Real Estate in Barrington & The Northwest Suburbs: December 2011

In my first post about selling your Palatine home we talked about the MLS, agents, and syndicating the listing. Now that's done and your home is beginning to appear on a lot of web sites, it's time to see what else we'll do to market your Palatine home.

Fortunately the MLS is just the start of your online presence and the marketing we do. Now it's time to take a look at a sign, the benefits and how we'll make it an interactive experience.

Sign or No Sign?

This will be a personal choice but as buyers of homes in Palatine still drive around preferred neighborhoods, we encourage home owners where-ever possible to have a sign. It's not always possible for town homes or condos, an alternative option is to have a sign on an upper floor window.

The sign tells buyers your home is for sale, and they'll slow the car down and start considering if it's the house for them. A  sign must have the name of the brokerage that is listing the property and a contact phone number. Some say for sale, others will have a seperate rider identifying a for sale or for rent. Agents can also add other riders , perhaps adding their name and cellphone.

The sign gives the drive buy viewer the option of calling for more details. However many buyers are not ready to make contact with an agent. So we'll hope they write down the address and go home, open up the laptop or tablet and search the address. WIth our syndication they should find it.

Is there a better sign experience?

Knowing that buyers crave information yet like to remain anonymous as long as possible why not make the best possible use of the sign? On the left you'll find a different type of sign. It is the same size as the one above, you can see everything we added to the sign. The required company name and contact phone number are there, but it includes a lot more.

• Property Address.
• Some essential details.
• Domain address - we'll talk about why in the next post.
• Three high quality photos of the interior.
• A QR code. Quick Response. These can be scanned by smart phones for more information about the property. (It's the black and white square on the left.)
• A text code, again for cell phone users to request more information.

Of course the choice is yours, sign or no sign, regular sign or interactive sign.

Next time we'll talk about that web address on the sign and how we utilize a single property web site.

The marketing of your Palatine home will continue.

Did you know that at least 80% of the buyers that walk through your home will do so with an agent of their own. It still is the leading source of finding a buyer and therefore is the number one prioritized item on a good marketing plan. The way to these buyers is through advertising to those agents and also online.

Let's look at the Palatine agents first.

If an agent wants to find homes to show their buyers the largest source is our MLS. (Multiple Listing Service). So it is the first place to advertise your home for sale. Now you are listed, any broker with a buyer in the Palatine area can check the database of homes to find properties that might be suitable for their client.

Now let's see where we can get the MLS listing to show up.

Where do buyers go to do research and find homes. Online. In fact it's now as high as 92% start their research online. That's before they hire a Realtor, before they drive neighborhoods, before anything else.

The simple addition of your home listing to our MLS will mean it now shows up on Realtor.com. It's still one of the most commonly visited sites by buyers but it does not stand alone. If you've heard of Yahoo real estate, Trulia, Zillow, Homes.com you'll know there are a lot of alternative web sites that buyers visit. So we want to be sure your home is on all of these sites, the big ones and the little ones. We achieve this by syndication. In fact we'll syndicate your home to over 900 of these web sites. If anyone inquires about your home on one of these web sites that inquiry will be sent either to Corinne, or if an agent has paid for leads from that site it might go to them. Either way buyers interested in your home will be directed to a broker.

Our picture is just a small sampling of the sites we always syndicate to.

Of course we'll be adding as many photos as we can to your listing, a virtual tour with more photos and even video, before we publish the listing. So right out of the gate your home will provide those buyer researchers with a lot of information. Viewers can send inquiry emails, request showings or just bookmark the listing for the future.

Do you think this is something you would benefit from when listing your Palatine home for sale?  

Stay tuned for the next stage in marketing your Palatine home for sale.

Hot on the heels of my last post about why 2012 appears to be a great year if you want to buy your first home, I thought I would turn this into a series to help Palatine first time buyers understand the entire home buying process.

I know many of you won't have the time to attend a seminar, or just don't want to go to one. So I am going to do this online for you. Feel free to ask me any questions-email is just fine.

