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I am surprised at how often homeowners ask me if they need to get an appraisal before they put their home on the market. The answer is no. If the buyer borrows money to pay for the home the lender will order an appraisal.

The purpose of the appraisal is to make sure that the amount being borrowed does not exceed the value of the home. The house will be used as collateral.

Houses do not always appraise for the offer amount. Sometimes buyers offer an amount that is significantly over the asking price with a small downpayment. If the house doesn’t appraise for enough the buyers may have to come up with more cash or the sellers will have to reduce the sale price.

As a home seller, I would want to see something in the offer that is for more than the asking price stating that the buyer will buy the home anyway and that the buyer has the cash to make up the difference.

If not it might make more sense to accept a lower offer because it is more likely to work out. In most cases people who have to put their home back on the market because an offer fell through end up getting less for it.

Most of the time I have an idea of what a home will appraise for. That helps with negotiations when there are multiple offers.

The way the appraisal process works is that an appraiser visits the property and looks it over. The price he/she (they are mostly men) comes up with is based on the actual sale price of three similar properties in the immediate area that have sold in the last year.

There are houses that are hard to appraise because it is hard to find comps. Appraisers can compare to properties and make adjustments. It isn’t an exact science.

On average for the Month of May 2018 St. Paul home sellers got more than 100% of the asking price. That does not mean that all homeowners got more than the asking price. If the property is overpriced sellers may get offers for less than the asking price or no offers at all.

The lender will not use a recent appraisal that the owner had done. They will always get a new appraisal and the borrower will have to pay for it. With cash sales, anything goes.

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun. Winter is headed our way again. Plan on wearing boots and a parka this weekend. Winter in April isn’t that unusual but where are the Nice Ride bikes? I went to their website looking for information and it looks like prices have gone up and there will be some new bikes but . . where are the bikes? Here are pictures of bikes in April of 2013 . . . . we had a looooong ass winter that year.

Do you see bikes? I don’t.

Oh and happy Friday the 13th.

I miss my mom. She is still alive and as I see who she is now I also remember who she was. A school teacher, an accomplished writer and an artist.

She  doesn’t talk anymore but will sometimes surprise us with a word or two. Just as she taught me how to read and how to tie my shoes she is now teaching me about how devastating Alzheimer’s disease is.

Alzheimer’s is not curable or reversible and is fatal 100% of the time. It is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. More than 5 million people in the U.S. Alzheimer’s is also the only disease in the top ten killers that there is no cure or treatment for.

While deaths from heart disease continue to go down deaths from Alzheimer’s continue to rise. The disease affects women more than men as we are more likely to have it and more likely to be the caregiver for someone with the disease.

Learn more about Alzheimer’s

I thought it was just my imagination that even though the inventory of homes for sale is low I am actually showing each buyer more homes and writing more offers.

The average number of showings each home gets before an offer is made that is accepted by the seller is up to 31 per home.  I wish there was some data on how many offers are made on each home.

 

I have had to photographic entire homes where every room is yellow. I was told the color is called “tuscan”.  Yellow is a challenging interior color to photograph.

Sometimes interior photos look yellow when there is no yellow in the room. I just looked at a bunch of photos of a condo for sale no doubt taken by a Realtor with a phone or digital camera and every room has a yellowish hue.

The yellow is a white balance issue. There are all sorts of ways to determine which white balance setting should be used. One easy way to figure it out is to try a couple of different white balance settings and then look at the picture.

I like to set my camera to RAW and adjust the white balance when I process the pictures. That way I can’t screw it up. Interior photos don’t have to look yellow.