Tip for Sellers: Buyer's May Not Love Your Pets Like You Do

Almost everybody loves pets except the home buyer who is buying your house. Don't ask us why, but that's often how it works out. Home sellers who adore their pets -- and we count ourselves as huge pet lovers -- have a hard time imagining the negative attitudes others harbor against pets. So, while this might be a bitter pill to swallow, if you want to get top dollar for your house, pay attention to how much you might lose with a dog or cat in residence.

Why Don't Home Buyers Like Your Pet?
•Nervousness. Pets make some people very uncomfortable. Not everybody grew up with a family pet or enjoys outings at the zoo. Fur and four legs does not a human make.
•Fear. Real and irrational. It's not only dogs that instill fear in people. All kinds of silly wives' tales and superstitions involve cats.
• Inexperience. Pets are not always predictable.
• Your pets aren't their pets. They imagine yours may bite, jump, vomit, claw, spit-up hairballs or are just plain hyper or bad in some way.

#1 Preferred Pet Solution
 You're not going to like this but we'll say it anyway, fully realizing that this very excellent piece of advice is likely to fall on deaf ears. The best thing to do to ensure top price for your home is to relocate your pets while your home is on the market. Putting them in the back yard, in the garage or in another room that you keep locked is insufficient, and it's not fair to them. You need to remove them from the house.
•Let a friend or relative care for Fluffy and Spike.
•Board them comfy and cozy at a kennel.
•Send them on vacation.

Overcoming Negatives Associated with Your Pets
If you shrug off all professional advice and absolutely refuse to move your pets out of the house, then at least minimize the objections and nuisance factors, real or otherwise:
•Cat Litter Boxes & Dog Potty Pads
 Keep them out of sight and impeccably clean. Nothing turns off buyers faster than opening the door to the laundry room and being greeted by a full or stinky cat box.
•Carpet & Floor Pet Stains
Hire professionals to remove the stains. Buyers will spot them and form unfavorable opinions about the rest of the house. If the stains can't be removed, then remove the floor covering and replace it.
•Pet Odors and Smells
1.Cat urine is the worst. Without question. The. Worst. Bring in a neighbor to do a whiff test.
2.Do not use air fresheners. People with allergies will react.
3.Try enzyme cleaners such as Simple Solution , Nature's Miracle or call a professional ozone company.

Remove Signs of a Pet
You may be required by state law to disclose that pets have lived in your home, but you don't need to advertise that pets live at your house. Removing signs that you have a pet is simply smart practice. Why turn off a buyer at the get-go? It's those first impressions that are so all-fired important.
•Do not put photos online showing your cat asleep on the bed
•Seal up doggie doors
•Put away food and water bowls when not in use
•Vacuum/sweep religiously, every day, sometimes twice a day
•Pick up pet toys and put them away
•Pack up cat trees and other signs of cat paraphernalia (you know who you are)
•Remove photos of pets from refrigerator, walls and table tops
•Pack up all cages, carriers and other tell-tale signs

Showing Your House
Put your pets into a carrier and attach a note warning buyers not to disturb them. The last thing you need is somebody sticking their hand inside the carrier and getting bit or scratched. You can't predict how your pet will react when locked up and alone.

An agent learned the hard way watching a cat run loose during a showing. They were outside talking to the neighbor while the selling agent showed the home. There was loud knocking and looked up to see the agent rapping on an upstairs window. They thought he was showing the buyer they had dual panes. It didn't dawn on them that he was panicking and couldn't figure out how to open the window. When the rapping continued, they went inside. Turned out the cat had cornered the agent and the buyer, and was growling at them.

Needless to say, that buyer didn't buy that house.
(A Repost)

Understanding Home Automation - Home Monitoring

These days, we are more likely to encounter homes equipped with home automation systems that allow homeowners to remotely access and control things, like heating, air conditioning, and even some appliances, using smartphones. David and I pride ourselves on using cutting-edge proven technologies that work for our clients. Here’s a look at some of the different systems to educate you about this rapidly evolving technology.

What makes a smart home smart?
Home security systems, lighting timers and programmable thermostats are nothing new. But in recent years, those technologies have evolved, becoming integrated into comprehensive, Internet-connected systems that provide an unprecedented level of visibility and control when homeowners are away.

