And until I belatedly read the the New York Times bit on golf, I thought the next guy still liked golf.

If you are the rebel who still golfs, the golfer who subscribes to GolfPunk magazine, full text will help you find a home on a golf course: A quick search of the greater Seattle area shows about 400 homes advertising proximity to golf courses. (check it out - it’s a funny clustering of homes by the area’s golf courses).

My preferred search is “-golf“, which eliminates those 400 homes from the search and means I can get more non-golf home for my money.

File this under old news, but it costs about 4% of the value of your home when a sex offender moves in nearby. Ouch.

At for homes. The researchers think exact numbers are low (like Walmart) while rounded numbers are high. They’re totally wrong on one count though:

“A condo priced at say $153,122 might actually sell faster than one priced at 150″

They may be right about people’s feelings once they see the condo, but they’re 100% wrong about what is important; people and agents alike search for real estate based on fairly standardized price ranges and when you’re selling a $150,000 condo at $153,000 price tag (in a non-Seattle market where condos cost that much), you’re missing a lot of potential buyers.

If your home is near the top of a price range, you are up against a similar homes and lesser homes when people are searching. Say your home is worth around $400,000. You price it for $405,000 and searchers are going to be comparing it to $450,000 homes (and searchers with the $400,000 as their high-end cutoff won’t see it). Price it at $399 and you get an entirely new group of people seeing it and it’s one of the nicest homes in their price range. And the people who are considering homes at $405,000 will still spot it - don’t worry.

Power move if you’re a future home buyer using Estately: find the people who haven’t priced their home properly with operators in the full text box. You can search down to the dollar by typing “price < $408,000" (for homes under $408,000) into the Text Search box. Here’s an example of a custom search in Ballard.

According to RemodelingOnline, on average, no major home improvement project yields a significantly higher resale value than you put into it. Here are the stats from the Seattle area and here is a soon to be pay-walled summary. So, as with most things in life, think about what makes you happy first, then think about how much it will cost.

That said, if new siding, a new deck, or a new kitchen would make you happy, it’s 80% off once you sell your home:

The most profitable project on the national level was upscale siding replacement, recouping 88 percent of costs upon resale. Wood deck additions and wood window replacements also returned more than 80 percent of costs, at 85 percent and 81 percent, respectively. On a national average, the only interior project to return more than 80 percent of remodeling costs this year was a minor kitchen remodel, returning 83 percent of project costs at resale.

For those wincing at the cost of Seattle homes that cost an average of $374 per square foot, I’d like to point out that they are a relative deal when placed next to New York’s approximate $1,000 per square foot prices (!!!). Seattle per square foot condo prices are higher - $521 per square foot ($540,556 average price, 1,037 sqft average size).

So you’re buying a house and you’re thinking to yourself, “I want a deal, and in this market I should be able to find someone who is represented by an amateur (who blew their staging and marketing) and will sell their house for less than it’s worth. Or better yet, someone who has to sell or they’ll be foreclosed on.” (That’s a dangling participle, if you’re keeping score)

You’re in luck. Short sales are being advertised.
You only need to search for the code words. Here is what the code words for foreclosure are showing us today:

“Short Sale” - 18 homes and condos for sale in the greater Seattle area
“Motivated Seller” - 125 homes for sale in the greater Seattle area
“Foreclosure” - 11 homes and condos for sale in the greater Seattle area

If you want to see foreclosures as they come on the market, you can save a search with one of those keywords and subscribe to get emails every time a foreclosure comes on the market.

While doing this survey I spotted another example of mediocre representation. Directly from the description of one of the foreclosure homes: “All offers will be reviewed 07/31/2007 and may be subject to bank approval.” The home is still for sale. Oops! Maybe the agent should have included more than one photo. Or more than 2 sentences in the description. Seller, you need to ditch that loser and try out Estately Agent Match.

Have more words we should add to the list? Let me know if the comments and I’ll add ‘em.

If Jim Duncan sold real estate in the greater Seattle area, we would recruit him for Agent Match. He’s good.

Here’s one of his clients:

We overlooked this home because it only had a photo of the outside, but the home next door to it was for sale and I found a virtual tour through Trulia- it is beautiful. Depending on the shape this one is in, we could go in at $240-250 and have some cash left for renovations. The outside looks well-kept.

The realtor is doing his client a disservice by only having one photo, but the resultant lack of interest may work to our advantage.

And here is his response:

I like to show properties that have one or fewer photos - it usually means that the Seller will have had less traffic and will therefore be more willing to negotiate a lower offer.

If your Realtor has actually seen every property you clients might want, you can seriously leverage bad staging, no staging, bad photos and inept marketing to find gems in the rough. If you’re selling, take a look at your Realtor’s past and current listings and ask yourself “would I want to check out that house?”

While it seems like you might miss potential clients by pricing your home so low that it falls off their radar screens, Broker Bryant today spotted a $235,000 home listed for $160,000. The guise: “drama pricing.” Set the price so low people get excited and let them bid it up.  They should call it ebay pricing in honor of the one cent listings.

Sure you’ll get a lot of bodies through the door and maybe you’ll start a bidding war like the ones every Seattle home for sale had in 2004, but isn’t it possible you’ll also turn someone off? There are deals and then there are deals that are too good to be true -  those are the ones you don’t even follow up because you actually don’t want to spend the $70,000 in repairs the person hasn’t disclosed in the listing.

In case the suspense was too much for agents viewing the listing, the listing agent put that the price is to “catch your attention” in the remarks. That sort of killed the drama for me.