Sandy Schweiger\’s Blog

 What is a blog?  

I have been quietly watching (yes I™m a third child) allot of different kinds of blogs in hopes to get off the fence and start typing… So here I am with all my fears and run on sentences in hopes to get people taking about the things they love to do , eat, train, and even talk about.First here is what I have found in the last year of reading/posting blogs, your blog has to be something you like talking about.   Don™t try to blog about stock market rates when you just like the money the stock market makes you have to love the stock market!! The building the stocks are traded in the smell of the mix of printer ink and paper the way time fly™s when you are trading¦¦¦   OK so get it?   You have to LOVE every bit of your topic or at least have a passion about it, even if you are just posting for friends and family.   My first attempts started out with replying to other peoples post it is almost like your posting but with less the pressure.Below are some topics that can be fun discussions for your readers.

1.                 RV Driving “ Tips for the summer (My personal favorite! Thanks DAD)

2.                 Horse showing “ Why we sometimes don™t eat just to buy a new bridal? (Thanks Mom)

3.                 Dog showing “ Why our kids want the life our dogs have

4.                 Gardening all kinds summer, winter, fall (I can™t grow a thing so these people are keep me in awe)

5.                 Landscaping “ What will the Deer™s NOT eat?  

SO that is just a start let™s sit down and think what is a fun topic?   And don™t over whelm the moment with how long it has to be the journal has no restrictions at all one line or my favorite a run on sentence full of wacky words.  

I love my name tag!  

Ok I said it!   I like when people can take directly to me about real estate, I also like that they know my name right off.   I will admit that if I happen to be working outside and look well let™s just say a little grubby I will opt out of the name tag.  

I wish the world would ware name tags (insert Seinfeld comment here) ok not everyone wants to wear one, But let™s consider a world of name tags let™s say you like dressing your animals up like humans and your feel no one in your town understands that your dog looks just like Humphrey Bogart well if you had a name tag that said specialize in dressing my pet, well that just says it all.    I addition I like that if I am at a business and they have a name tag I immediately have the ability to talk to them personably like Hi Mike do you know where the _____ is?   I am even the person that wears the name tags that are passed out at any large event displaying Hello my name is _________.  

It surprises me when I see agents I out and about without their name tags is it just because they are so sure the public knows they are agent that they don™t need to?   Or is it a cool kid thing?   I will admit  it can be distracting when I am at the groceries store and someone has a question when I am trying to put in my pin number but I usually just say hold on let me do this before I try to answer your question.   Especially if I have already gotten the disapproving look from the casher and the blinking green letters saying wrong pin, :} the person asking the question usually understands.

So with that said lets all say it and say it strong¦¦¦Ware your name tags!   Find yours or make your own just remember if you where it they will talk.

Selling a house can be a bit like having a baby — everyone gives you advice that may or may not be true for you. Here are ten myths uncovered:

1. Myth: You should always price your home high and gradually lower it if it doesn’t sell.
Truth: Pricing too high can be as bad as pricing too low.

You may think by listing high you can always accept a lower offer, but if you do, you’ll miss the buyers looking in the price range where your home should be. Offers may not even come in, because interested buyers are scared off by the price and won’t bother to look. By the time the listing price is corrected, you will have lost a large group of potential buyers. Your real estate agent will offer you a comparable market analysis. This is a document that compares your home to other similar homes in your area, with the goal of helping you to accurately assess your home’s true market value.

2. Myth: Minor repairs can wait until later. There are more important things to be done.
Truth: Minor repairs make your house more marketable, allowing you to maximize your return (or minimize loss) on the sale.

By and large, buyers are looking for an inviting home in move-in condition. Buyers who are willing to tackle the repairs after moving in automatically subtract the cost of needed fix-ups from the price they offer. You save nothing by putting off these items, and you may likely slow the sale of your home.

3. Myth: Once potential buyers see the inside of your home, curb appeal won’t matter.
Truth: Buyers probably won’t make it to the inside of the home if the outside of your home does not appeal to them.

Many buyers drive by a home before deciding whether or not to look inside. Your home’s exterior will have less than a minute to make a good first impression. Spruce up the lawn, trim shrubs and trees, and weed the garden. Clear the walkways and driveways of leaves and other debris. Repair gutters and eaves, touch up the exterior paint and repair or resurface cracked driveways and sidewalks. Place potted flowers out front, hang a wreath on the door and put out a pleasing welcome mat for added curb appeal.

