Nail the Right Color for Your Listing

Nail the Right Color for Your Listing

You’ve seen clients react: The wall color can make or break a room. And when selling a home, choosing wrongly could make for a very costly mistake.

The color “sets up the temperature, the depth, the mood, and the atmosphere for all the other colors to be layered and featured,” says Gretchen Schauffer, founder of the paint line Devine Color.

Schauffler and Puji Sherer, president at Colorhouse Paint, recently offered some tips at Curbed.com for selecting the best paint color for a space. Among their tips:

Weigh the light and scale of the space. A room facing north could have a much different quality of light, affecting how the paint appears compared with a south-facing room. A dusky lavender’s blue undertones, for example, can be strong in a south-facing room, but the warm lavender can appear lilac in a north-facing space. Carefully review the paint colors in the actual space. Paint a big poster board or even a section of the wall before committing to the entire wall. This will help you spot any undertones in the color beforehand.

Don’t go too bright. Let the wall color be the background, the color experts recommend. In living spaces, Sherer and Schauffler recommends letting the wall color be the supporting player and not the star. “I’m always explaining how that background color is going to actually allow you to see the foreground,” Schauffler says. A neutral wall may feel “muted and subdued,” but “the colors sit back so they become more backdrops and don’t overwhelm the space,” Sherer says.

Check the color temperature. You want buyers to feel comfortable in the space as soon as they walk in. Cooler hues — blues and greens — are known for creating more restful retreats that are calm and peaceful. “Any colors that are a little bit on the cooler side are great for bedroom spaces,” Sherer says. On the other hand, warm and energetic colors — yellows, oranges, and reds — tend to work better for social areas in the home. They are “gathering colors, so they’re good to put in spaces like dining rooms or kitchens, where people sit around the table and share stories, or cook and eat together,” Sherer says.

Source: “How to Choose the Best Paint Color for Any Room in Your House,” Curbed.com (Nov. 1, 2016)

Here’s What Has Your Sellers Most Worried

Here’s What Has Your Sellers Most Worried

Forty-five percent of more than 1,700 home owners say they are planning to sell, but the majority of them aren’t sure when they will list, according to a new Redfin survey. Concern over finding a replacement home is the top reason for their indecision.

Yet, 42 percent of respondents agree 2016 has been a seller’s market, tilting in the favor of home owners over buyers, with sixty-eight percent of home owners saying they expect home prices to increase in 2017.

“The irony doesn’t escape me when I say home sellers are in a tough spot right now since the market seems to weigh so heavily in their favor,” says Lorella Martin, a Redfin real estate professional in Austin, Texas. “Many people move out of necessity, but those home owners who would like to sell in order to upgrade to a larger and nicer home are on the fence. As prices continue to rise, most prospective home sellers ask me two key questions: ‘is now the best time to sell?’ and ‘how difficult will it be to find another home?’”

Sellers are most concerned about finding a suitable replacement home (32 percent) and worry their property may fall in value before they are able to sell (32 percent), the Redfin survey shows.

The top reasons home owners say they want to sell are to upgrade to a larger and nicer home (36 percent) and to pull out profit from the home (23 percent), according to the survey.

Source: Redfin

Haunted Houses for Sale…

Some home sellers and real estate professionals are using Halloween to market the “haunted home” reputation of their listing. And for fodder, here are some of the spookiest listings for sale across the country, according to TopTenRealEstateDeals.com:

Haunted mansion: A remodeled 5,000-square-foot home featuring five bedrooms and three baths on the water in Long Island, N.Y., may be quite a find to a buyer. But they may not to get past the home’s eerie past. The home was featured in the “Amityville Horror” movies. This home was originally listed for $1.15 million a few years ago but has since been re-listed for $850,000.

Asylum for sale: In Detroit, buyers can purchase a former mental asylum, which also comes with a bakery, fire department, and its own ZIP code. The cost is $1.5 million for the Eloise area, which consists of 76 buildings that covers 902 acres. For those buyers who like to get spooked, plenty of creepy stories have been linked to the asylum, including stories of ghosts and screaming former patients that haunt the area.

