By By Jennifer Lade
Bulletin correspondent
February 24, 2012 6:22 PM
Homeowners looking to sell their house have a competitive buyer’s market to contend with. Many are finding an edge with home staging, the art and science of presenting one’s home so that prospective buyers can see themselves living there.
While real estate agents and professional home stagers agree that simple cleanliness is a must, there is more dispute about how far to go after that.
“Every single type of house needs some type of staging,” said Blair Hamaty, executive managing officer of Setting the Space, a Plymouth-based home staging company. “A professional stager needs to come in and be able to depersonalize the house to turn it into a commodity.”
Staging is more than de-cluttering and taking down personal photos, Hamaty said. It entails rearranging or changing furniture to make a room look bigger, painting and fixing problems with the house that a prospective buyer would notice.
Setting the Space has staged more than 2,500 homes worth more than $1 billion total, Hamaty said. It has its own warehouse of home furnishings, which it can use in clients’ homes if necessary and desired. Costs can range from as little as $500 to as much as $20,000 based on how much work the house needs and how thorough homeowners want to be.
Hamaty said that homes that are staged sell faster than unstaged homes and the cost of staging is always less than the home’s first price reduction. In other words, he said, it’s worth the money.
“Staging is still being done by a very small market,” he said. “Anybody who jumps on board of staging a house is way ahead of the competition.”
A study by Stagedhomes.com showed that homes that were staged by an Accredited Staging Professional were on the market for 80 percent less time than homes that were not staged by an ASP. The staged homes also sold for 7.9 percent to 25 percent more money depending upon the home’s market, price range and neighborhood.
Still, for many prospective sellers, having to pay for professional staging seems daunting or unnecessary. For those who can’t afford a professional home stager, many sellers’ agents offer the service free of charge as part of their package.
Lori Nery, a Realtor, broker and owner at Coastal Realty, said she stages her client’s homes herself.
“Before home staging, cleanliness is superb. It has to be clean and neat,” Nery said. If care has been taken to dust, vacuum, scrub bathrooms, pick up clutter and open up aisles for easily moving around the house, the sellers are on the right track.
“Clean first … then if you can afford to do the home staging, then that’s great,” she said.
Nery said she gives all her clients a home staging book and checklist that helps them see why lighting a candle on the table can help or why it might be best that their extensive bottle cap collection is packed away before an open house.
Nery also uses creativity to keep a house she stages looking pristine, offering seller’s children incentives for keeping their rooms clean and the house damage-free. She once promised two teenage boys a $100 gift card not to destroy the recently-repaired garage doors with their basketball, as they had done in the past.
“The house was sold and I lived up to my promise,” Nery said. Everybody was happy.”
The bottom line in Nery’s eyes? Unless the house is vacant, staging is not a necessity. Keeping a clean home and setting aside time for a few do-it-yourself home projects can increase the value of one’s home, even without a professional stager.
“You just have to speak with a seasoned realtor who’s sold a lot of homes and knows what people are looking for,” she said. “We see it all day long and we know how to get the house ready.”
At Bold Moves Real Estate, home staging is still part of the package, but it is done by a professional home stager — Christal Lanagan — who has her Accredited Staging Professional designation. She is paid by Bold Moves to do an initial consultation with each of the real estate agency’s clients.
“You want the buyer to come in and see the home as a place where they can live,” said Lanagan, who works out of the Bold Moves office in Rochester but has her own independent staging company, Christal Clear.
After the initial consultation, Lanagan gives homeowners quotes, and they can decide whether to hire her for a few small jobs or a complete overhaul.
For Bold Moves’ clients at least, home staging has paid off.
“The houses have absolutely sold faster and for higher prices having been home staged,” said Bold Moves owner Kate Flanagan.
Was a professional stager a necessity for this success? Flanagan says yes. Staging a house can be a painful process for some homeowners, who are emotionally attached to their homes and might take offense to some of the suggestions. Having the home stager be a third-party expert lends legitimacy to the suggestions and preserves the agent-seller relationship.
“Just as I wouldn’t give legal advice and I wouldn’t give mortgage advice, I wouldn’t give home staging advice,” Flanagan said.

By Scott Van Voorhis

Banker & Tradesman columnist

• A surge of low-ball appraisals threatens to tank what’s left of the tattered home sales market, both here in the Bay State and across the country.

Just over half of all agents polled by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors in a recent survey reported that sales in their offices have taken a hit as a result of rock-bottom appraisals. That’s actually worse than the national numbers, which are already disturbingly high.

As many as 16 percent of all home sales fell through in June, up from 9 percent in June 2010, the National Association of Realtors recently reported. And low-ball appraisals were the main culprit, the trade group contends.