Here's the first post in case you missed it.

http://blog.realestateinpalatine.com/palatine-first-time-buyers-2012-could-be-a-great-year-to-buy-your-home/

So having discussed the low prices of Palatine homes and the low interest rates I suggested the first thing you need do is to get pre-approved for a mortgage. If you don't know who to call try Steve. He's a friend of mine, in fact when my kids were at Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights, he was their gym teacher. Those days are long gone now, my boys are in college and Steve is a full time loan officer. I trust him and have no problem recommending him. So if you are curious, wonder if you can afford to buy, give Steve a call, tell him I sent you. His cell is 847-942-5151. Ask him how you can get approved for a mortgage.

And just so you know. Neither he nor I get money for referring clients to each other, that's against the law. I just recommend him because he does a very good job for his clients.

To get pre-approved you will need to provide information about your income and outgoings, a loan officer will tell you exactly what they need. You cannot get a full approval until you find a home to buy but a pre-approval is what you need to go property shopping. It tells the seller you can afford to buy the home, that you're serious.

First time buyers in Palatine - Well Done, You're Pre-Approved

Now you are pre-approved we can go property shopping and I'll talk about that in my next post.

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Attention Palatine first time buyers, mortgage interest rates are at an all time low. As I write this post today, December 23rd 2011 the 30 year fixed mortgage rate hovers under 4%. Believe me when I tell you that is a very low interest rate. No doubt it will go up and down a little but it is predicted to stay low for a while. I hope so!

Now I am not one of those agents that say you must buy, you must, you should, buy now, you know all that hipe. What I am saying is if you are considering buying your first Palatine home in 2012, you are being blessed with the lowest home prices we have seen in a very long time and the lowest mortgage interest rates we have seen in a very long time. Add those two to the great choice in homes for sale in Palatine and you cannot go wrong.

Here are a few to tempt you. Take a peak and then read on about where to begin. 

A Palatine First Time Home Buyers Starting Point

So what's a first time home buyers first thing to do? Well I know the temptation is to start looking at homes. Doing your online research is fine but looking at homes might set you up for disappointment. Here's is what you should do. Find out how much you can afford and make sure you are comfortable with the monthly cost. Adjust down if it cramps your social style too much. Then go property shopping.

We can help. We know buying your first home can seem a daunting task. Yes there is excitement but it can take a while and can be very stressful. Our job is to guide you through the process, finding the right people to help you along the way, like a good trustworthy loan officer, a great home inspector, an attorney to handle the legal stuff, yet all the while we are your single point of contact. So no matter what you need to know or when, you can text, call or email us and we promise we'll answer as soon as we can, usually the same day.

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SEO Success in Just Two Days - Google Loves Me! Real Estate in Palatine is Number Nine.

Back in April this year I took on a task which had all the makings of success over a wide geographic area for the niche relocation. The problem was it was just too big for one person to handle so last weekend I decided, with a few tears, to bench the project. No, not thrown away just benched. Maybe one day I'll have the financial ability to start it up again, who knows.

Have a nice rest Relocation House Hunters

I did not want to waste the money I had spent on the design and the blog so what to do. Well as my Barrington site has been so succesful in the search engines and really now beginning to increase leads and clients, it seems a good idea to target a new geographic area. So I spent last Saturday doing my keyword research and formulating the plan. Enter Real Estate in Palatine. I already sell homes in Palatine so it seems a logical choice for a new site.

Why a new site? Well the keywords in the title puts me leaps ahead of the competition and in a minute I'll reveal the results.

Yesterday was spent moving the design to the new domain: RealEstateinPalatine.com moving the blog, the IDX, a new logo, my attached Posterous blog for photos, that's a lot of coding, some I did, some I had help. By the end of the day, voila!

is live. I believe there is one home page glitch to be taken care of and a few more may become apparent as I test the site. So having added a redirect from old to new, to help Google visit a little faster I am sitting happy this morning to see that Google loves me. Yesterday new site-not indexed. This morning 1 day old site with 8 pages indexed.