These real estate professionals have used their haunted house listings to their advantage. Read more about it at REALTOR® Magazine: A Haunted House Can Be Marketing Gold

High-end ghosts: In Pennsylvania, buyers could pay $16.5 million for a 110-room mansion that once belonged to wealthy investor A.B. Widener. But there may be some ghosts in the closet. Widener lost his son and grandson on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, the White Star Line that he had once invested in. Still in mourning, the legend goes, Widener died in his mansion three years after the sinking of the Titanic and that all three Widener ghosts are the caretakers in the home. The home has become known as the “world’s largest ghost house.”

Desert town: The abandoned town of Santa Claus, Ariz., only has the remains of “tattered skeletons of buildings, the weathered Santa Claus sign, and the sad remnants of the children’s Christmas train now covered with graffiti,” TopTenRealEstateDeals.com notes. The town is located between Phoenix and Las Vegas in the Mojave Desert. The town was most recently listed for sale in the 1980s for $95,000.

Source: TopTenRealEstateDeals.com

Use Facebook to Generate Offline Referrals

Use Facebook to Generate Offline Referrals

Facebook: is it friend or foe when it comes to building your business? On the face of it, a social media site like Facebook would seem to be a no-brainer for reaching out to people when they’re ready to buy or sell a house. But often the reality doesn’t live up to the potential. You either spend too much time on the platform for little return or you turn off people by marketing too directly to them.

A top producer in the Atlanta area, Maura Neill, thinks she’s found the right balance. The RE/MAX Around Atlanta agent uses Facebook in a variety of ways, but one way she uses it to good effect is to build attendance at events she hosts twice a year. And it’s these events—off-line, in-person, on the ground—that build her business in the end.

In fact, she says, she gets anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen referrals out of these events, and that is part of the concrete ROI she sees from her social media effort.

Neill talks in-depth about how she uses Facebook in The Takeaway with Nobu Hata, a new audio podcast series. Neill’s remarks are featured in the latest Voice for Real Estate news video from NAR.

Also looked at in the video is the big win by the real estate industry against what many saw as overreach by the federal government on anti-kickback enforcement. A federal appeals court has shot down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s enforcement of Sec. 8 rules under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA). The CFPB imposed a massive fine—$109 million—against a mortgage company for sending referrals to mortgage insurers that used its affiliated mortgage reinsurance business.

Back when HUD administered RESPA, such “tying” arrangements were considered fine, depending on how they were structured. But when CFPB took over RESPA enforcement, it said they weren’t fine and hit the company for illegal referrals. What’s more, it imposed its fine retroactively, so the company was on the hook for the arrangement even during the years HUD said it was legal.

NAR sent a friend-of-the-court brief to the appeals court that said such retroactive enforcement was wrong, and the court agreed. Not only did it require the CFPB to withdraw the fine, it said CFPB’s interpretation of Sec. 8 was incorrect. HUD’s was the correct one.

In another video segment, an NAR analyst explains why it’s going to take a few years before lenders will be able to make federally backed rural home loans quickly under a new direct endorsement program that Congress created for the Rural Housing Service. FHA already uses direct endorsement and NAR for a long time called on Congress to let RHS use it too for rural home loans. Congress agreed, but RHS doesn’t have the money to make the system changes it needs to make it happen, so even though RHS has the authority, it’s going to be around 2019 before quicker rural home loans happen.

The video looks at another win, albeit a much smaller one. In a change to its FHA single-family loan handbook, HUD removed language requiring appraisers to act as home inspectors by testing appliances when they go to set a value on a house. NAR argued that that was outside the scope of appraiser duties and HUD agreed.

Another segment in the video looks at how well the new closing rules are doing one year after they took effect. NAR found that there are fewer closing delays because of the new rules. But agents are still facing a needlessly tough time getting their hands on the new closing disclosure, which replaced the HUD-1 Settlement Form. But even that is showing some improvement.

—REALTOR® Magazine

Who Has the Biggest Kitchens?

Who Has the Biggest Kitchens?