Sadly, home appraisers have become the easy fall guys for this. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the real bad guys here – skittish bankers who have become increasingly allergic to all things real estate since the dark days of September 2008.

“‘I can never get in trouble for too low of an appraisal, but I can get in trouble if I come in too high,’” Gary Rogers, a broker with RE/MAX On the Charles in Waltham, recalls being told by one fed-up appraiser. “The appraisers are running for cover.”

After doling out mortgages like so many poker chips during the bubble years – a time when no appraisal ever came in too high – banks and other lenders today have become completely paranoid about mundane levels of real estate risk. Now no appraisal report can come in too low, and the appraisers full well know it.

Horror Stories

A growing number of stories are now emerging of home sales torpedoed at the last minute after bizarrely low appraisals that defy conventional real estate logic.

Laurie Cadigan, MAR’s president and broker owner of Barrett & Co. in Concord, had a sale of a colonial in Concord fall through after the appraiser brought in by the bank pegged the value at $700,000. The house was on the market for $829,000 and the seller had multiple offers before moving ahead with a buyer.

Turns out, the appraiser used comparable sales that didn’t match up at all, including a tear-down in another part of town.

The house went on the market again and quickly got interest from a new buyer with financing from another bank. A second appraiser, using a different set of comps, came to a much different conclusion, pegging the value at slightly above the $829,000 listing price.

“It’s frightening,” Cadigan said of the huge gap between the two different assessments.

Rogers, the RE/MAX agent in Waltham, recently suffered a serious appraisal shock of his own.

Things appeared to be going swimmingly for his client, who was trying to sell her childhood home in the Warrendale section of Waltham. Perched in a quiet, “Leave it to Beaver” type neighborhood, the 1930s era, three-bedroom, two-bath colonial got three offers.

Rogers’ seller settled on a $448,000 offer – with a two car garage, an unusual feature in the neighborhood, helping seal the deal.

But the appraisal, when it came in, threw a monkey wrench into the whole process, pegging the house’s value at only $430,000.

Irate, Rogers took a closer look and discovered the comps used included the sale of a Cape-style home nearly a mile across town in a commercial district, far from the cozy Warrendale neighborhood. He protested to the bank, to no avail.

In the end, the buyers, a young couple just starting out, coughed up an extra $9,000 while the sellers dropped their price by $8,000.

“It just boggled my mind there was no recourse on this,” Rogers fumed.

And Lori Nery, broker owner of Coastal Realty in New Bedford, said she has encountered a couple appraisal surprises, too.

Selling a house in Dartmouth, she knew she was in for trouble when the appraiser showed up from Boston and seemed surprised to find out the house in question was near the ocean.

Never having been to Dartmouth, he had seen fields on his drive in and was under the impression the coastal town was a rural town farther inland.

Paranoia Runs Deep

Appraisers often appear to be “pulled out of a hat,” Nery noted. “If you are a mile from the beach, that is great in our area. He just took it as an area with farms. He really didn’t do his homework.”

Even agents who say they have not run into a problem yet, like Lesley Palmiter, a sales associate in the Newton office of William Raveis, are scrambling to stay ahead of potential appraisal problems before they hit.

“It’s a big problem,” Palmiter said, adding “it hasn’t happened to me, knock on wood.”

And if the numbers and horror stories look bad now, just wait. Things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Locally, the trend of deals falling through thanks to rock-bottom appraisals has been a factor since the recession hit in 2008. But the paranoia on part of lenders, if anything, appears to be worsening.

Banks and other lenders are running scared again, with the turmoil in Washington and the roller coaster ride on Wall Street stoking fears that another 2008-style financial crisis may be brewing.

About 20 percent of agents surveyed by MAR reported three or four sales in their offices having been skewed or cancelled because of low-ball appraisals. Roughly another 9 percent have seen as many as five to 10 home sales go south after lower than expected appraisals, while another 4 to 5 percent have seen 10 or more deals blown up.

“I don’t see the pendulum coming back at all,” MAR’s Cadigan said.

Massachusetts single-family homes sales for June dropped to the lowest level for that month since 1991, but those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

According to a report from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, single-family home sales slid 23.5 percent in June, the fifth straight month of double-digit percentage decreases (with 4,313 sold, down from 5,639 a year earlier). That number marks the worst June since 1991 (4,243), in what is typically a brisk month for sales. The report also noted that year-to-date home sales from January to June were down 20 percent from 2010.

However — comparing this year’s sales figures to last year’s may be an “apples to oranges” comparison, say some in the industry, because last year’s numbers were inflated due to the homebuyer tax credits, which ended in June 2010.

Also, while the number of sales is down — prices have gone up for the second straight month, according to the report, with the median sale price of single-family homes statewide at $325,850 in June 2011 (up from $325,000 in June 2010).

