REAL ESTATE
4 Surprising Tips You Need to Know
Before Buying or Selling a House
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(NU) - Insider tips -- who doesn’t love a good (legal) one?
And when it comes to buying
or selling a house, it turns out
some of the very best -- ones that
can translate into big bucks -- are
those maybe only someone with
Brian Williams’ imagination
would think of.
Want to know why, for example, Starbucks may be the greatest
predictor of home-value appreciation? Read on.
• March is the most profitable
month. For sellers, that is. According to Spencer Rascoff, CEO
of Zillow.com, who mined his
site’s database of millions of
homes in co-authoring the newly
released “Zillow Talk: The New
Rules of Real Estate,” properties
listed then sold faster and fetched
2 percent higher than average.
Buyers, on the other hand,
catch a break in December when
even New York owners are apparently so demoralized by the
cold that they’re willing to part
with their homes for 2.8 percent
less during the second week of
the month.
“You shouldn’t list your
house for sale before March
Madness or after the Masters (in
April),” says Rascoff.
• Your real estate agent’s gender matters. Women, because
they’re “more willing to negotiate,” tend to close deals faster, research suggests. But sellers take
note: If you can hold out, men -stubborn devils that they are -- are
often better at getting the original
asking price.
• A new roof is a sure-fire way
to boost a home’s resale value.
Forget kitchen remodeling. “You
could spend a fortune, and it still
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might not suit prospective buyers’
tastes,” explains Patsy O’Neill, a
sales associate with Sotheby’s in
Montclair, New Jersey.
Replacing an unsightly roof
with a spiffy new one -- better for
that all-important “curb appeal” -was one of the very few projects
singled out in Remodeling magazine’s new annual Cost vs. Value
Report for 2015, rising a chart-topping 5.9 percent over even last
year’s double-digit increase.
In fact, says O’Neill -- and,
sellers, pay close attention to the
psychology here -- if your current
roof really is an eyesore, buyers
will be “predisposed” to find a
zillion other things they hate
about your place. Ergo, those
craving the look of luxury at affordable prices should check out
the Value Collection Lifetime Designer Shingles from GAF
(www.gaf.com), North America’s
largest roofing manufacture.
• The Starbucks Effect. Don’t
laugh. When Rascoff was checking his data, he discovered that, lo
and behold, homes within a quarter mile of a Starbucks had appreciated 31 percent more – 96 percent vs. 65 percent – over the last
17 years than others nationwide.
“Is it that Starbucks is really
great at picking locations, or is that
Starbucks is sort of an omen of
gentrification?” he writes. “It’s a
little of each.”