We all know that traditionally, spring is the hottest season for real estate. Sales peak in the April to June period, soften into the summer, resurrect for September and October and then fall into the winter. Even this November of 2014, while sales are up over last November, they are down 18 per cent over October 2014. So does this mean that you shouldn’t try to sell your property in December? The short answer is no.

If you have to sell, take a hard look at selling when there is less competition – as in, now! Properties do sell in December. Some Realtors had their best month of sales in December.

That’s why you shouldn’t buy the standard myths:

- December is a bad month to sell and, what with the holidays, no one comes out looking;

- The average realtor has gone skiing (well, maybe); and

- Nobody buys over the season anyhow.

If you want to sell, think again. Realtors know (or ought to know) that, while you do not want to have anyone tromping through your home on Christmas Day, those that are out looking in December are serious buyer types. They are definitely into moving, and soon.

Since most sellers believe no one is looking, fewer homes are being put up for sale – ergo less competition. Competition to buy is less, buyers are more serious, and sellers know that an offer in December may not come around again until March. So, if you need to sell --- go against the trend and consider December.

Here are a few tips to help your property sell.

- List your property with a Realtor who is around over the holidays.

Tell them not to book appointments on the days when you want peace, such as Christmas/Boxing Day, etc., but you want Realtors to know that your home is for sale.

- Put up those sparkly lights, inside and out.

For a $40 investment, even the most tired-looking home can look great at night.

- Decorate that tree tastefully and put up a door wreath – early.

Remember that buyers are looking for a home ... nothing like conveying that homey feeling with presents under the tree.

- Use more splashes of red than green because red is an emotionally appealing and warm colour.

- Display elegant centerpieces made from pinecones or other wintry pieces of nature.

- Have that wonderful “baked cookie” scent.

Set a plate of cookies on the counter, next to festive paper napkins for prospective buyers. If you don't bake cookies, simmer a cinnamon stick and cloves in water before buyers come for a great aroma. Or simmer spicy apple cider on the stove, and set out cups and a ladle.

There is nothing like showing a home at its sparkling best. Go against the trend – consider December!

Take a peek inside six gorgeous Westside homes decorated in festive style and help support Kids Help Phone – there are six pairs of tour tickets to give away!

Lavish Westside Vancouver homes, sumptuously decorated for the holidays – what could be more festive than that? Well, how about a tour of those homes, organized in support of children in need?

Homes for the Holidays is running its 10th Anniversary Tour on November 28 and 29, and all proceeds of the tour go to Kids Help Phone, a charity that offers 24-hour confidential and anonymous telephone support for children, 365 days a year.

Click here for more information: http://www.rew.ca/news/win-tickets-to-homes-for-the-holidays-2014-tour-1.1593679

Moving is a headache, specially the organizing and boxing part ...... BUT THE HELP IS COMING! 

http://vancouverinthebox.com/

The Finishing Edge Contracting

Mike Neufeld

thefinishingedgecontracting@gmail.com

Cell: 778-241-6710

Other: 604-996-4336

Office Hours:

Monday – Saturday

(various/flexible times)

If you have any questions or would like to discuss possible contracts or prices, please contact us.

Full Service Junk Removal

1-800-GOT-JUNK? offers full-service junk removal for your home or business including offices, retail locations, construction sites, and more. Our friendly team is happy to meet all your junk hauling needs, including:

Household Junk Removal: appliance, refrigerator, furniture removal and more
Office Junk Removal: computer, printer and monitor recycling
General Junk Removal: leaf, rubbish, garbage removal alternative and more

Contact Us

To book a job, please call us at 1-800-468-5865.

According to Mike Blaney's article at REW.ca, these are the most useful apps for Realtors:

The key to marketing success lies in focus and consistency creating a meaningful message and repeating it to those most receptive to it. The following five tools, in no particular order, are a combination of technological time savers and organizational tools to make your marketing programs and client contact easier to manage. Any Realtor will find them useful.

#1 Dropbox

Dropbox is simply a great tool to share documents with others, and store all of the stuff you need to keep. It is called cloud storage and is like having a second hard drive to store documents and photos. It is secure, easy to use and can be a real time saver.

From a client perspective it is a great way for a photographer to provide photos for your listings and in turn you can share listing photos with your clients or website provider. You never have to worry about sending emails that bounce because the attachments are too large.

Instead of filling up the hard drive on your computer with contracts, addenda and other documents of your previously closed deals, they can be stored on a service like Dropbox. You can also use it to sync files between your home PC, office PC and iPad.

If you are getting design work done or printed materials have the designer share proofs and finished material in Dropbox so you can review them from any computer or smartphone and in turn share the folder with anyone else involved.

