Do you even need a realtor to set up a search for you if you're just starting your search process? There are so many search portals out there that often when people get started on their search, they start on the internet, they start looking at all of those portals. And we'll say to a realtor, I don't need you to set up a search, I already have access to all this other stuff. So if you're thinking about looking for a home, or you're starting to seriously look for a home, and your agent says, hey, I want to set you up with a search portal, there are a few reasons why you might want to do that. First of all, the timeliness with which that information gets syndicated out to all those other sites, sometimes it can take two days. And in two days, in this market, you may have missed the boat on that home that you could have fallen in love with. Secondly, it's a great little reminder for your agent. If I am looking for five different buyers and I have searches set up, it's going to send me a copy of that too. So I am also able to get that little tap on the shoulder from the multiple listing service, letting me know hey, there is a house that you know, Bob and Mary Smith might love. It's also a great way to communicate with your agent because you can put notes on there. So as we're sometimes learning what you like and what you don't like, if you're putting notes on there that say things like I love this location, but I hate this kitchen, then that helps me if I'm your agent learn a little bit better about what you like. So always don't get too specific in those things, but it really does shorten that learning curve a little bit and help make your home search a little bit more efficient. So if your agent says, "Let me set you up with a search portal", don't just wave it off. Yes, it's one more email. But hopefully it won't take very long before you'll be able to find the home that you love. It'll be easier, shorten that learning curve, and make sure that you're knowing exactly what comes on the market exactly when it comes on the market and not two days later. If you have any questions about the home buying process, the home searching process, I'd love to talk to you more, give me a call, send me an email or shoot me a message and let's chat.

Every buyer's journey is different, but I want to share this one with everyone to show what a difference small changes make. Ready to start your buyer's journey? Reach out to me on Instagram @ CindyBennettRealEstate or via my website cindybennett.net.

You've got to be kidding, we're still having multiple offer situations. Fortunately, or unfortunately, yes, we are still seeing multiple offer situations all over the place every week, every day, in lots of different price ranges with lots of different homes. So if you're thinking of buying, I wanted to break down just a little bit of what you can. I don't know that I want to say look forward to but maybe expect if you're looking at a home and likely to run into a multiple offer situation. So working with your buyer's agent, you're going to look at all of the homes that have sold in the area that are kind of comparable and get a feel for what homes are selling for. Now, if a home sold a year ago, it's not really going to be a great comp. So don't hang your hat on that and get hung up on what somebody paid six months or a year ago. I can almost guarantee you, the house that you're going to buy is going to end up costing more than the same house sold for six months ago or a year ago. That's just what the market is doing right now. So make sure that you're realistic in what things are costing, what homes are selling for, and what you're willing to pay. If the house is turnkey and doesn't need anything that has a value beyond just the dollar amount of those individual fixes. So if that's what you're looking for a turnkey situation, give that the credit that it's due, and go a little bit higher, knowing that you're going to be able to move in and put your feet up. Rather than have to do a whole bunch of projects in the first month you're living there, the more information you can find out the better. So if you know how many offers, if your agent can find out how many offer their offers, there is anything that you can find out is going to help you. Keep in mind that it's not always about price, you can add a lot of little details to your offer that are going to make it more appealing that might be the closing date, it might be inspection terms, it might be a rent back that the seller wants or needs. Or it may be something totally random, like, you know, they need to have an extra three weeks because they have to clean out the garage. The more things that you give them like that the more appealing your offer is going to be. But often it really does come down to price. So make sure that you are looking at current comparables with your agent and coming up with a price that is good today. If you're thinking about buying, and you're curious about multiple offer situations, how they work, how to navigate them how to get the best deal for you, while also winning the house. Give me a call. I'd love to help we'll walk you through it. And my goal is always to walk you through it a little bit before we get to the day that you find the house that you love. So they have a little bit more information to navigate those waters without just jumping in cold and having to swim. Give me a call. I'd love to talk to you.

Here are a couple of reasons why you may not want to buy a house in 2023 or 2024. The market that we're in is a little weird. And with rates a little higher property values a little higher, and things a little bit tighter in regard to inventory. It is definitely a little harder to get into homeownership now, if you are not already in the game, so to speak. So, the first reason that you may not want to buy a home in 2023, with the higher values and the higher interest rates is, if you are thinking you are not going to be in the home for at least two to five years. You probably want to wait and hold off on buying for a little while, given the interest rate and the cost of homes right now. And all of the fees and costs associated with buying a home your closing costs, etc. You may well not recoup the money that you put in, in that two year period, enough to make any sort of gain when you go to sell, if it is in two years or less. I am almost always going to say that time in the market is better than timing the market. So I talked to a lot of potential buyers, a lot of first-time buyers who are waiting for interest rates to drop. They're hoping that interest rates are going to drop and prices are going to drop. Those things very seldom happen at the same time. My advice to them is if you buy now, at a higher interest rate, you can always refinance later, but odds are if you wait to buy, those prices are going to be higher. So while rates may come down, prices will still continue to go up, because we're still in an inventory shortage. So buying now is going to give you more time in the market for that property to appreciate and your interest rate can always go down. I say that with the caveat that you don't want to buy a house on the market right now if you cannot afford the payment. Please, please, please do not spend every dime of your savings on the down payment for a house and put yourself in a position where you're not able to go out to eat, take a vacation, buy furniture, come up with the money for unexpected expenses like your car breaks down or somebody needs a medical procedure. Things like that are not worth getting in the market if you're not quite ready. So even if you're ready, even if you're thinking about buying a home, talk to an agent that you trust and talk to a mortgage lender to get a good idea of what your payments are going to be what your costs are going to be. And it's okay to wait if you're not ready. Just don't wait too long, or wait too long thinking that that dream home that you can't afford now is going to be affordable in two years unless you know that you're going to get a significant bump in pay. But if you have any questions about buying, I'd love to talk to you. I'd love to help you decide if now is the right time and what might be a reasonable way to get your foot in the door right now. So that dream home may be two years away but you've started the process now give me a call or send me a message I'd love to talk to you.