Home automation services like ADT PulseSM, Comcast’s XfinityTM Home and AT&T Digital LifeTM offer features like remote video monitoring, alarm alerts, appliance monitoring and so much more. Using a smartphone or tablet app, you can not only see what’s happening at your home but also perform actions like turning lights on and off, locking and unlocking doors and setting the thermostat.
Forgot to close the garage door? What if your teenager loses the house keys? Not sure if you left the oven on? Connected home systems can solve all these problems.

The upside of this technology is obvious: It offers a tremendous amount of convenience and control. But, you may find that it’s not ideal for all of you.

What’s the downside?
All those cool features come at a cost. Some providers charge monthly or annual fees to monitor and maintain home automation systems, such as traditional home security systems. They all require an Internet connection, and you will need an app-enabled mobile device in order to control the system remotely. There are costs associated with each of these components, so it’s important to be aware of them when considering a home equipped with automation. Additionally, if you are older or not savvy about technology, they may find home automation systems confusing or intimidating. You may even have privacy concerns.

Automation in surprising places.
In addition to whole-home automation systems, connected technologies are beginning to appear in a variety of home appliances. Some high-end appliance manufacturers now offer WiFi connected appliances, including refrigerators and washing machines, that allow remote monitoring and control through smartphone apps.

Imagine getting a text from your fridge telling you that you need milk. With today’s technology, it’s possible. There’s even a water faucet filtration system on the horizon that will communicate with smartphones and tell you what’s in their water, when to replace the filter and which filter is best for your water chemistry. 

We want to hear from you.
What do you think are some personal pros and cons of this new technology? Are you already using it? Would you consider it for your home? 

reposted article from AmericanHomeShield

Los Angeles Homeowner Plumbing Tips

Prevention is often the best medicine. This is a great and short video on some plumbing tips for homeowners.

Please feel free to comment and share some of your tips with us. We want to hear from you!

US Faces Housing Inventory Shortage

Homes available for sale as well as the housing supplies measured in months are now at pre-recession levels, while household formation continues to recover (see post). This development was predicted by William Wheaton back in 2009.

Forbes: - Most striking however is the fact that inventory has contracted to its lowest level since December 1999, more than 13 years ago. The number of available homes, which is not seasonally adjusted, fell 4.9% from December and is 25.3% lower than a year ago. With 1.74 million homes on the market, at the current sales pace, supply will be exhausted in just over four months. It represents the lowest housing supply since April 2005. In a normal market, a healthy supply level is about six months.  

A number of economists continue to talk about the shadow inventory - the millions of homes that are "about to hit the market" as homeowners have or shortly will fail on their mortgages. Some evidence suggests that in the more depressed housing areas banks are indeed sitting on foreclosed properties, unwilling to sell. But a number of banks have also been aggressively modifying mortgages, reducing principal and interest, and therefore cutting delinquencies.

Clearly many more homes will be hitting the markets this year. But it really doesn't make much difference if people who move out of these homes end up buying or renting - they need to live somewhere. And according to the Census Bureau, rental vacancies are near a 10-year low.

Ironically, the relatively tight credit conditions are (at least partially) restricting new home construction. Completion of new housing units has improved recently but remains at historically depressed levels - certainly not enough to keep up with the population growth and family formation. The danger of course is that with spring approaching (generally a period of increased demand for homes), some markets could overheat due to tight supplies, worsening home affordability and dampening sales numbers.

repost by BusinessInsider  Walter Kurtz, Sober Look | Feb. 24, 2013

Read more: http://soberlook.com/2013/02/is-us-facing-housing-shortage.html#ixzz2LwQpGLqA

Happy Valentine's Day!

10 Things To Do With $10K

10 Things to do with $10K

Spring is coming!

For all the focus we put on transactions – buying and selling – the truth is that for most of your life as a real estate consumer, you’ll be a homeowner. And because your home is so much more than just a transactional asset, a widget to be traded and tweaked only for financial reasons, it makes sense to spend some portion of your time, energy and money making it really work for you.

Unfortunately, what too many of us do is wait until we can save up or pull out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a major move: build on an addition, gut and remodel the kitchen, turn the basement into a media room extraordinaire. And many times, that means we never do the project, or we only do it when it’s time to sell and move.

The fact is, there are numerous remodeling projects that can crank up your enjoyment factor at home, for the much more accessible sum of $10,000. Here’s a hit list of the top 10 things you can do for 10K, if you’re in your home and planning to stay put for a while:

1. Crank up the curb appeal. We usually talk about curb appeal in the context of sprucing your home up to prep it for sale, but I say that it’s also one of the most cost-effective home improvement projects for homeowners who are staying put in terms of life-improving bang for the home improvement buck. There’s just something about loving the way your home looks when you drive up to it day after day, or when you have people over, that dramatically increases your enjoyment of home.