#2 Evernote

Evernote is a fantastic tool for information gathering and storage. For a Realtor it can be real time saver and streamline your marketing efforts. You can clip articles, websites, images and content from any website and store it for easy retrieval from any device and any place. Great for gathering content for blog posts.

Keep notes about every conversation in specific client notebooks. Group notes by buyer name in a buyer notebook and keep qualification notes, consultation notes, property tour notes, negotiation notes and transaction notes, as well as all associated documents in one place.

Create a customized property tour including the MLS sheet of all homes customers will preview. Include hyperlinks to the map and a calendar entry for the associated showing times right inside one single note.

Forward all client-related emails directly to your Evernote account for a complete repository of all communications with your buyer over the course of the buying lifecycle in one, easily searchable place.

You can even snap a photo of your handwritten notes and send it to your clients Evernote account for review later.

#3 MailChimp

The MailChimp newsletter program is one of the top email marketing service providers around and it is free up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers a month. It is used so widely I don't think anyone ever gives a second thought to the MailChimp branding at the bottom of your emails. With one of the most complete platforms available MailChimp has proven itself as an extremely useful and effective email marketing provider. It has great analytics for tracking emails. Lots of templates to choose from and importing client information is intuitive.

MailChimp is excellent for "drip" email campaigns where you create a series of four emails that go to your new prospects on a timed basis. After you have met someone add them to the mailing list and the first email can go out the next day. A second email can be sent a few days later explaining more about the service you offer, what you do and inviting them to join your newsletter mailing list.

You can also set up a market update newsletter template that you email monthly to your mailing list just changing the statistics each time, but retaining the same look and feel.

You can create a signup form which you can add to your website to manage newsletter signups. They enter their information and it goes directly into the mailing list.

#4 Google My Business

Formerly Google Places For Business or Google+ Local, Google My Business is a new platform that makes it easy to manage all of your Google accounts in one place and add in your real estate business hours, photos of your company, and information about your services. This will not only help you get found better through organic searches, but also get more visibility for your Google+ profile.

Setting up Google My Business can easily improve your online presence for real estate by keeping your business information centrally located for Google. And as long as you continue to follow SEO best practices for your real estate website and Google+ page, this will boost your brand awareness and search optimization.

If you want to be found in a Google search for Vancouver Realtor as an example, setting up a Google My Business account is a key step in the process.

#5 Hootsuite

Social media is now a must-have for good real-estate marketing, and managing your various channels becomes much easier with Hootsuite. Think of it as a dashboard where you can monitor everything going on in your social media accounts and you can post to one or all from one place. It lets you update and keep track of your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts all in one spot a huge time saver.

Hootsuite is particularly useful for Twitter. With Hootsuite, Twitter users can:

• Schedule tweets for specific times and dates.
• Tweet the same content from multiple Twitter accounts, simultaneously.
• Track retweets and mentions of user-selected hashtags or keywords.
• Track tweets that mention you or a topic you are interested in on any or all of your Twitter accounts.

There are many more tools out there, but these are the ones we feel are most practical for most Realtors. If you have any favourites, please share them in the comments below.

Hello Friends of i❤homes.ca, Please join our coloring contest!!!

Copy Paste this link in the URL

file:///C:/Users/Jessica%20Prasad/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/P0NOMUQ4/ilovehomes%20caBacktoSchool.html

Draw the outside, add your favorite Back to School characters, and decorate the inside with your own personal style, make it sparkle!!!

wins!  By entering the contest you are giving us permission to display your work on our facebook & twitter page

“Color your way Back to School”

www.ilovehomes.ca Coloring Contest

I love School!!

Email to info@ilovehomes.ca or text pic to 778.241.8946

All entries must be received by September 30, 2014 to be considered.

You've got equity to spare. Your 2,000 square feet is starting to feel more like 200. All the neighbors are doing it. It's time to play a game of Move-up Mania!

Homeownership isn't the American dream - moving up and up to get to the home you really want is, right? Is it time for you to play the game? Answer the following questions and find out.

1. How close are you to being free and clear

Depending on how long you have been in your house and whether or not you have been overpaying your mortgage, you might be closer to paying off your house than you thought. If it's a dream of yours to own a home outright, well, maybe you want to rethink the move-up thing. Or, you could look into renting your existing home. If rental rates in your area are strong, you may be able to rent it for more than your house payment and use the money you'll make to cover the difference in your new house payment.

2. Is staying in your existing neighborhood important?

Your kids may not appreciate the extra bedrooms or the pool out back if they have to move our of their schools and leave their friends behind. Make sure if you're making a move for the good of your family that you are in touch with what your family really wants.

3. Do you really need more space?

If you answered yes, do you need more space more than you need a college fund or a nest egg? It all comes down to priorities.

Yes, space is important. If you have more children than bedrooms, more stuff than you can store, or are in an older home that would be impossible and/or price prohibitive to enlarge and/or update, that's one thing.