4. Myth: Once potential buyers fall in love with the exterior look of your home, you put interior improvements on the back burner.
Truth: Buyers have no qualms about walking right out the front door within 60 seconds if the house doesn’t look like it could be theirs.

Remember that most buyers are looking for an inviting home in move-in condition. Spending a few thousand dollars for the right work on your home before you sell it, usually translates into a higher selling price and shorter marketing time. Your real estate agent will consult with you about the repairs and replacements that will benefit you most.

5. Myth: Your home must be every homebuyer’s dream home.
Truth: If you get carried away with repairs and replacements to your home, you may end up over-improving the house.

At some point, improvements that you make to your home can exceed what is customary for comparable homes in your area. For instance, there may not be another swimming pool in your entire subdivision. After spending $20,000 to install an in-ground swimming pool that you hope will lure buyers, you may find that it only raises the market value of your home by $10,000 because there are no other comparable properties to support the market value of the pool. As a rule of thumb, if your improvements push your home’s value higher than 20% above average neighboring home values, don’t expect to recoup the entire amount of improvements. Your real estate agent can advise you as to the scope of projects you might consider in preparing your house for sale.

6. Myth: Buyers are never swayed by sellers that offer creative financing options.
Truth: By offering flexibility in financing options, you may lure more prospective buyers.

You might consider offering seller financing, paying some of the buyer’s closing costs, including a one-year home warranty, or other buyer incentives. Your real estate agent, who has professional knowledge of local market activity, can help you decide what incentives, if any, to offer.

7. Myth: You are better off selling your home on your own, thus saving the commission you would have paid to a real estate agent.
Truth: Statistically, many sellers who attempt to sell their homes on their own cannot complete the sale without the service of a professional real estate agent.

Sellers who sell their home without a real estate agent often net less from the sale than sellers who use one. You visit a doctor when youre sick and take your car to a mechanic when it needs repairs. It makes sense to contact a real estate professional when you are preparing to sell your biggest asset!

8. Myth: Good sellers should be available to guide prospective buyers through the home, giving the whole process a more personal touch.
Truth: Prospective buyers will feel more like the house could be theirs if the current owners are not there.

The presence of homeowners during a viewing can make buyers feel like they are intruding. They need to be able to visualize your house as their home, which can be difficult to do when they are acutely aware that it is still your home. Your real estate agent will be happy to look out for your home during open houses or showings.

9. Myth: Successful sellers insist that the terms of the sale happen their way or no way.
Truth: If you approach the sale of your home as the buyer’s adversary, you risk losing a perfectly solid buyer for no good reason.

Both you and the buyer have the same goal: for you to sell your home and for the buyer to buy it. Work with your real estate agent to approach negotiations positively and with a win-win frame of mind.

10. Myth: When you receive an offer, you should make the buyer wait. This gives you a better negotiating position.
Truth: You should reply immediately to an offer!

When a buyer makes an offer, that buyer is, at that moment in time, ready to buy your home. Moods can change, and you don’t want to lose the sale because you stalled in replying.  

Do you think that your home is overpriced in todays market even after the painful correction? If you live in one of these zip codes you may be right. Of course, some of these communities are still very highly desirable, but at the end of the day, do you want Tribeca or Central Park West? Chinatown or Beacon Hill?

Forbes  and the ever inquisitive Matt Woolsey have come  up with a list of the most overpriced zip codes in the United  States. The methodology was  fairly simple and one that was trumpeted just before the housing crash.

How much more expensive is it to own your home than rent?

These communities tend to have homes that are 25 times or more expensive to  own then rent!  And this is not even taking into consideration taxes and maintenance. Now the pleasure and comfort of owning ones own home is never to be denied, but to pay 25 to 30  times the amount for the privilege? You have to be a little bit nuts!

But to each his own. There are benefits to living in these communities, I just have to wonder if the benefit of ownership at such high prices is one of them.

Top 10 Overpriced Zip Codes in America

1. 10037   New York, TriBeCa   (36.3 P/R)
2. 02111   Boston, Chinatown   (30.5 P/R)
3. 98104   Seattle, Downtown     (30.3 P/R)
4. 90038   Los Angeles, West Hollywood   (30.2 P/R)
5. 92103   San Diego, Calif. Mission Hills   (30 P/R)
6. 94122   San Francisco, Outer Sunset   (28.5 P/R)
7. 85006   Phoenix, Coronado   (27.1 P/R)
8. 85006   Dallas, Greenway Parks   (26.7 P/R)
9. 97213   Portland, Rose City Park (26.6 P/R)
10. 95125   San Jose, Willow Glen   (26.1 P/R)

There is much confusion these days about what an REO is and what the opportunities are around purchasing one of these properties. Just to clarify, an REO is a property (typically a single family home) that has been taken back by the bank or investor because the homeowner was unable or unwilling  to keep up with the payments on the home.