Locally — that increase was even greater. Lori Nery, president of the Greater New Bedford Association of Realtors and owner of Coastal Realty, said the median sale price in June in the cities/towns covered under her board’s office was $230,000 — up from $210,000 in that month last year.

“I was floored by that,” said Nery, who had expected a lower number when compared to last June, the last month of the homebuyer tax incentives.

“The number of sales had gone down, maybe about 10 percent below (June of 2010),” she said. “But what we are showing is that although there are fewer buyers on the market, the ones that were buying are actually starting to step up a bit and the prices are starting to climb.”

John R. Buckley Jr., Register of Deeds for Plymouth County, said property values have held steady. Using the most recently available numbers (from July 2011), he said the average sale price for the January-July period was $310,590, up from $301,075 during the same period last year.

In Plymouth County, reports (which include all sales and refinances, and do not distinguish between residential and commercial), indicated an 18 percent decrease in sales volume for January through June in 2011 (when compared to the same period in 2010). In that period, the average sales price increased by 2 percent and the average mortgage amount increased by 3 percent.

The Bristol County Registry of Deeds Southern District (which includes New Bedford, Westport, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, and Acushnet), saw the number of mortgages decrease in June (311) when compared to last June (459 recorded), and the number of deeds decreased (270 this June, versus 317 recorded last June). But the Bristol County office saw fewer foreclosure deeds — 30 recorded in June versus 50 in that month last year.

Buckley said there have been fewer foreclosures in 2011 in Plymouth County, as well — a 44 percent decrease in foreclosure deeds, and a 31 percent decrease in foreclosure notices, for the January through July period.

“I’ve seen reports that because of all the inventory, that the national lenders now are better than they were at doing modifications or allowing short sales,” Buckley said.

Buckley noted that the total sales volume reported by Plymouth County includes sales by foreclosure deed. In the first half of 2010, 828 sales, or 21 percent of total volume were by foreclosure deed. Through June of this year, 462 foreclosure deeds were recorded, accounting for 14 percent of total sales.

In early August, the Federal Reserve vowed to keep interest rates low for at least two years.

“The fact of the matter is the Federal Reserve (August 9) guaranteed the lowest possible rates through 2013, and there are so many people who just can’t take advantage of it,” Buckley said, noting the impact on mortgages based on tightening of standards by lenders, and the fact that many people are under water in their mortgages and can’t refinance. “It’s pretty sad.”

“But those low guaranteed rates are certainly going to solidify the mortgage market for a while,” he said.

Added Nery, “If we can keep more foreclosures off the market we can make the whole situation so much better. I think news of the interest rates was really what a lot of homebuyers were waiting for.”

Nery said she has noticed that banks seem more willing to lend recently. She also said homebuyers are much more educated now. “I think what this has all taught us is that the new buyers on the market have saved more than the old buyers,” she said. “Before there was 100 percent financing, they had nothing vested. They had nothing invested in the house so if they ended up not being able to pay it they just walked away like it was a rental.”

But when a buyer puts down 3 to 5 percent of the cost, “they have a significant investment, so they make a point to make their payment on time and balance their budget.”

“Buyers have been more serious and qualified and they don’t want to do what the people before them did, and lose their houses,” she said. “I see a really good buyer on the rise, a much more educated buyer.”

Globe Staff/ October 2, 2011

“If your dream is to have a spectacular waterfront house, now is the best time to buy,’’ Bethune said.

Davis Rowley, sales manager at Hammond Residential Real Estate in Cambridge, said that of six offers he recently received for a property, three were in cash. He said some sellers are more willing to reduce their prices if they don’t have to worry about a buyer’s financing situation or a low appraisal scuttling the sale. As lenders have grown more conservative in an effort to avoid the kinds of mistakes that led to the subprime mortgage crisis, the loan process can take months to complete.

“It’s a huge headache taken off the plate,’’ Rowley said of cash offers.

Tracy Campion, owner of the high-end Newbury Street real estate agency Campion & Co., said many of her clients buy homes with cash to speed the sales, and later apply for a loan. “They say, `We are all cash and we want to close,’ ’’ Campion said. “The sellers like that. They expect no mortgage contingencies on a high-end deal.’’

It’s not just pricey deals that are being completed without mortgage brokers and appraisers. In Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood plagued by foreclosures and a steep drop in home values during the last several years, more than half of the property sales so far this year have been made with cash, according to Warren Group data.

For developer Silvian Robinson, using cash to buy real estate is nothing new. Robinson said that’s how he’s been purchasing abandoned and foreclosed homes in Roxbury and Dorchester for two decades. After making repairs and renovations to the properties, he eventually sells them at a profit. Robinson said he performs an important service because many first-time homeowners cannot get financing themselves to purchase run-down homes and make them livable.