Depending on which projects you’d like to do and whether you’re interested in doing any of the work yourself, you can crank up your curb appeal for just a few hundred dollars or a few thousand. Here are a few vision-starting curb appeal-boosting projects to consider:

• Exterior paint or power wash
• Paint or install a new garage door
• Paint or install a new front door
• Paint or install new trims (shutters, eaves, etc.)
• New exterior hardware (door kickplate, mailbox, house numbers, etc.)
• Exterior or landscape lighting
• Front yard landscaping spruce-up or makeover

2. Get rid of a wall. You might be a homeowner now, but hearken back to your days as a house hunter. You might remember seeing homes and wishing for what is easily the #1 remodel fantasy of homeowners to be: knocking down a wall. In my experience the wall home buyers-cum-owners love to hate the most is the one between kitchen and dining room, far and away. Opening a kitchen and dining room into one larger, brighter space holds particular appeal for those who enjoy gathering family and friends to entertain at their homes, without isolating the cook/host.

The next most common wall people crave to eliminate is a wall between two small bedrooms.

Now, agents and appraisers will tell you that turning two small bedrooms into one poses the potential to decrease the resale value of a home – and that’s true. But if you’re not planning to sell anytime soon, it might be worthwhile doing it anyway, especially if it renders two barely usable rooms into one user-friendly space. And in fact, this wall is often relatively inexpensive to remove – and to replace, if you decide to do so.

In fact, removing walls, even structural walls, is highly feasible and much less expensive than many home owners assume. (If a load-bearing wall is removed, the structural component can often be preserved and finished, by simple leaving a beam at the ceiling.) What can jack the price up is the relocation of plumbing or wiring contained in the wall being removed. Reconnecting interruptions in flooring and adding in things like an island or the other remodeling line items that can go along with opening a kitchen up (e.g., adding an island, new cabinets and counters, etc.) can also add up. Check with a reputable local contractor to consult on how such a project can be planned and executed efficiently.

3. Swap out the old windows for dual-paned. This is one of those $10K-ish projects that actually can pay for itself over time. Switching out your old single paned windows for new dual-paned ones might make your home look better, but it will definitely make your home operate more efficiently – and more comfortably. Dual-paned windows minimize heat-loss in the winter and keep the cool air in, in the summer, so you’re not trying to heat up and cool down the whole outdoors through the leaks in your windows. They’re also a must if you have street noise or other noise challenges around your home; the extra insulation traps noise before it can get to you, inside your home.

As with everything, costs vary by location and by the quality of window you choose, but you can use $200-300/window, installed, as a rough rule of thumb. Some older homes can require wood repair of rotted out window frames, in the course of switching to dual-paned, which can increase the project cost significantly. Also, many cities and states offer rebates for installing dual paned windows (and making other energy-efficient upgrades, by the by), which can dramatically defray the costs of this particular remodeling project.

4. Extend your living areas outdoors. The National Outdoor Kitchen and Fireplace Association pegs the average cost of an outdoor kitchen at $12,000 to $15,000 on average – so, if you can cut costs, find appliances on sale or do some of the work yourself, you might just be able to get one in your own backyard for the $10,000 price point. Outdoor kitchens can be as simple as a table and grill, or as complex as having wood-burning ovens, refrigerators and big-screen televisions. Whatever route you go, the appliances are likely to be the single most expensive line-item of an outdoor kitchen. If you can tolerate the high-class problem of bringing your food from indoors, you can very cost-effectively create an outdoor living room complete with weather-proof furniture and lighting, in your backyard instead.

The major remodeling return-on-investment indices don’t track the return on outdoor living spaces, but experience tells me that well-executed outdoor kitchen and living rooms are both extremely fun to live with – and extremely desirable to the buyers to whom you will eventually be marketing your home.

5. New kitchen appliances. In terms of sheer functionality, new kitchen appliances can create an overwhelming upgrade to your family’s everyday life. A new fridge will run you anywhere from $350 to $2,000 on average (though French door, custom and commercial versions can cost upwards of $10,000 or more); a new stove/oven range can run anywhere from $300 to $6,000 (with the commercial, 40-inch ranges running from $9,000 to $20,000+) and an appliance store dishwasher will cost you somewhere around $250 to $1,600.

