If you’re considering selling your home, there are a number of factors you should consider regarding the resale value of your property. Some of these issues may devalue your home or scare some potential buyers away entirely, even if your home is an otherwise outstanding property! Consider these eight factors when listing your home.

1. Location, Location, Location
Many real estate television shows repeat this phrase over and over. Buying a home in an area that provides residents with access to services and effective transportation is important – though many buyers don’t wish to live too close to airports and busy roads for fear of noise.

Visual appeal is another concern. Cell phone towers and power lines can be seen as eyesores – or possibly even having potential health hazards. Local school closures can also deter potential buyers who have children or who are considering having children in the near future. Some buyers may be leery of purchasing homes that are on flood plains.

To ensure maximum resale potential, consider how many of these types of issues exist near the properties you’re considering. Remember, though, there’s no way of knowing exactly how a neighborhood will evolve over time.

2. Good Renovations Gone Bad
If your home looks like a DIY nightmare, this can definitely devalue your home. Though putting money into renovations generally increases the value of a home, poorly done renovations can have the opposite effect. If buyers feel that the renovations will have to be redone, there’s a good chance they’ll make a lower offer or keep looking for a move-in ready home.

3. Overly Creative Customization
That bright pink feature wall might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the truth is that unusual paint choices – both inside and outside the home – can turn buyers off, even if your customization is the cutting edge trend in current home design magazines. Customizing spaces so that they may not be functional to future buyers, like turning the garage into a home gym or a granny apartment, might make some buyers reluctant to buy your property.

The same can be said for unique landscaping choices or renovations that are too high scale for the house. A professional chef’s kitchen or marble bathrooms in a modest home suited to first-time buyers won’t likely provide a good return on investment.

4. Unappealing Curb Appeal
The first thing potential buyers will see is the exterior of the property. If the house appears to be outdated or in poor repair on the outside, people will assume it is the same for the inside. Water features or swimming pools and overly landscaped green space may turn off some buyers since people tend to associate high maintenance yards with expensive upkeep and unnecessary headaches. Old fences and sheds can also devalue your home, especially if they look like they’re in dire need of replacement. Keep the gardens weeded and the lawn mowed so that potential buyers can see how nice the property is, inside and out.

5. Pets Gone Wild
Many people won’t mind buying a home that has had resident animals, but no one wants to live with constant reminders of former owners’ pets. Damage to carpets, walls or a strong smell of animals will put off some buyers – especially those with allergies. Consider letting your pets live elsewhere while the property is for sale. Also, a good cleaning and repairing of any visible damage will help to mitigate the potential devaluation of your home associated with pet ownership. 

6. Not-So-Nice Neighborhood
A dodgy neighborhood with a high crime rate or homes on your block that look unkempt can scare potential buyers away. Even if your neighbors have unusual-colored homes or have made strange additions to their homes, this can be perceived by potential buyers as an eyesore.

7. Sinister Reputation
Well-known crimes, deaths or even urban legends associated with your house or neighborhood can decrease the value of a home immensely. Most people don’t want to live in a home where they feel that something awful has happened, much less move in with your alleged resident ghost! Though these kinds of issues may be out of your control, they may certainly have an impact on the resale value of your home.

8. Frightful Foreclosures
Many buyers are leery of purchasing foreclosures that are being sold on an “as-is” basis. The fear is that the home could be a money pit or require a huge amount of repairs before being move-in ready. Some good homes may be available through foreclosures, but it’s important to do your research, ask lots of questions and don’t be afraid to bargain. It’s also crucial that you get a home inspection so that you know exactly what you’re getting into. There’s a good chance that some work will be required when buying a foreclosure, but you may get great value for your money if you’re willing to put in a little work.

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Katonah NY Homes

Is your home’s price about to fall 10% further?

That’s what two respected teams of analysts are predicting right now. And TrimTabs Investment Research is more pessimistic, suggesting it could be five or six years before home prices stabilize and move higher.

Of course, this is just one more problem for investors and consumers to worry about. The economy appears to be slowing again. Stocks have ambled sideways since February. The U.S. government faces the prospect of a technical default on the national debt.

Indeed, we’re looking at a time of serious upheaval. We’ve had the Arab Spring in the Middle East. There’s been a spate of natural disasters, including Japan’s earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown, as well as floods and tornadoes in America’s heartland. And frothy commodities markets have suffered violent setbacks, with silver in particular showing symptoms of excessive speculation. And don’t forget that the dollar, after being left for dead, is rising like Lazarus, reanimated by new fears over Greece and the future of the eurozone.

In all of the tumult, it’s easy to forget that the root cause of all this mess — now entering its fourth year — continues to fester like an untreated wound. I’m talking about the U.S. housing market, which, by some measures, has fallen to new lows. After showing signs of hope late last year in the wake of the homebuyer tax credit, it’s now suffering fresh setbacks and reaccelerating price declines.

Consumers, weighed down by rising inflationary pressure and lackluster job growth, are losing confidence. At the same time, tight lending standards and efforts to reform Wall Street and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are restricting access to mortgage credit. Right now, housing finance survives on government largesse: Government-backed entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now account for 95% of new mortgages.

All of this is limiting economic growth by keeping pressure on the financial system. And it risks the creation of a negative feedback loop in which lower home prices result in more homeowners falling into negative equity, leading to more foreclosures, more bank losses, tighter credit and, ultimately, further price declines.

All this leads the analysts to predict another drop in prices before a solid bottom is found. For potential landlords, especially those with cash in hand, this could mean it’s time to buy property. For investors, it means bargains on a lot of related equities; I’ll have some names later in this column, though I wouldn’t start buying just yet.

But for homeowners? More pain. Here’s why.

Hopes dashed

Longtime readers will remember that last December, when the economic outlook was much brighter, I penned a column (“Why it’s safe to buy homes again“) encouraging buyers to jump back into real estate. And if you got a low interest rate and you planned to stay put, it was. I also wrote that barring some “unforeseen calamity, another self-perpetuating cycle of higher home prices” could be seen as early as this year.

Unfortunately, we’ve had a few calamities since then; Fed-induced inflation, the Portuguese bailout, unrest in Libya and Japan’s quake have led to a manufacturing slowdown. Economic growth slowed dramatically in the first quarter of this year to just 1.8% from 3.1% in the fourth quarter. The team at Capital Economics noted that households had “been hit hard by surging prices for everyday necessities such as food and energy.”

And now there is evidence that the job market is softening again, with the unemployment rate popping back up to 9% in April. (I covered the economic slowdown and its impact on stocks in my April 27 column, “Investors, it’s time to run and hide.”)

Housing activity is way down because of all this. Home sales have stagnated near recessionary lows after unwinding the temporary boost from the homebuyer tax credit. Demand for new mortgages has dropped back to levels not seen since the depths of the financial crisis in 2008. Homebuilder confidence has sunk to very low levels — and stayed there — for more than three years and hasn’t been positive since April 2006.

As a result, home prices have started falling again. What’s more, the price declines seem to be accelerating, with the 20-city Case-Shiller Home Price Index off 3.3% in February from its year-ago level — a drop of a magnitude not seen since late 2009. That’s the eighth consecutive month-over-month price decline. The homeownership rate also continued to fall as more and more distressed owners became renters.

There are still some pluses

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the long-term factors I mentioned back in December are still valid. These include record affordability, thanks to low prices and low borrowing rates, and still-favorable long-term demographics, as the United States is one of the few wealthy nations set to enjoy an expanding workforce in the years to come — unlike Japan and most of Europe.

Continued…..

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