home is on the market your clock has started and buyers buy or move on. If you are looking for the best real estate agents in Jacksonville be sure to see if they have a step by step plan to market your home, and don’t be in a hurry to get the home on the market before it is 100% ready for buyers, it will sell soon enough and for more money!

U.S. rate on 30-year mortgage rises to 3.98%-Higher Rates Equal Lower Prices

Fixed U.S. mortgage rates rose for the sixth straight week, putting the average rate on the 30-year loan just shy of 4 percent.

Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday that the rate on the 30-year loan increased to 3.98 percent. That's up from 3.91 percent last week and the highest since April 2012. The average rate was last at 4 percent or higher in March 2012.
The rate on the 15-year loan advanced to 3.10 percent from 3.03 percent. That's also the highest since April 2012.

Concerns that the Federal Reserve will scale back its bond purchases have pushed rates higher. Still, mortgage rates remain low by historical standards.

Cheap mortgages have helped sustain a housing recovery that began last year, encouraging more Americans to buy homes or refinance existing loans.

Housing’s up, but is the foundation sound?

 Demographics will play a major role in the strength and length of the housing market recovery. Those bullish on housing expect the rebound to last for several years because new-home construction and household formation fell during the downturn even though the U.S. population continued to grow.

As more young adults move out of their parents’ homes, they will seek apartments before achieving homeownership, and those who put off buying a home during the recession are now ready to make purchases.

Even after taking the so-called shadow inventory into account, the bulls say more housing units need to be built. Zelman & Associates calculates that 14 million additional housing units are needed this decade to accommodate population growth, but only 5.7 million will be built by 2015.

U.S. regains wealth from recession, but not equally

America as a whole has regained all the household wealth it lost to the Great Recession and then some, thanks to higher stock and home prices.

The average household still has a long way to go.

U.S. household wealth jumped $3 trillion to $70 trillion in the January-March quarter this year, the Federal Reserve said Thursday. That topped the previous peak of $68 trillion in the third quarter of 2007, just before the recession began.

Yet because of inflation and a rising population, the average household has recovered only about 63 percent of the wealth it lost, according to separate calculations by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Affluent households have benefited most because most of the recovered wealth has come from higher stock prices. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own about 80 percent of stocks.

The recession cost Americans $15.6 trillion in wealth.

Average rate on 15-year U.S. mortgage above 3 percent

 The average U.S. rate on a 15-year fixed mortgage rose above 3 percent this week for the first time in a year, while the rate on the 30-year fixed loan approached 4 percent.

Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday that the rate on the 30-year loan jumped to 3.91 percent from 3.81 percent last week. That’s the highest since March 2012.

The rate on the 15-year loan rose to 3.03 percent from 2.98 percent. That’s the highest since last May.

Concerns that the Federal Reserve may scale back its bond purchases have pushed rates higher over the last month. Still, mortgage rates remain low by historical standards. The 30-year loan hit a record 3.31 percent rate in November. The 15-year loan fell to its low of 2.56 percent a month ago.

Mortgage rates are rising because they tend to follow the yield on the 10-year Treasury note. The yield on the 10-year note climbed as high as 2.2 percent last week, its highest level in more than two years. It has since slipped to 2.1 percent in early trading Thursday. That compares with 1.63 percent at the beginning of May.

Wall Street goes shopping in weak housing markets

The last time the housing market was this hot in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the buyers pushing up prices were mostly small time. Nowadays, they are big time – Wall Street big.

Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation’s most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Some are already wondering if prices will slump anew if the big money stops flowing.

“The growth is being propelled by institutional money,” said Suzanne Mistretta, an analyst at Fitch Ratings. “The question is how much the change in prices really reflects market demand, rather than one-off market shifts that may not be around in a couple years.”

Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy – and, in retrospect, risky – mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.

Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, is spending $250 million a month and already owns 10,000 properties. With little fanfare, these and other financial companies have become significant landlords on Main Street. Most of the firms are renting out the homes, with the possibility of unloading them at a profit when prices rise far enough.

April foreclosure inventory drops 24%

   CoreLogic’s latest National Foreclosure Report found 52,000 completed foreclosures in the U.S. in April 2013. That’s down from 62,000 in April 2012 for a year-over-year decrease of 16 percent. Compared to completed foreclosures one month earlier, the number was relatively flat.

Prior to the 2007 decline in the housing market, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide.

In April 2013, about 1.1 million U.S. homes were in some stage of foreclosure, making them part of the foreclosure inventory, a drop from 1.5 million in April 2012 for a year-over-year decrease of 24 percent.

The foreclosure inventory declined 2 percent in one month. As of April 2013, it represented 2.8 percent of all homes with a mortgage compared to 3.5 percent in March 2013.

“The shadow of foreclosure and distress continues to fade, with the annualized sum of completed foreclosures having declined for 17 straight months,” says Dr. Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “Six states have year-over-year declines in the foreclosure inventory of more than 40 percent, and in Arizona and California the year-over-year decline is more than 50 percent.”

Florida

Florida continued to lead the nation in the percent of homes in foreclosure. According to CoreLogic, 9.5 percent of Florida homes were in some state of foreclosure compared to the 2.8 percent national average. New Jersey ranked second at 7.4 percent, but only five states have an inventory of 4 percent or larger. Still, Florida’s foreclosure inventory fell 2.6 percent year-over-year.

5 Emotional Mistakes Sellers Make

Have you ever said something in the heat of the moment, then wished for weeks later you could reel those words back in?  Truth is, all of us commit emotion-driven mistakes in some areas of our lives.  But when it comes to selling your home - read: cashing out your most valuable asset - the stakes are simply too, too high to allow yourself and your transaction to fall prey to predictable emotional pitfalls.  

Fortunately, when it comes to emotion, what’s predictable is avoidable if you’re willing to acknowledge and correct for your own feelings and how they can foul up your decision-making.  This list will help you predict - and better yet, avoid - some common decision traps driven by emotions.

1.    Price reduction paralysis.  Wikipedia defines panic as “a sudden sensation of fear which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reaction.”  But there’s a real estate-specific reaction to panic that the infinitely wise Wiki editors left out: freezing up entirely.

In cases of overpricing, the seller has most often started out as overconfident in their home’s prospects on the current market.  But as the days on the market turn into weeks, or even months, that overconfidence morphs into panic: panic that the place will only get a lowball offer, panic that the place won’t ever sell, panic that the seller will be stuck in the property, panic that the seller’s future life or career plans will be ruined.  This is a panic that snowballs into increasingly disastrous hypothetical scenarios, and fast. 

Unfortunately, this panic is often accompanied by a fear that actually reducing the home’s list price will actually kick off the snowball effect. This couldn’t be further from the truth: when a home is dramatically overpriced, cutting the price is the only way to fix the scenario (besides pulling it off the market entirely) and render the home more compelling to buyers. Some sellers have actually found that reducing their price gets them to a sweet spot wherein their home receives multiple offers and sells somewhere between the reduced price and the original list price. 

But sellers who cannot manage their fear and panic can end up paralyzed, unable to cut the list price.  And this begins the snowball effect of more and more days on the market, which aggressive buyers watch until they believe the seller’s desperation will make them amenable to a lowball offer. 

The best way to deactivate this panic is to put a plan in place before it ever arises. Work with your agent to understand how to use the data around how long most homes in your area take to sell as a guidepost for making price reductions, if and when the need arises.