6. Swap out your carpet. Listen, you might LOVE carpet. And if you do, that’s fantastic. But many Americans are living with carpet they really, really dislike, whether because of its color, its condition or the upkeep and maintenance it requires. If you have $10K and you can’t stand your carpet, you can estimate that it’ll run you about $300-$500 per room to replace it with new carpet, or $1500-$2000 per room to replace it with hardwood, depending – obviously – on where you live, how large your rooms are and what specific materials you choose in terms of the replacement floors.

7. Bring a bathroom into this millennium. The average cost of a bathroom remodel in America is right around $16,000, according to Remodeling Magazine, but that lumps master bathrooms in with powder rooms and the like. I say there are dozens of things you can do to your hall or other bathrooms to bring them into the 21st century for well under the $10,000 mark. For example, my Jacuzzi tubs are probably the most-used “appliances” in my home – homewyse.com pegs the average cost of swapping your tub for a jetted one at somewhere between $1500 and $3500.

In fact, there are a number of thousand-dollar-or-less bathroom power-tweaks suggested by Consumer Reports – if you’re committed and smart, you can group a number of them into a bathroom that feels like new for well under $10,000:

• Replace the vanity with a new wood model that has a stone counter.
• Add a new mirror and faucet. Alternatively, keep your current vanity but replace your toilet and faucet and add a new vinyl floor.
• Improve lighting and ventilation with a new combination light and exhaust fan. One with a heat setting will keep you from getting chilled when you get out of the shower.
• Add a set of sconces on either side of the mirror or medicine cabinet.
• Update towel bars, hooks, toothbrush and toilet paper holders, and cabinet hardware. Add matching shelves for your towels and toiletries.
• Switch your standard showerhead to one with multiple settings, including a pulsating or massage setting.
• Keep your towels toasty with a heated towel bar, some of which cost $100 or less.

8. Build in organizing systems. Clutter is an energy vampire – there’s nothing like having a place for everything and everything in its place to create the sense that your life is in control. And one of the most significant advantages to owning your own home is that you can customize it to manage your stuff and your activities, rather than being forced to fit your things into someone else’s system. If you have $10K in hand to make your home more ‘you,’ consider having custom organizing systems built into your closet, office, pantry or garage, tailored to your family’s stuff and needs.

The range of pricing here is vast, depending on whether you buy an off-the-shelf closet organizer at the home improvement store and install it yourself or call California Closets out to measure your shoes and sporting goods and input them into a custom design, complete with hydraulics.

9. Paint. A few years back, there was a study on what home improvements actually could be linked to an increase in happiness and well-being. One of the most affordable was to simply paint the rooms of your home in colors that fostered the target emotions that map to the function of the room. For instance, painting a bedroom a soft blue or green fosters tranquility and rest, while painting a kitchen or dining room a warmer shade might promote the cozy fuzzy feelings of family togetherness. Painting can be very affordable, depending on your home’s size and details, and is a great starter do-it-yourself project, to boot.

Here’s a personal cost-cutting tip: pick your colors from the designer paint swatches, but have the paint department staff use more affordable paint when they custom-mix the colors to mix.

10. Connect your home. When so-called “smart home” systems first came out, they were the stuff of an MTV Cribs episode, costing tens of thousands of dollars to put various home systems on a remote control. But as with all technologies, costs of connecting your home have come down – a lot. For anywhere from $200 to $2,000, you might be able to have your home’s systems wired so that you can:

• Control lighting, heating and AC remotely
• Have your HVAC systems and window coverings, for example, work in sync
• Monitor your home via video and sensors for security and other home crises (e.g., flood, etc.), no matter where you are.

The best part? Even the least expensive of these systems now is able to be run via a smartphone app. Home security providers are increasingly offering these options, and even some home internet/telephone providers have also gotten into the business of affordably connecting your home.

If you’re considering making a modest investment in a home you plan to own for a while, you’re increasingly in the norm. Studies show that over 50% of homeowners are now focusing on smaller home improvement projects that increase their enjoyment of their homes - even if they don't increase its value.

Another tip toward -- Life. Lived Well.
Excerpt Trulia 2012 By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

All: Do you fall into this group? What $10,000-or-less projects have you done at home that boosted your enjoyment?

It's Here! Market Within A Market - Snapshot of West Los Angeles

Your source for a great snapshot for a review of market trends from September to January in the Los Angeles area.

If you would like to request a specific area, please email us at Moradifar Group. Please share it with your friends, family or coworkers also!


Market Within A Market