With so many personal bankruptcy™s and foreclosures on homes these days, bargain hunters and first time home buyers are scrambling to pick up homes on the cheap, but it™s not a simple as that. The banks and lenders that own these properties invested their money in them on behalf of the homeowner, expecting a return on their investment. They are not too eager to sell these homes at a loss, just as any other homeowner.More than ever, it™s important to work with a Real Estate professional with many years of experience in REO properties to make sure you completely understand the process. Expect to spend a little more time and effort to get a home that is right for your needs and at the right price. By having patience and following the advice of your Realtor ®, you can expect to have a much smoother and successful transaction than attempting to purchase directly from the bank or at auction. Call me for more information on REO properties or any Real Estate needs,(530)878-0321. Sandy Schweiger,
Keller Williams    

WINNER

Top 100 rank: 90
Population: 107,100
Compare Roseville to Top 10 Best Places

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Roseville boasts lots of good jobs: Technology firm Hewlett-Packard and managed care organization Kaiser Permanente are among the companies that call the town home. What’s more, Sacramento State University and Philadelphia’s Drexel University have explored opening satellite campuses here. Roseville, which boasts the eleventh highest retail sales in California, is also a shopper’s mecca. The planned expansion of the Westfield Galleria at Roseville is attracting vendors such as the Apple Store, Burberry, Lacoste, Juicy Couture, Sephora, BCBG and others to an already popular regional shopping destination.

Two deer fell in my pool!!

For those of you who don™t know I have two lovely dogs. Sierra and Tiger you can find them with me on some of my advertising.   Those are beautiful dogs is what I normally hear, well today there names are mud!!<!–[endif]–>

I had just finished spending a boat load of money on back to school shopping and was ready to finish my projects in my office when my kids started saying things like œThere is a deer in the pool!!  

Well hears the story the dogs are good at being somewhat of our fire alarms for deer they know to just bark and run. So they probably just started doing there job, that™s why we feed them to chase stuff off your property. Well the two deer chased a mom and a baby.   (Insert Bambi and its mommy comment hear) And they must have chased them towards the house and doing the put the mom and baby in the pool.

While my kids and I tried to herd her out of the pool I couldn™t help while watching the mom swim in circles with her baby seems so sad and familiar, Knowing she wants out so bad but having no tools to do it with.   I called animal control, put a pool cover on the side for her to clime out on even put a rope around her neck to pull her out (Deer™s are surprisingly strong even in the water) but nothing seemed to work.   We managed to get the baby close enough to pull out leaving the mother to continue to tread water alone and scared the baby stayed there true to her and waited fatefully.

Watching her swim made my heart sink and mad at the same time.   She just had to calm down and she could get out that™s all I kept thinking.   But she kept scratching at the sides and not making any progress.   Somehow I feel like that especially that day, trying so hard to stay afloat and not lose sight of my kids.   Knowing if something doesn™t happen soon my true self will sink and fall into bad habits like laziness with my clients, self destructively changing my regular schedule and just plane self doubted.  

Eventually for what seemed like an hour that was actually 20 the baby move only about 10 feet away almost saying should I go?   Are you going to just stay there and swim?   She crawled up the side and out.   (Not using the pool cover) It was almost as if she knew her family had given up and she had better do something.   Off she went leaving my pool and teaching me the lesson of persistent for survival.   I didn™t mention that my pool was a doughboy pool and with all that scratching it went from a home with a pool to a home without a pool in about 30 mins.   But not without its lessons for the homeowner.

In the market the way it is now you find yourself trending a lot of water knowing your family is right there beside you.   But getting out of a bad situation is your job and first you need to calm down keep your family close.   Next look for people that put down a pool cover for you.   They are there to help.

The weak U.S. housing market is a boon for landlords, at least in some areas. Actual rent paid “ not including free months or other incentives “ rose in 78 of 79 apartment markets, according to data compiled by Reis, a commercial real estate data analysis firm. The largest increases were in areas that saw home price run-ups during the housing boom, Reis says. New York City saw the highest third-quarter increase, with a rise of 3.6 percent compared with the second quarter. San Francisco was second, with an increase of 3.4 percent. Other top areas for rental increases: San Jose and Fairfield County in California, northern New Jersey, and Seattle. Source: The Associated Press, Danielle Reed (10/30/2007)