So how well did my keyword choice do in the domain name? I chose Real Estate in Palatine. I already have Real Estate in Barrington and Real Estate Lake Zurich, the third area I cover. Most people search for Palatine real estate and that domain was first taken but also really hard to rank. So I looked at the keywords and found that Real Estate in Palatine has what I call the middle of the road searches. Not huge but not small either.

Today Google decided my new site fit that search term so well I am on page one at position number nine (9).  Boy does that feel good. Of course I know it will fluctuate for a while as I build out the site's content. We had about 200 pages to go live with but most of that is Wordpress and IDX, it now needs content about Palatine, photos and more blog posts. Gives me something to do over the quiet winter months.

Hot on the heels of my Palatine Town Homes Market report, I am back again with one for Arlington Heights. I think it's a fair assumption to assume that marketing times and average sales prices are going to be very similar to Palatine. Lets take a quick peak at that for the current year before I move on.

• Palatine: Average Market Time 2011 was 178 Days
• Arlington Heights: Average Market Time 2011 is 150 days.

That's about 1 month less, a bigger difference than I expected.

What about average sales price?

• Palatine: over the last 12 months was $176,546
• Arlington Heights: over the last 12 months was $232,942 Now that's a considerable difference. 

Arlington Heights town homes are on average sold at a 32% higher price than Palatine.

I took a look at single family homes, the average price there is also higher in Arlington Heights but not by as much. $297k v $275k, only an 8% increase.

So let's get to sales prices and price cuts because that's where I really wanted to go with this. A recent publication states that 3 of 4 homeowners still believe their home to be worth more than it is. On the other hand buyers or at least 53% of them still consider homes are priced too high. How does this translate into sales of town homes in 60004 and 60005?

Regardless of what percentage homes sell for in relation to the asking price, it's really important to see how they got  to the sale. Did they sell at the original asking price or not?  The answer is not, however I have to say the differences here are nominal. On average a price was reduced by less than 3%. The sale achieved was 97% of the final asking price or 93% of the original asking price.

Pricing is critical in a buyers market, and it appears Arlington Heights town home owners are reviewing the data they are given to establsih a list price, and being rewarded with less time on the market that their counterparts in Palatine.

Go Arlington Heights Sellers & Realtors...Job Well Done!

I wanted to look at the sales of Palatine Town Homes to see if sales activity is better this year than in 2010. Condos and town homes always suffer more in a buyers market, well at least they seem to, but let's look at some numbers, it should help verify my thoughts and maybe help Palatine town homeowners decide whether they want to sell or not. Lets take a look at the things sellers are most interested in:

1. How long will it take to sell my Palatine Town Home?
2. Are prices going down or up?

This first graph shows that since 2007 the average marketing time to sell Palatine town homes has increased year on year. Although 2011 is not yet finished I went back 12 months from today to make it a 12 month cycle. I doubt it will change much in the last 3 weeks of the year. Naturally this is only an average and there are so many things a seller can do to get under that number. But in general it appears we have increased from 4 to 6 months.

Did you know that according to stats released today, 3 of 4 home owners still think their home is worth more than it is.

Now lets look at average sales amounts.

This graph is showing the average sales price of Palatine town homes from 2007 through to 2011. The graph tells it all right? Prices going downhill. We've heard on the media that there have been some nominal increases in price over the last couple of months. I think the jury should stay out for a while in relation to townhomes in Palatine. I certainly would want a period of six months to really see if they are climbing.

As for whether you should sell, well the numbers might help, it depends on why you need to sell. Call us if we can help.  

Twice in this past week I have been exposed to some jaw dropping criticizm. It wasn't that the criticism itself hurt, I am thick skinned enough to ignore it. It's the mere fact that other Lake Zurich Realtors think they know better and proceed to ram that down another Realtors throat. Here are the two instances.

Market Reports

The way I write my market reports is my way. I decide what to put in and what not. I try to make it easy for my readers to understand. It's not an exact science, it's just simply extracting data from my MLS and presenting it the way I want. Just because another Realtor thinks differently does not make mine wrong. So I will continue to write my Lake Zurich market reports my way, with my graphs.

