Boise Real Estate Blog

Staging Your Boise Home to SELL! Part 2 of 6

Photos taken from ssorganizing.com

The second C we are going to talk about is Clutter. From the front yard to the back gate, get rid of everything that takes up space or anything that you can live without. Likely, you're moving into your new home soon, so why not start packing now? Depersonalize and declutter to create an inviting environment that appeals to varied tastes and styles.
Home buyers are looking for cabinets, closets and kitchen space. Home sellers need to reduce, reduce, reduce! An over packed living room is a red flag to buyers that your home lacks storage space. Pack up unnecessary items and furniture and move it your garage or a nearby storage facility. Clear the way for a sale by letting buyers see your square footage, not your personal belongings. Potential buyers love homes that have lots of storage space. Since they will open your closets, it's a good idea to clear out unnecessary clutter, and organize your shelves to show off how much storage you really have. Plus, it gives you a chance to start packing, as you will definitely be moving once buyers see all that closet space.

Gina Thompson, Realtor, Advantage Real Estate Team

Staging Your Boise Home to SELL!

Six c’s to staging your home!

There are 6 C's to staging your home to sell. They are:
Curb
Clutter
Clean
Color
Consistency
Count

Each week we will be featuring each of these C's! So be sure to come back and check out the great tips!

Curb appeal. Stand across the street and critically evaluate your front yard. Is it weed free? Add new mulch if necessary. Trim the brushes. It will really freshen up the front of your home. Do you have flyers available? Seems small, but these are actually "biggies" in many neighborhoods where multiple homes are for sale. Remember that “outside” is the new “inside”. Don’t forget to address the outside spaces as additional spaces to entertain. Clean up the yard.

Gina Thompson, Realtor, Advantage Real Esatate Team, Keller Williams Realty Boise

New Construction in Ada County

672 Burney Glen, New Construction For Sale $334,000

While doing a little research on the market, I stumbled on some interesting stats on new construction. In the past five years the percentage new construction in the market was around 33%. Every year since 2001, the dollar volume of new construction in Ada County has increased by around 100 million. The exception was from 2004 to 2005 when the volume doubled from 688 million dollars to 1.2 billion and then dropped in 2006 to 1.09 billion dollars. Those numbers reflect the increase in new construction housing prices of 43%. The difference didn’t hit the bottom of the builders pocket either. Every facet of the cost to build a home went up dramatically including the cost of government for permits and fees. Don’t worry folks, new construction and development pays its own way.

Layoffs affect on Boise Real Estate

There haven’t been any encouraging news events on the job front. Albertsons is continuing to quietly move people out of Boise. It seems that Super Value doesn’t have the same corporate philosophy about requiring the vendors to have an office close to them. Most of the vendors that did move people here are slowly moving them away. The Washington Group has laid-off a good number of people and I hear rumors that Micron hasn’t finished its lay offs. It would be nice to have a new employer move into the valley. That would certainly help with absorption of the current glut of homes for sale in the Boise Real Estate Market

Inventory Drops in Boise Real Estate

Boise Real Estate

In last two weeks we had a substantial drop in housing inventory in Ada County. And surprisingly enough, we even had a positive article in the Idaho Statesman regarding Real Estate. It’s the first positive thing they have printed this year. The headline was “Ada County Real Estate Bottoms Out” or something close to that. Whether or not that headline is the correct forecast for our market is yet to be determined. Our team’s original forecast for a normal level of inventory was some time in the middle of 2009. It appears that was a pessimistic view of market conditions. If inventories continue to drop at the current rate we could see a corrected market by the middle to the end of 2008. The trajectory of the current inventory depletion puts us at about September of 2008 to reach 3000 listings.

Time to Get OFF the Fence!

Time To Get Off The Fence!

If you’ve been thinking about buying a home, or an investment property in the Boise area Real Estate market, now is the time! We have heard from a lot of our investors and home buyers that they are going to “wait and see” what happens. Many investors like to try to time the market, and buy when it hits “rock bottom”. It’s the old buy low, and sell high adage. That is a great thing when you can actually pull it off, but it’s a lot harder to actually do. All markets have cycles, and ours has been in a down cycle recently. The realty is that by the time the market cycles back up, it’s already too late, and you may have missed that opportunity to get the best deal!

Inventory levels of available properties in the Ada County real estate market have been dropping consistently for the last two months. This is an improvement, and tells me that we are already recovering from the worst of it, in terms of fewer sales and price reductions. Here are six things to think about if you’ve been thinking about buying:

-Interest rates on mortgages hit a 26 month low the other day.
-There are plenty of homes available NOW, and many great deals out there.
-Vacancy rates are extremely low right now, I have heard 3-4%, and rental rates are increasing due to the difficulty for some getting mortgages, those affected by the recent “mortgage meltdown” and being forced to rent.
-If home prices drop by 2.5%, but your interest rate goes up by .25%, you lose! Your payment will be higher.
-\Winter brings fewer sales statistically, that means sellers are more motivated.
-The market has been improving, so we may have already hit “bottom”.

These are six great reasons to buy now if you’ve been thinking about it. Again, even savvy investors can rarely time the market perfectly, so when you have an opportunity to get a great deal on a home, and a great interest rate on your mortgage, it’s the right time to buy!

Van States, Realtor, Advantage Real Estate Team

Where is the Boise Real Estate Market Heading?

Boise Real Estate

We have our November stats out on the Boise Metro Market and the numbers are encouraging. Ada County inventories have dropped by 400 since last month. Our staff has put together a excel spread sheet that allows us to project, based on our bi-month inventory chart, when we will be at a balanced market of between 3,400 and 3,500 listings. If we look at the last three months, our excel flow chart projects a balanced market somewhere in the last quarter of 2009. However, if we look just at the last month, the middle of 2008 appears to be the target. The number of listings on the market is definitely dropping.

If history repeats its self, and it usually does, an improvement in the market will start slowly then accelerate, just as it did when the market went into decline. We saw the market start to slow down around March of 2006. January of 2006 was actually the lowest inventory we experienced at 1438 listings. By March the increase really began to accelerate, with only a slight dip in June when inventories grew from 2,829 listings to 5,011 by the middle of October of 2006 to an eventual all time high of 5,788 listings on September 16th of this year.

Predictably, the rate of inventory declines will be mirrored by what we saw in inventory increases. It should take about as long to come down as it did to go up. If it took 22 months to run up, it could take that long to correct once the correction starts. The tough part is predicting when it will start and we have not been off the peak for very long. It appears now that the declining trend could continue until we reach a balanced market again somewhere between the middle of 2008 and the end of 2009. Right now it’s a pretty wild guess. We will continue to watch this very closely and report what we see.

This week we saw interest rates adjust and now are at the lowest rates in 26 months. Qualified conventional borrowers can now expect to get an interest rate of less that 6%. It makes no sense to wait. Homes that are selling are still selling for an average of 98% of the purchase price and an upward movement in rates of .5% will cost buyers much more than they could save by waiting for a lower price. It’s a great time to buy, don’t wait!