Find the Right Destination Property by Hiring a Great Agent

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.  

 The greatest challenge that most sellers face is finding the right destination property. Sure, you know you want to sell your current home - but how do you find a new one when you're not sure where it is you want to go?

For starters, you need to enable yourself to more readily afford the home of your dreams. To do this, it is critical that you leverage the sale of your current home to get the best possible price. By maximizing your opportunity to find the right home, finding the right destination property will become much easier.

Next, by creating more spending power from the sale of your home, you'll have the adequate funds to leverage the purchase of your new home. Working with the right agent is the best way to do this effectively. They will help you maximize your financial opportunity in both transactions. 

Hiring any run-of -the-mill agent won't do. You need to make yourself familiar with the characteristics of a great agent - one that can facilitate the entire process so you can sell and buy at about the same time. Here's what to look for:

1. Experienced
2. 
   
3. Knowledgeable
4. 
   
5. Listening skills
6. 
   
7. Negotiating skills
8. 
   
9. Highly Competitive

Keep these characteristics in mind when looking for an agent if you want to have successful transactions. As always, we're available to help for all your Merrimack Valley real estate needs, so don't hesitate to give us a call. We'd love to show you what we have to offer.

What You Need to Know About Expired Listings

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.  

In our area in the past year alone, there have been 6,786 expired listings. These are homes that were listed by a real estate professional but failed to sell. They became dead listings and the seller was stuck with them. There are 5 primary reasons this happens and we want to let you know about them so you can understand what is happening and how to resolve those issues.

1. Non-Strategic Pricing
• When an agent or seller fails to price their home properly, that property can become ostracized by the buying population, consequently preventing the sale.
2. Lack of Exposure 
• We live in the age of technology, where buyers and sellers alike have access to all the information out there. Failure of homes to sell in this era is due to not being properly exposed through various internet mediums they need in order to gain momentum to sell.
3. Improper presentation
•  When a home is not clean, not staged properly, or inaccessible, more often than not it fails to sell.
4. Lack of effective communication between buyers, sellers, and and brokers.
• When a buyer views a property and they indicate that they decided not to pursue it for whatever reasons, its the listing agents responsibility to the seller to find out what those reasons are and if they can be resolved to the extent that a buyer might change their mind.
5. Inability by the listing agent to create a sales opportunity

•  An agent needs to make sure that any opportunity that arises which enables a buyer to want to purchase the home for the right price, the responsibility falls on the agent to bring that sale in. Doing this requires energy, effort, enthusiasm, skill, knowledge, and experience.

If you have any questions about avoiding mistakes like these when selling your home, please give us a call. We would love the chance to talk with you about how you can properly sell your home.

The Truth About Zillow from a Premier Zillow Agent

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.  

I am excited to talk to you today about a very well known and popular real estate website called Zillow. If you haven't heard about it already, Zillow is the most visited real estate site in the United States and it offers a vast array of real estate listings and even a free estimate, called a Zestimate. Many of my clients have mentioned what they believed  their home was worth based on this zestimate. More often than not, the estimate is not very accurate at all.

Zillow is a great site for doing Merrimack Valley real estate research. It can show you what similar homes to yours in Merrimack Valley have been selling for, and it does have a wide variety of listings. However, when it comes to giving accurate estimates, they can't give you as accurate of an estimate as an experienced real estate professional in your market can give you. The information that appears on a zestimate is the result of analysis of the millions of pieces of information that are entered on their site. The problem with this is that their estimate is a combination of generalities that don't take into account your specific home, but base their figure on the average of what similar homes sell for in your area.

It is important for you to know that many zestimates can be up to 10% off your home's actual value. If you list your home based off this type of estimate, you are either going to be severely undervaluing your home, or you are going to overprice, neither outcome is good.  We have encountered zestimates that have undervalued homes by up to $400,000. I happen to be a premier agent for Zillow who handles the Merrimack Valley listings for them. I don't want you to get an inaccurate listing, so whenever you need a real estimate and you want to find out how much money your zestimate could be costing you, please give me a call or send a quick e-mail. If you don't have accurate information, it can cost you great opportunities and a lot of cash.