Selling your Cumming, GA house is a lot easier when you have an experienced professional relieving you of the lion’s share of the work. I spend full time dealing with the ins and outs of marketing, dealing with qualified prospective buyers, and making sure the Georgia and Cumming, GA technical requirements are met to the letter. That means that the lion’s share of what you need to deal with are the finishing touches of showings and open house presentations.

But long before any marketing can get under way; before an eye-pleasing Cumming, GA listing can be created—and even before a final choice the right REALTOR® is made—two formidable opponents have to be met and conquered. Taken individually, neither is nearly as imposing as when they team up. But when they work together, they can stall the initiation of any Cumming, GA house selling initiative for months—even years. Unfortunately, they’re always hanging around the house, waiting to cause trouble.
The villains are inertia and its helpmate, clutter.

Inertia is the force that pushes you back in your seat when your jetliner takes off. It’s the force that keeps the car moving after you’ve taken your foot off the gas. It’s the physical property of a body at rest (or in motion) that opposes a change in what is happening at the moment.

In the realm of homeownership, real estate inertia is the natural tendency to stay put in your familiar home setting. Rather than upsetting the applecart by striking out in a new direction, it’s the understandable propensity to leave well enough alone—even when the familiar home base is no longer as suitable a venue as it used to be.

This despite the fact that as our family or work or financial situations evolve, sooner or later most everyone will overcome house-related inertia and start thinking about selling and finding a better fit. That might be larger or smaller, grander or simpler, or simply more conveniently located. That’s when inertia’s partner comes into play to stop everything.

Clutter is all the stuff we’ve built up to make our lives more comfortable—and there is a lot of it we could do without. But the idea of actually addressing which things are disposable, and then actually disposing of them? Well, nobody in his or her right mind wants to tackle that (at least not right now).

To make a mathematical formula for this common phenomenon:
inertia + clutter = later

The foolproof strategy for overcoming the two scoundrels is to cut the clutter part down to size. Tackle one room at a time. It works. True, this involves overcoming a certain amount of inertia—but nothing like the mountain of the stuff that thinking about the whole household full of the stuff involves.

My i + c = l formula probably might not be included in any physics textbooks, but it’s a good one to remember as soon as you begin to think about selling your own Cumming, GA house. Also good to remember around the same time is to give me a call!

This Cumming GA Real Estate blog is hosted by Gayle Barton of BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY HomeServices Georgia Properties.

I specialize in Real Estate sales in the following Forsyth County, North Fulton County and East Cobb cities: Cumming, Suwanee, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Duluth, Milton, and Roswell. Other areas are serviced by request.

Gayle Barton South Forsyth Real Estate | Cumming GA Real Estate
Gayle Barton Cumming GA Real Estate | South Forsyth Real Estate

When the goals motivating the parties in a negotiation—including Cumming, GA real estate negotiations—are understood by all concerned, the odds for success are greatly improved. In most cases where the negotiation is between a buyer and seller of Cumming, GA real estate, the goals are straightforward enough that it doesn’t seem to require much attention. Yet with a negotiation as weighty as the buying and selling of a home, stripping down the motivations common to the various parties can be a clarifying exercise. Here is what you might call a negotiation matrix:

When a buyer puts together an offer, more often than not their mental decision-making process goes something like this:

— — — — — — — — — BUYER — — — — — — — —
I do not want to lose this house ?|?I want to pay as little as possible
— — — — — — — — — —— — — — — — — — — — —

The reason for the colliding arrows is that the two goals run the risk of conflicting with one another. If the buyer’s offer is too low, another buyer could come in to swoop up the property, and: game over. If the offer is higher than would turn out to be acceptable to the seller, the second goal will have been needlessly sacrificed.

At the same time and on the other side, the seller is usually thinking:

— — — — — — — — — —— — — — — — — — — — —
I want to complete the sale?|?I want to bank the full asking price (or higher!)
— — — — — — — — — — SELLER— — — — — — — — — — —

It’s quite similar to the buyer’s mental process. Both are calculations of the risk vs. reward that making an offer and responding to an offer entails.

When a buyer makes a lowball offer, it signals to the seller that the “don’t want to lose this house” side is probably losing out to the “pay the least” side of the buyer’s calculation. If the seller is leaning toward the “complete the sale” side of his or her own calculation, the offer will either be accepted or countered with a significant discount. If the current inclination is more toward the “full price” side, the counter may contain just a minor discount.

This negotiation matrix is the barest of bare-bones reductions. In practice, it’s often a little more complicated. Offers often contain details about desired maintenance corrections or may be dependent upon outside factors (like selling their current home); counter-offers, likewise.

