Please contact Shannon Fitzpatrick to arrange for your private tour of this fantastic home, or other Central Coast Properties.
Shannon can be reached at 805-801-5436, Shannon@CometRealty.com.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Hayley's Feng Shui Tip: FALL CLEANING TIPS!
Fall is in the air! Prepare for the change of season (even if you are in California!) with a few deep-cleaning tips for your home. A clean home is a happy home! Clean from ceiling to floors, starting with the most used rooms. Tackle this list over a few weeks if you get overwhelmed. I won't tell anybody!
LIVING ROOM
- Dust fans, crown molding and air vents. Soak and wash glass light fixtures.
- Walls and corners collect lots of dust (and dog hair, in my case!) Wipe down latex or oil painted walls with an All-Purpose Cleanser** (read the label!) and water. We recommend testing on an inconspicuous area first. Don’t forget the baseboards!
- If you paid attention to the last Feng Shui Tip, you already cleaned your windows (:-) If you missed that one, there is still time! Wash the screens on a warmer day and allow to dry in the sun. Next are curtains and blinds.
- Vacuum furniture and upholstery. Make sure to clean underneath furniture as well.
- Lastly, clean the floors, carpets, and rugs. If they are heavily soiled, it may be time to call a professional** or rent a cleaning machine.
KITCHEN
- Clean under and behind the refrigerator, vacuuming the condenser coils.
- Clean and organize kitchen cabinets. Plan on one cabinet a day to make the task less daunting.
- Take unwanted, unopened packaged foods to a local food shelter (or toss expired or questionable foods).
- Clear the kitchen counters of all appliances not used in the last week.
- Deep clean your oven with a mixture of 2:1 All Purpose** and Surface Scrub** and let sit for 15-20 minutes, then wipe down the insides and outsides of the oven and range.
- If you have drip pans under your burners, run them through the dishwasher, or consider replacing them.
BATHROOM
- Clean out the medicine cabinet; be sure to discard expired prescriptions, over-the-counter medications and lotions. (Please do not dump prescriptions in the toilet!)
- Empty each drawer and cabinet so you can wipe down the interior.
- Give your shower or tub a good scrub. My friend Becky discovered that it is much more fun using scrubbing bubbles if you are also drinking bubbly.
- Launder or clean the shower curtain and liner.
- Scrub down the toilet, both inside and out - don’t forget the handle, seat, or base of toilet.
- Dust the outsides of vents and fans.
BEDROOMS
- Launder all bedding, including bedskirts, mattress pads, sheets, pillows, blankets, duvets, and comforters.
- Clean and organize drawers, shelves or nightstands.
- Once the weather turns cooler, pack away summer clothes (for Californians - just move to the back of the closet!)
- Determine what your favorite clothes are, then donate the unwanted, clean, usable clothes to a charity thrift store (I personally like Mission Thrift on Broad Street).
OUTSIDE
- After the leaves have fallen, empty the gutters, then rinse clean gutters with a special hose attachment.
- Clean up your patio furniture. (Californians are lucky enough to not have to worry about storing our patio furniture!)
- Check the weather stripping and caulking around doors and windows to ensure your home is energy efficient.
** This list is brought to you from my favorite GREEN cleaning product line: CALDREA. Find your favorite Caldrea scent (mine is Basil Blue Sage), and your entire home will smell amazing when you clean (rather than caustic). www.Caldrea.com, Fortini’s in SLO carries it, and every once in awhile, you can even find it at Ross or TJ Maxx (if I haven’t found and bought it first!) They have spectacular concentrated laundry detergent. Your sheets, towels, skin, nose, family and home will thank you!
If you need to buy or sell a home, call or email Comet Realty: 805.546.9925, Info@CometRealty.com.
If you need to clean your home, do it yourself! (refer to list above)
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
TIP: Home Improvements That Pay Off
Dian Hymer is a nationally syndicated real estate columnist, and author.
The temptation is strong: Clean up the yard, declutter the house, and put it on the market without spending time and money sprucing the place up for sale. This is especially the case if you anticipate losing money on the sale.
Some real estate agents recommend you do little if anything to get your home ready for sale. This could work if you price the listing to look like a bargain. However, most buyers in today's market are nervous and picky. They aren't in a hurry and they want a house that's move-in ready.
An agent who is looking for a fast sale might steer his or her clients away from doing any fix-up work. It takes a lot of time and coordination, not to mention money, to get a home properly prepared for sale in today's market. Some agents don't want to take on the effort, or haven't the vision to see the home's potential. This could cost you on the sale.
One agent told his clients that they needn't do anything to get their house ready for sale. True, the house had inherent charm and good bones. But, the seller's furniture was much too big to show the rooms off to advantage. The dogs had damaged the hardwood floor and the beautiful garden was overgrown.
The house didn't sell until the sellers found another agent who recommended a laundry list of items to take care of before selling, including moving most of the seller's furniture out and having the house staged.
Unfortunately, market values declined between the first and second times the home was listed. Even though the house sold quickly with multiple offers the second time it was listed, it sold for less than it would have if it had showed well the first time it hit the market.