For your remodeling clients, they may want to make sure they don’t end up making a kitchen too small compared to other homes in the area. However, the size of the kitchen may vary drastically by geographic location, home size, and home style, according to new research from the National Kitchen and Bath Association, in which researchers evaluated more than 3,000 home plans.

The average size of a newly built single-family home’s kitchen is 161 square feet, or just under 13 feet by 13 feet, the study shows. However, some regions tend to offer much bigger kitchens.

The Middle Atlantic region, which includes New York and Pennsylvania, has the largest average kitchen sizes at 170 square feet, followed by the South Atlantic, which includes Florida and the Carolinas, at 166 square feet, and the West-South Central region, which includes Texas, at 165 square feet. Meanwhile, the smallest kitchens may be found in the West-North Central region, which includes the Dakotas, at 153 square feet, the study shows.

While larger homes tend to have larger kitchens, the scale of the increased kitchen size is not proportion to the overall home, the report notes. Homes that have great rooms tend to have slightly larger kitchens, but only by an average of 5 square feet.

The study found that single-story homes tended to have kitchens with an average of 151 square feet. Kitchens in multi-level homes, on the other hand, tended to have kitchens that average 174 square feet.

Source: “Size of Kitchens in New U.S. Single-Family Homes,” National Kitchen and Bath Association (2016)

Have You Spent Too Much on Digital Ads?

Have You Spent Too Much on Digital Ads?

Real estate professionals are big spenders when it comes to advertising. They will spend an estimated $25.9 billion this year alone, according to the 2016 Real Estate Advertising Update by Borrell Associates, which tracks advertising data. The report includes results from the company’s survey of about 290 real estate agents and brokers about how they allocate their marketing dollars.

But advertising expenditures have fallen 6 percent since last year, and while real estate pros favor digital ads the most, agencies reduced spending in the digital realm by 8.5 percent this year, the report shows. It notes that practitioners may have committed too much money to digital and are now reallocating cash toward more traditional advertising avenues.

“We believe real estate advertisers — especially those involved with residential home sales — have perhaps overspent on digital and are now ‘adjusting the dials’ for a more appropriate advertising mix,” the report says.

Five of the 11 media categories measured in the report showed advertising growth since 2015:

• Directories: +84 percent
• Telemarketing: +20 percent
• Cable TV advertising: +12.7 percent
• “Other print”: +12.5 percent
• Radio advertising: +9.5 percent

Real estate professionals are still putting a strong emphasis on digital ads, particularly video. In 2016, agents and brokers spent 6 percent of their digital budgets — or $472 million — on streaming video advertising. Borrell Associates forecasts that in five years, agencies will spend 29 percent of their digital budgets — or $2.6 billion — on streaming video ads.

Twenty-two percent of all real estate advertising dollars is spent at the local level. Local spending will total an estimated $5.7 billion this year, with online media getting more than half of that amount. Here’s a snapshot of some of the local real estate ad spending estimates for 2016:

• Newspapers: 12.5 percent (local share)
• Other print: 5.1 percent
• Directories: 2 percent
• Broadcast TV: 6.1 percent
• Cable TV: 2 percent
• Radio: 5.2 percent
• Out of home: 1.9 percent
• Cinema: 5.7 percent
• Direct mail: 4.6 percent
• Online/digital: 53.4 percent
• Telemarketing: 1.4 percent

Overall, real estate professionals reported spending an average of $40,047 on advertising in the last year. Four in five agents, however, reported spending less than $2,000 a month on advertising. Here are some additional findings from the report:

• 76 percent of agents say their website is “mobile optimized”
• 88 percent have a social media page
• 62 percent are planning a “major” website change soon
• 64 percent have advertised on Facebook
• 32 percent have advertised on LinkedIn
• Twenty-nine is the average number of monthly calls they get from ad-sales reps
• Three is the average number of media companies they work with
• 58 percent of their digital ad budgets go to email and display
• 17 percent are buying mobile advertising
• 5 percent see mobile campaigns as a significant source of leads

Source: Borrell Associates