Property Descriptions

One of the things all Lake Zurich listing agents do is write a summary of the property being listed. I have always thought the best way to describe a property is in a story book fashion. You know, like in kids books you see a picture and there is a description underneath. Each picture is a mini story and collectively you see and read the whole book.

Our MLS has a limit on characters, so once a story idea is formed the listing agent will try to focus on extracting from the story.

One of my agents, Eileen Mattison, writes wonderful property descriptions, I am seriously jealous of her ability to extract and present the best points of a home. She paints great pictures in words. So when she gets "told" to change it and literally presented with the alternative text to use, I feel that's just downright disrespectful. Gosh did they ever consider that the listing agent and seller discussed and agreed what to use?

Regardless, we all do things differently. That does not make one right and one wrong. There are so many features to a large home, we'll all focus on the points we think are best, or the seller wants highlighted. If you feel like criticizing, please don't; please keep it to yourself, for some Lake Zurich Realtors, this can be very hurtful.      

My eldest son lives in our finished basement, he's 22 and gets his own living suite. Lucky him, he has a great room, bedroom, bathroom. He has to use the main kitchen and laundry and access to the house but he gets his own privacy and thats the way he likes it. Works fine for us too. For a while he has been telling me there is a mouse running through the walls. He hates spiders and mice can move pretty fast so not a real lover of them either.

Not so long ago he called on younger brother, 20, to come down and help him catch the critter. Poor Mitchell who has no fear of any critter big or small, spent a long time chasing little mouse all by himself, mouse finally ended up upstairs in our fireplace unable to go anywhere because there was a big black cat staring at him. In the morning my husband caught him and released him into the wild. We live on 2+ acres backing to conservation, his new world looked pretty inviting....we think.

Not long goes by before Lewis again tells me there is a mouse again. We set traps and catch....nothing. That was odd because I once used these traps on a rental and they worked fine.  (Turns out I forgot the right way to bait the traps-didn't have my glasses to read the instructions, so assumed....bad mistake.)  So off I toddle to the hardware store to pick up 4 more traps. I am done with the mouse complaints from the basement!

I respectfully decline to set the traps, nor collect them, so hubby takes the lead. All traps set and off to bed we go. Quick nudge in the morning reminding him I am not going down to look.....EW. 4 trapped and dead mice. Double EW. I am seriously surprised and shocked. So we set two more traps and the next night another one is caught. We've had to buy more traps and will set 2 more tonight.

Now some might say I should have let my cats downstairs. Well yes, but 5 cats and 5 mice with a white carpet did not sound like a good mix to me. I am a little grossed out, not because of the mice, if I had my way I would free them all, but it appears they'll just come back inside. I guess the problems of leaving near conservation opens us up to these tiny little critters that squeeze through the tiniest of spaces. I just had not realized how many we had living with us.

We'll continue to set traps until we catch no more, but then leave a couple in the mechanical room all the time. If you have a basement, I would highly recommend setting a couple of traps, you might be as seriously grossed out as I am to find who is living with you and nibbling away at your home. You might not be a source of food, but you'll make a great place to camp out in the winter.  

I recently read a comment online from a consumer on another web site that got me thinking about how contracts and earnest money work differently in every state. Today I am talking about Illinois and the reason I want to get this in writing is because the writer thought there was unethical behavior-which in fact there was not. Let's answer the first question.

When Is Your Contract Secure. I am of course talking about your contract to buy a home. In the business we refer to them as Purchase Offers. Why? Well because to begin with that is what they are. So here is the process:

1. You find a home you want to buy.
2. Your Realtor writes up a purchase offer and you sign it.
3. Your Realtor presents your offer to the listing agent.
4. Listing agent presents and discusses offer with seller.
5. Seller either rejects, accepts or counters the offer.
6. Any negotiation concludes and terms are reached. Changes are made on the offer to reflect changes.
7. Purchase offer goes back to listing agent.
8. Seller signs document.