Where a possible negotiation can needlessly go off the rails is if either party becomes emotionally threatened by an offer or counter. And believe me, it can happen! What’s vitally important is that each side understands that the other’s goals are legitimate, even though at odds with their own. A lowball offer may be misguided, but it’s not evil. A refusal to counter at all is, likewise, a statement of a legitimate bargaining position. Either may be disappointing, but neither is necessarily evidence of bad faith.

It’s my job to help my buying and selling clients chart a course through the negotiation rapids while avoiding such emotional cross-currents. At best, they are a needless distraction; at worst, obstacles that can prevent a meeting of minds. Appreciating the legitimacy of everybody’s motivations before the actual numbers start to fly is a good way to prepare. And, as usual, calling me is another prudent idea!

In the Terminator movies, a robot from the future (Arnold Schwarzenegger) hunts down the human heroine in order to change the future by altering the past. Although that’s actually the present. It’s complicated.

Although generally considered science fiction, the same thing is happening right now in the realm of Cumming, GA home appraisals! Now, before any Cumming, GA readers panic, there’s no immediate danger to the community. The authorities have the situation well in hand; in fact, the robot in question has already been hauled into court. There’s certainly nothing that could affect any individual Cumming, GA homeowner…that is, unless your own house is about to be entered into the Cumming, GA listings.
First, about the robot: this is not the Terminator (Arnold) himself. In real life, he is in no way the fictional robot character who was the antagonist/protagonist featured in the Terminator movies.

Neither is the robot that lurks in some online listings: the home appraisal robot. It, too, is nothing to fear, even though it has probably already visited your house without your knowledge. This robot comes from the Zillow website, and its name is “Zestimate.” It means no harm and is doing the best an automated home estimate robot could be expected to do. Any unintended consequences of what happens when it visits your house are, as the phrase indicates, unintentional.

About that court case: the online information company Zillow publishes a dollar figure that its robot calculates for most U.S. home addresses. It is featured as its “Zestimate” of a property’s market value. An Illinois realty lawyer has sued them because she claims that in her case that number is so low and off-kilter that it has materially hampered the sale of her condominium. State law has it that nobody can publish an appraisal without permission of the property’s owner. Zillow says that the $ number it calls its “Zestimate” is not an appraisal at all: instead, it’s an “estimated market value.” Who wins the court case is yet to be determined.
How this might affect your own Cumming, GA home is because prospective buyers might visit Zillow to see what the robot thinks your own property is worth, and be slightly misled. Zillow admits that, compared with actual sale prices, their Zestimate number has a median error rate of 5% (not bad)—but that it’s only within twenty percent 89.7% of the time. A 20% error would be terribly misleading; especially when it happens more than one out of ten times.

The fact is, this robot doesn’t come from the future like the Terminator. Its numbers are based solely on publicly recorded information, which may be outdated, incorrect, or, most likely, unable to factor in anything other than basic square footage and general comps. What the Zestimate cannot account for are things like how upgraded, or outdated, or depressingly dark, or delightfully light, or traffic-noise heavy, or majestically awe-inspiring the subject property actually is in comparison to the comps used to calculate the Zestimate. When human beings aren’t involved at all, the subject property itself is not actually compared. I think there is room for this kind of automated approach. It can be fun and interesting to look around a neighborhood to see how various individual properties fare, even if the numbers aren’t to be taken too seriously. As the name implies, it’s really just an estimate.

But when the time comes to actually sell your own Cumming, GA home or to start looking in earnest for a house you will be calling home for many years, that’s no time to rely on anything less than comparables and guidance researched by a living, breathing real estate professional. In other words, when the information needs to be right—call me!

This Cumming GA Real Estate blog is hosted by Gayle Barton of BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY HomeServices Georgia Properties.

I specialize in Real Estate sales in the following Forsyth County, North Fulton County and East Cobb cities: Cumming, Suwanee, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Duluth, Milton, and Roswell. Other areas are serviced by request.

Gayle Barton South Forsyth Real Estate | Cumming GA Real Estate
Gayle Barton Cumming GA Real Estate | South Forsyth Real Estate

You’d think that the whole notion of the American Dream is vague enough that it would be immune from challenge, and for the most part, that’s still true enough. Not so for its principal emblem, which most Forsyth County residents would agree is owning your own home. Being free to work hard to reach that goal—no matter who you are or how humble your origins—has long been the leading sign that the Dream is alive and kicking.

Even so, lately it’s been getting hard to ignore some media discussions that seem to challenge homeownership’s legitimacy as a pillar of that whole American Dream notion. Simply put, the suggestion is that the financial benefits to be had from owning your own home are no longer valid—or at least, that they are growing less valid.