HOUSE HUNTING TIP: Choose an agent to work with who has experience helping sellers prepare their homes for the market. Ask an agent you're thinking about hiring for references. Call past sellers and ask them how effectively the agent helped them get their home sold and whether they made back the money they invested getting the home ready for sale.
A good agent should be able to supply you with a list of tradespeople who can help you paint, change outdated floor coverings and light fixtures, etc., at reasonable prices. And your agent ought to be able to provide access to the home for the people you select to help with the fix-up if you are out of town or at work.
Ideally, you should work with your agent who will help you prioritize the things that should be done to bring about a timely sale. For example, an outdated kitchen can usually be improved considerably by painting, changing light fixtures, refinishing or replacing a worn floor, and changing cabinet pulls.
It might make sense to change extremely old appliances and counters. However, it's not a good idea to gut the kitchen and completely remodel it for sale. You won't get that money back when you sell. The aim is to make cost-effective improvements that make your home appealing to the broadest number of buyers possible.
Painting is the least expensive improvement you can make that is likely to return more than you invest, provided you select the right colors. One seller repainted the exterior of his home before he selected a real estate agent. He painted it the same dowdy colors that adorned the house for decades. The first thing the buyers wanted to change was the exterior paint color.
THE CLOSING: For the best result, talk to a color consultant before you paint.
TIP: Contact Comet Realty's team of professionals. They have the local knowledge, expertise, feng shui certifications and staging experience to help you decide what to do to get YOUR house ready to put on the market.
805.546.9925, Info@CometRealty.com
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Top 10 Tax Tips for Sellers According to IRS
If you are thinking of selling, the first thing you should do is call Comet Realty to find out how they can market and sell your property!
The second thing you should do is look at this list that the IRS has published for sellers. (http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/content/0,,id=104608,00.html.)
Here are the IRS's top 10 tax tips for home sellers (taken from their website August 2011):
1. In general, you are eligible to exclude the gain from income if you have owned and used your home as your main home for two years out of the five years prior to the date of its sale.
2. If you have a gain from the sale of your main home, you may be able to exclude up to $250,000 of the gain from your income ($500,000 on a joint return in most cases).
3. You are not eligible for the exclusion if you excluded the gain from the sale of another home during the two-year period prior to the sale of your home.
4. If you can exclude all of the gain, you do not need to report the sale on your tax return.
5. If you have a gain that cannot be excluded, it is taxable. You must report it on Form 1040, Schedule D, Capital Gains and Losses.
6. You cannot deduct a loss from the sale of your main home.
7. Worksheets are included in Publication 523, Selling Your Home, to help you figure the adjusted basis of the home you sold, the gain (or loss) on the sale, and the gain that you can exclude.
8. If you have more than one home, you can exclude a gain only from the sale of your main home. You must pay tax on the gain from selling any other home. If you have two homes and live in both of them, your main home is ordinarily the one you live in most of the time.
9. If you received the first-time homebuyer credit and within 36 months of the date of purchase, the property is no longer used as your principal residence, you are required to repay the credit. Repayment of the full credit is due with the income tax return for the year the home ceased to be your principal residence, using Form 5405, First-Time Homebuyer Credit and Repayment of the Credit. The full amount of the credit is reflected as additional tax on that year's tax return.
10. When you move, be sure to update your address with the IRS and the U.S. Postal Service to ensure you receive refunds or correspondence from the IRS. Use Form 8822, Change of Address, to notify the IRS of your address change.
And the hottest tip of them all: Call Comet Realty for a wonderful experience in selling or buying real estate on the Central Coast. All of our agents are standing by ready to assist you ... 805-546-9925.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Happy Comet Realty Clients
Please contact Comet Realty - a full service Real Estate firm - to find out what they can do for you. From selling to buying to property management, they are just a phone call away.
Keith Hoffmann, Realtor®, can be reached at 805-801-6498, or Keith@CometRealty.com
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Four Ways On-line Real Estate Valuations FAIL
Tara-Nicholle Nelson is an author and the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com.
Q: Knowing that I would be selling my home, I have been following price ranges for comparable properties to my home on a couple of major real estate websites. Now that I am ready to list, all the agents I've talked to say that the websites are so out of line that their recommendations are worthless. What a shock!
A: Real estate websites have transformed the whole experience consumers have of home buying or selling -- they have made public what used to be private and difficult to get to -- namely, listing and sales data about homes across the country.
Several of these sites offer nearby recent sales, with the promise that savvy sellers like yourself can simply go online, input your address and find out what specific homes in your neighborhood have sold for lately -- some even go so far as to take the leap from what those homes have sold for to placing an estimated value on your home.
These sites try hard to do a lot of the work for you -- surfacing the homes they see as comparable to yours.
However, these are, at bottom, computer programs.
So, what's involved is a computer taking the description of your home from the public records (which usually reside at the county recorder's office and in their databases) or from a recent listing (if your home has been sold in the past few years), in terms of the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet, primarily, and pulling out the closest homes to yours that have sold recently that have similar data on record.
