Things to think about before downsizing your home
- Do you have enough equity in your current home that you can buy a smaller home with lower payments…or free and clear? Is it even possible to buy a home with lower payments in your area, given interest rates and prices?
- Are there desirable single level homes you would want to move into? If you don’t know, then hop onto my website at http://www.richracine.com and do a search, or call me for help.
- Would it be more profitable to move now or wait? By buying smaller now, you may take advantage of lower interest rates, lower prices, and a longer ownership window for building equity again in the new home. But if you wait, you could gain more equity in your current home. It depends on if the market is rising, falling, or stabilizing.
Should We Photoshop Listing Images?
If you, or someone you know lives in a home that’s too large now, please call me to discuss the pros and cons—and costs—of moving. The psychology of listing photographs is not hotly debated. But maybe it should be, because listing photos can make a huge difference in how fast and for how much a home sells.
The important question is this: Which works better to sell a house…a realistic image, or an image “dressed to advantage” to enhance the size or angles of a room?
On the buyer side, I can tell you that home buyers are often disappointed or even angry when they see a home that doesn’t measure up to the ideal images they saw online. I can also tell you that sellers love photos that make their homes look as special as they feel.
But which works better in terms of selling? Take a look at the two images above. You see the same bathroom photographed for two listing periods with different agents. One listing lasted three months and had no offers. The other listing received an offer right away at the asking price. Which image from above went with the faster sale?
If you guessed the one on the right, you are correct. Apparently realism in images is not a deciding factor in a sale. What is a deciding factor is how many people see the house in person.
Statistics show that the more people who go through a house, the faster it sells. Therefore, enhancing a room through staging and good photography (not fakery) can help a home sell faster simply by getting more people to the house. Once at the house, people quickly forget the photos as other aspects of the home attract them.