There’s no arguing that there are many situations where renting makes more financial sense than does buying. Most of them are related to the expected duration of residence. As The New York Times observes, “Buying tends to be better the longer you stay” if only because the upfront costs are spread out over many years. In one of its Upshot commentaries, the Times presents a calculator which adds up “Initial,” “Recurring,” and “Opportunity Costs” for various rent and buy situations in order to show at what monthly rental dollar amount “renting is better.”

Sorry, Times. Your calculator may accurately display the tradeoffs in dollar costs—but it overlooks one factor that can ultimately prove to be the most significant. It’s the real-life factor that is built in whenever Forsyth County families decide to graduate from renting to buying. It begins to take form with the first dollar saved for a starter home down payment and continues until the last mortgage check clears the bank.

You can call it “enforced savings”—but whatever its name, in addition to the emotional benefits of owning your home, a measurable infusion of financial independence is the usual outcome. For example, when the Federal Reserve last reported “Changes in U.S. Family Finances” during the years from 2010-2013, it found that although median incomes fell 5%, “the median net worth of homeowners increased 4%, whereas that of renters or other non-homeowners did not change.”

If the American Dream is one of self-reliance and independence, then owning your Forsyth County home isn’t likely to disappear as its leading goal anytime soon. It’s one of the greatest parts of my job to help clients turn that distant dream into today’s reality. It’s a process that starts with a simple call to my office!

 
This Cumming GA Real Estate blog is hosted by Gayle Barton of BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY HomeServices Georgia Properties.

I specialize in Real Estate sales in the following Forsyth County, North Fulton County and East Cobb cities: Cumming, Suwanee, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Duluth, Milton, and Roswell. Other areas are serviced by request.

Gayle Barton South Forsyth Real Estate | Cumming GA Real Estate
Gayle Barton Cumming GA Real Estate | South Forsyth Real Estate

The science of pricing a house to sell fast in the Cumming, GA real estate market isn’t really a science… It’s an ART!!

The thing about science that makes it reliable is that its findings can be confirmed experimentally. If Galileo drops a feather and a lead weight from the Tower of Pisa to prove something about gravity, anyone else can trot right up there and repeat the experiment. If the results are always the same, we’re in the realm of science.

Pricing Cumming, GA houses may not be pure art, but it’s a cinch it’s not science, either. You can’t repeat a pricing experiment because no two Cumming, GA houses are exactly alike (even the same models in a development are situated differently). And even if you sold the same house two times, the pool of possible buyers is changing all the time; the competitive landscape as represented in the moment’s Cumming, GA listings, likewise; even the news of the day can affect the sales climate.

Further muddying the waters is the emotional component most of us feel for the places we call home. Even after the most dispassionate Cumming, GA homeowner has shed any such baggage, there remain two distinct ways to value a home. There is the value it can be sold for, and there is what it is worth to your own family. Hopefully, they aren’t terribly different; but in any case, it’s the former that’s important when it comes to selling.

Once we accept that no pricing strategy can be confirmed experimentally, the best procedure is to follow some general guidelines that have wide acceptance. I advise my clients to approach the pricing of their Cumming, GA house in several ways—

• Canvass the market the same way your future buyers will. See what comparable properties have sold for recently and the asking prices currently listed. Determine where yours belongs. This is one place where my research will be a major help.
• Once you’re satisfied that you know the range where your property fits, look for “holes” in that range. Many times there will be a noticeable gap in asking prices within your range—and one good strategy is to become the lone listing that fills it.
• Once you’ve arrived at a price that seems right, another strategy is to lower it to the next “99” number. If pricing your house led you to a $405,000 asking price, consider notching it down to $399,999. Everybody knows what you’re doing, but it’s such common practice that people don’t regard it as a ruse. It is worth doing because human beings can’t help but react to that second price as if it’s significantly lower!
• Consider how buyer’s actually search. (Ask me and I’ll illuminate this option!)

Pricing your Cumming, GA house properly is just one of the many steps that go into a successful sales campaign. Give me a call to chat about your own situation and goals: there’s never a charge nor any obligation for sharing the latest market information!

This Cumming GA Real Estate blog is hosted by Gayle Barton of BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY HomeServices Georgia Properties.

I specialize in Real Estate sales in the following Forsyth County, North Fulton County and East Cobb cities: Cumming, Suwanee, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Duluth, Milton, and Roswell. Other areas are serviced by request.

Gayle Barton South Forsyth Real Estate | Cumming GA Real Estate
Gayle Barton Cumming GA Real Estate | South Forsyth Real Estate