However, the computer can't necessarily distinguish nuances in a property's condition or aesthetics, nor does it always correct for whether the house two blocks over was a short sale or a foreclosure.
Depending on where you live, how similar homes are to each other in your area, the level of sales activity near your home and the level of accuracy found in the public records for your house and nearby homes, these sites can offer very comparable "comps" -- or comparables that aren't really comparable at all.
If you live in a fairly cookie-cutter subdivision where several homes just like yours have sold very recently, you're likely to get a good set of comparables, and a value estimate that's at least in the ballpark. But in many areas, lots of fairly common scenarios can come between you and a good set of automated comps:
• if your home is older and has had a lot of improvements and even additions that are not in the county records, you're likely to get bad comps;
• if homes in your area are very different from each other, you might get bad comps;
• if you live in a neighborhood very nearby another neighborhood where homes have a much higher or lower value than your area's (say, because they belong in a better school district or even on the other side of the city limits), you're prone to getting bad comps;
• if your home is in an area where homes are dense, the algorithm might jump over many very nearby properties to get to a relatively dissimilar one even a half-mile away, and that can give you bad comps.
The listings provided by the sites can be very useful for homeowners trying to stay on top of what homes around theirs are selling for -- not listed for, but actually selling for. They are less useful, in my opinion, at placing values on properties; the sites that do this usually have their accuracy rates listed somewhere on the site, and I haven't yet seen one that's impressive.
But when it's time to actually list your home, or figure out what it is worth, no computer -- no algorithm -- is as accurate as a living, breathing local real estate professional who sees and sells all the different specimens of homes in your neighborhood and sees firsthand what ready, willing, qualified buyers actually pay for them, day in and day out.
I think it's important for sellers interviewing listing agents to discuss the online comparables with prospective listing agents, but not as a counterargument to what the listing agents recommend you list your home at.
Rather, it's a smart way to see what the agents know -- and what you can learn -- about the other properties in your area.
If you are considering selling your home, or just want to see what your home would be worth in today's market, please call one of Comet Realty's professionals at 805.546.9925.
Q: Knowing that I would be selling my home, I have been following price ranges for comparable properties to my home on a couple of major real estate websites. Now that I am ready to list, all the agents I've talked to say that the websites are so out of line that their recommendations are worthless. What a shock!
A: Real estate websites have transformed the whole experience consumers have of home buying or selling -- they have made public what used to be private and difficult to get to -- namely, listing and sales data about homes across the country.
Several of these sites offer nearby recent sales, with the promise that savvy sellers like yourself can simply go online, input your address and find out what specific homes in your neighborhood have sold for lately -- some even go so far as to take the leap from what those homes have sold for to placing an estimated value on your home.
These sites try hard to do a lot of the work for you -- surfacing the homes they see as comparable to yours.
However, these are, at bottom, computer programs.
So, what's involved is a computer taking the description of your home from the public records (which usually reside at the county recorder's office and in their databases) or from a recent listing (if your home has been sold in the past few years), in terms of the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet, primarily, and pulling out the closest homes to yours that have sold recently that have similar data on record.
However, the computer can't necessarily distinguish nuances in a property's condition or aesthetics, nor does it always correct for whether the house two blocks over was a short sale or a foreclosure.
Depending on where you live, how similar homes are to each other in your area, the level of sales activity near your home and the level of accuracy found in the public records for your house and nearby homes, these sites can offer very comparable "comps" -- or comparables that aren't really comparable at all.
If you live in a fairly cookie-cutter subdivision where several homes just like yours have sold very recently, you're likely to get a good set of comparables, and a value estimate that's at least in the ballpark. But in many areas, lots of fairly common scenarios can come between you and a good set of automated comps:
• if your home is older and has had a lot of improvements and even additions that are not in the county records, you're likely to get bad comps;
• if homes in your area are very different from each other, you might get bad comps;
• if you live in a neighborhood very nearby another neighborhood where homes have a much higher or lower value than your area's (say, because they belong in a better school district or even on the other side of the city limits), you're prone to getting bad comps;
• if your home is in an area where homes are dense, the algorithm might jump over many very nearby properties to get to a relatively dissimilar one even a half-mile away, and that can give you bad comps.
The listings provided by the sites can be very useful for homeowners trying to stay on top of what homes around theirs are selling for -- not listed for, but actually selling for. They are less useful, in my opinion, at placing values on properties; the sites that do this usually have their accuracy rates listed somewhere on the site, and I haven't yet seen one that's impressive.
But when it's time to actually list your home, or figure out what it is worth, no computer -- no algorithm -- is as accurate as a living, breathing local real estate professional who sees and sells all the different specimens of homes in your neighborhood and sees firsthand what ready, willing, qualified buyers actually pay for them, day in and day out.
I think it's important for sellers interviewing listing agents to discuss the online comparables with prospective listing agents, but not as a counterargument to what the listing agents recommend you list your home at.
Rather, it's a smart way to see what the agents know -- and what you can learn -- about the other properties in your area.
If you are considering selling your home, or just want to see what your home would be worth in today's market, please call one of Comet Realty's professionals at 805.546.9925.
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