But even though he is able to buy homes at deep price cuts, selling them remains a challenge in the current market. “I’m getting a lot of good deals, but I’m holding them longer,’’ Robinson said.

Dorchester developer Michael Stella said lenders generally shy away from selling foreclosed homes to people who need a mortgage because there is more risk of complications. Homeowners needing financing are largely barred from foreclosure auctions because the deals need to be finalized within 30 days. That’s usually not enough time to secure a loan, Stella said.

Stella’s strategy is to buy and rehab a home and then rent it out. Typically, he doesn’t seek a loan until after a property is renovated. As prices have dropped in recent years, Stella said, he has been buying more homes.

“When the bottom dropped out and the same units were back on the market, they became worth one third of what they sold for,’’ he said.

Lori Nery, owner of Coastal Realty in New Bedford, said out-of-town investors have been inquiring about buying properties in the struggling coastal city, where nearly half of this year’s sales have been cash-only. “I think the word is out we are a good bargain,’’ Nery said.

Real estate agents said they are also hearing from more international investors interested in Boston-area properties. Shahan Missaghian, an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Brookline, said a growing number of Chinese investors are eager to pay cash for multifamily homes in Brighton. She said they are attracted by Brighton’s proximity to Boston College and Boston University, as well as other universities and hospitals.

Chinese investors are generally conservative, Missaghian said, but sometimes they take unusual factors into consideration. For example, one particular home was recently sought after simply because its street address features the digits “88,’’ a combination considered lucky by the Chinese.

“The feng shui has to be right,’’ Shahan said. “They are buying with cash.’’

After several years serving on GRNBAR committees and the Board of Directors, Lori will now serve as President for 2011.

A licensed Real Estate Broker in MA and RI, Lori has obtained the GRI (Graduate Realtor Institute), CBR, (Certified Buyers Representative), LMS (Loss Mitigation Specialist) and WHALE Historic Home Specialist designations during her career.

Mrs. Nery is a founding member of the New House Buyer’s Program and a member of the Massachusetts and National Association of REALTORS©.  Lori is a committee member of REALTORS© for Charity, a Relay for Life Team Coordinator, Habitat for Humanity Volunteer, Member of the Friends of Buttonwood Park, and the Buttonwood Park Zoological Society.  Lori Nery is a proud member and volunteer of the American Cancer Society and Heart Association.   CONGRATULATIONS !!

The Worst Home Improvements For The Money

Morgan Brennan, 02.11.11, 06:15 PM EST

Not long ago a new bathroom paid for itself when a home was sold. Not anymore.

Ten Worst Home Renovations For The Money

Ten Best Home Renovations For The Money

Such doors tend to recoup 102% of the construction cost when a home is sold. A front door made of fiberglass–which actually costs more to buy and install–won’t pay off nearly as well. It only pulls in 60% of its original cost.

The sad truth is that most home improvements are like fiberglass doors, and won’t come close to paying for themselves. Some projects–namely room additions and upscale remodeling–are just plain dollar drains, according to the 2010-2011 Cost Vs. Value report.

Ten Worst Home Renovations For The Money

Ten Best Home Renovations For The Money

The annual survey, conducted by Remodeling magazine in collaboration with the National Association of Realtors, compares construction cost estimates (provided by HomeTech Information Systems) with resale value estimates (provided by members of NAR) across the country for 35 mid-range and upscale home remodeling projects.

http://www.forbes.com/2011/02/11/home-improvements-personal-finance-best-payback.html

When marketing the home, the theory “the more eyes, the better” is not the best solution.  Use sources the sellers themselves would use when making purchases.

Nearly half of all home buyers looked online as the very first step in the home buying process.

 While the Internet has grown astronomically as a resource to buyers, real estate agents are actually the most useful source for buyers. While print newspaper advertisements are used by 36 percent of buyers only 24 percent found them useful to their home search.

 Buyers are using the internet to find the Open Houses to attend.

– National Association of Realtors©

Buying property is a complex and stressful task. In fact, it’s often the biggest single investment you will make in your lifetime. At the same time, real estate transactions have become increasingly complicated.

New technology, laws, procedures and the increasing sophistication of buyers and sellers require real estate practitioners to perform at an ever-increasing level of professionalism.

So it’s more important than ever that you work with an agent who has a keen understanding of the real estate business. The GRI program has helped the best and the brightest in the industry achieve that level of understanding.

GRIs are:

Nationally recognized as top performers in the real estate industry

Professionally trained

Knowledgeable

Dedicated to bringing you quality service

A GRI can make a difference

When you see the letters “GRI” after an agent’s name, you can count on receiving the knowledge and guidance you need to make your transaction go smoothly. In short, you can count on getting the best service available from a real estate professional.

Don’t you deserve the best?