If it's just a "Keeping up with the Joneses" thing, well, then there are a few other questions you'll want to ask yourself, like whether or not the Joneses will make your house payment if you get yourself in trouble by biting off more house than you can chew.

4. Do you want to do your part for the economy?

By most accounts, move-up buyers help move the economy along by stimulating the real estate cycle. More first-time buyer homes on the market means more first-time buyers. "The return of move-up buyers is good for the market as a whole," said MSN. "It brings more homes to the market, particularly much-needed starter homes, as these buyers trade up. It's also a good sign for the broader economy. An important sign of a healthy and sustainable recovery is increased housing turnover driven by trade-up buying, which is more or less discretionary spending. These buyers are typically more responsive to market conditions and financial incentives."

5. How much can you reasonably afford to increase your payment?

Even with equity in your existing home, you may still have increased costs once you move.

"Often times, we eyeball these things: rates are still good, you just got a raise, you can well afford your current payment, looks like your home is worth more now and those houses up the hill don't cost that much more," said Forbes. "There's a lot more to account for in this equation. You need to factor in what the actual increase in your mortgage payment will be, but also how much you'll net on your home, how much cash you'll need to close on your next one, and how much your utilities, property taxes, insurance and other home-related expenses might increase if you move up."

6. In many areas, ample equity makes the move up possible. But is a big step up doable in your desired neighborhood?

In some markets, the disparity between your starter home and the one you want to move up to is vast, and some move-up buyers simply can't make the leap.

"Move-up buyers (may not) have enough equity in their home or liquid cash to purchase another home," said CNBC. Fast-appreciating markets throughout the U.S. and even in Canada may be feeling the pinch.

"It's not just first-time buyers who are finding themselves priced out of fast-appreciating housing markets — the high price tag of properties is also starting to ‘paralyze' the move-up market," said The Star.

7. Should you stay put and renovate?

Whether to move or improve is always a difficult question, but "a few cost-benefit calculations can help you make the right decision," said Houselogic.

"As a general rule, improving costs less than trading up. But it depends on what kind of improvements you're doing," they said. "Figure paying somewhere between $100-$200/square foot for new construction or a major remodel, depending on the scope of the project and labor costs in your area."

If your move-up plan was predicated on not having enough space for family, it might be a smart decision to add on. Not only will you get the space you need, with a design created to your specifications and style, but you may also increase the value of your home. 

Source: Realty Times

Join me at the Bliss Music & Wellness Festival, I'll be handing out water for the charity event!! WHOOO HOOO!!!

When it comes to showing a home it is highly recommended that the Sellers leave the home BEFORE a buyer is due to arrive. At least walk around the block or something, but don’t under any circumstances be at the home! This is a huge turn-off to buyers. It is also something the other agent really hates. Agents don’t need your help to point out the great features of your home. The buyer’s agent knows what that particular buyer is looking for and will make sure to point out the items they know their buyer wants to see.  

There are a lot of reasons for the seller not to be home when it is shown. Below are the top four that I have found in my business.

• If the seller is home, the buyer can’t fully explore the home. The whole point is for the buyer to picture themselves living in the home and feeling like it could be theirs. If the seller is there, the buyer can’t do that.  The buyer needs to be comfortable opening cabinets, closets, etc. .. They need to picture their furniture in the home and how the home will work in their life.
  
  
• Buyers also need to be able to talk openly with their agent. They need to be able to express their thoughts and concerns. They may be thinking how a room is too small and therefore deciding the home is not for them. If they can express that to the agent, the agent may be able to offer suggestions like knocking out a wall to make the home perfect for them.  Maybe the colors are not what the buyer likes and some buyers need to be reminded that painting is a cheap fix to make the home what they want.
  
  
• When the seller is home the buyer also feels rushed. They may go through the home so fast that they don’t really even see it and remember it later in the day. Buyers are very intimidated by the seller being around and won’t spend the time needed to know if they like the home or not.  Most buyers won’t even go into the room a seller is in.. And even worse if they are playing tour guide, the buyer just wants to leave asap!
  
  
• And last, but certainly not least, is that sellers tend to talk too much. They give out way too much info that may hurt them when it comes to negotiating later. They may talk about how they have to move asap for a job and can’t afford to move until the home is sold. I even had a seller tell a buyer recently that they were moving out the next week. That is so dangerous! Now someone knows that in a week the home will be vacant! TMI is a real problem when the seller is present. I know the seller thinks they can give good reasons why the home is great, but they usually end up giving reasons why the home is not so great!

In the end, let the agents do their job. After all, that is what we are getting paid to do. :-)

Source: http://sheilanewtonteam.realtytimes.com/advicefromagents1/item/30558-four-reasons-to-get-out-of-your-house-mistakes-sellers-make-series