Test the market BEFORE you sell!

The Chicago Tribune's Mary Umberger recently wrote a piece on our new Buyer Buzz feature. Check out the article to see how you might use Buyer Buzz to learn more about your home's value before you actually sell it.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

_{"You can prequalify to buy a house. Now you can "pre-list" one for sale..." READ MORE}

*Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune & Mary Umberger

Transit Score now available on ZipRealty.com

Want to see how public transit friendly a home is? With Walkscore's new Transit Score feature, now you can! Similar to the Walkscore for a home, the Transit Score rates a home's transit-friendliness on a scale of 1-100, with 100 being the most transit-friendly.

As the first residential real estate brokerage to add this feature to supplement home listings for sale, we are happy to roll this feature out to our customers in over 30 cities, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Learn more about the transit score and how it works.

To access the Transit Score on ZipRealty.com, simply browse our current 1.18 Million homes for sale and click on the 'Local Info' tab to see both the Transit Score and the Walkscore for the home. As more cities are added to the Transit Score coverage, they'll be added to ZipRealty.com as well.

Best Time to Make An Offer

If you are looking for the best time to make an offer on a home, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, and most importantly, if you can make an offer without a competitive bid, you have a great deal more leverage to negotiate. 

Making an offer when there are no other bidders can be as simple as jumping on an opportunity as soon as you find the right property. Most buyers know the right home for them almost immediately. Experienced buyers know they must move quickly. The inexperienced may want to wait, or think about the purchase for days or weeks--often waiting until it is too late. I would say that this is the most common mistake made by first time home buyers.

Some additional “rules of thumb” to consider when timing your offer include:

• “Low Times” in the calendar. There are certain times in almost every quarter when you may be the only person bidding on a property. For example, between Thanksgiving and December 26th are seasonal lows, when fewer buyers are out looking for houses. Buying a home when the weather is particularly bad may be ideal due to the lack of other buyers to compete with your bid.

• The beginning of the week can be a good timing strategy, but if you find a house on a Friday in the peak summer months and then you wait until Tuesday to make an offer, you may be disappointed--as the same things that you liked about the property may be attractive to other buyers as well and in the end, you may have unexpected competition.

• Buying an inventory home from a new home builder at specific times can give you a huge advantage, but you have to understand what is important to that particular builder at that point in time. All builders have different financial drivers and fiscal calendars. This is where you need a savvy Realtor to help you determine what motivates a given builder, when and where the best deals can be made--based on their quarterly revenue and sales motivations at that point in time.   Read more

Tim Thornton, REALTOR®
ZipRealty, Inc.
Austin, Texas

http://www.ziprealty.com/agent/tithornton

 

ZipRealty Price Reductions by Metro, July 2010

Download Price Reduction - July 2010