Have you always thought about buying investment property, but you're not sure where to start, how to start, or what you need to know to really get going? And who would do that in this market anyway? Let's unpack some of the numbers and historical numbers and kind of take a look at why now might actually not be a bad time to get into real estate investing. If you look at the average appreciation over the last couple of years, and these are big national numbers, so they're gonna be dependent upon where you are, and the neighborhood and the area and the county and the city and all that good stuff. But the overall numbers are 20% appreciation on home values over the last two years. Those are pretty wild and crazy numbers, because where are you getting a 20% return on an investment that is relatively safe, like it's not likely to drop by, you know, 100 points tomorrow. Now, those numbers are unlikely to continue. So while 20% is great, that also implies that prices are going to go up by that much, right? Nobody really wants that. But over the last 10 years, we've seen increases in value of about 10%, prior to the last couple of years. So that is still a pretty solid return on your investment over time. When we look at the average return on standard traditional investment stocks and 401k's and things like that, as being between 5% and 8%, take into account the fact that income has only increased year over year by four to 5%. And hedging against inflation. Figuring out how to make your money make more money for you, real estate investing is a really solid way to go. You could check my other video that has some more information about different business models on real estate investing, whether you are looking to have immediate cash flow, whether you just want to balance it and bank on the appreciation, house hack, or any other type of real estate investing. But overall, the appreciation and the ROI that you get from real estate is a really solid investment and something that is a great way to pay for your kids college. If you buy a house when they're young, sell it when they go to school often you can pay for their whole college experience just by the appreciation alone. So if you've ever thought about investing in real estate, it is not a bad time even though rates are a little high. And your return on your investment can be really fantastic depending on what you buy. So if you want more information and you're curious about getting started, you want to see what it takes. Give me a call or send me an email let's schedule a time to chat and discuss your long-term plans, and short-term plans, and see if jumping into the real estate market as an investment is the right time for you.

So you want to buy or sell a house, but you need a little breathing room and you don't know how you're going to work, the timing of that whole situation, especially in this market, what do you do? One way that we often handle these logistics of literally moving targets with closing dates, times moving trucks, people moving in people moving out is with a possession by seller or possession by purchaser agreement. But what are those? You may have heard that term, and sometimes the possession by the seller is actually called a rent back. That's our common vernacular for that document, or that situation. And it's called a rent back because basically, you as the seller are renting back your house after you close and the purchaser actually owns it. We do have another thing called a possession by the purchaser. That is very, very seldom used, because there are a lot of risks involved in letting a purchaser move into your house before you are actually close as you can imagine, they move in and they start putting wallpaper up or demoing the kitchen, and some reason, their deal does not close and you're stuck with whatever they did when they were in your house and you're also kind of stuck with them in your house, and you may accidentally become a landlord. We don't use those very often. The way that the possession by the seller works is literally just like the way you would rent a property. So you own the house, you know, you're going to close on, say the 10th of the month, but you need to stay in for an extra week or two, we're going to have a whole document that's basically a rental agreement where the purchaser closes, and then you're going to be renting that house back from them for the next week or two weeks, whatever. There is usually a deposit just in case you damage anything while you're moving or getting all your stuff out. And you are going to have to cover that if that happens. There's generally a per diem amount as well. So if you go past that, say, you're supposed to close on your new construction, this is one where sometimes the closing dates don't really line up the way we want them to say you're closing on new construction on the fifth of the month. And that's when your rent back ends on the house that you're leaving. But the builder isn't ready until the 10th, so you may have to pay extra, then for those additional days that you stay, or you may just have to beat it because sometimes the agreement was you're going to be out on the fifth and sometimes that's just what has to happen. All of this can get really confusing and sound really confusing. In reality, it's not that confusing, but a lot of it goes back to having a plan before you put your house on the market before you write the contract for the house that you fall in love with making sure that you sit down with your agent and kind of plan out that whole scenario. Sometimes hard when you're really emotional about this process or you're looking at all the other moving parts, but the times and the dates and all of that good stuff really get important, so having that plan is really key. I'd love to explain to you how that might work for you, so just give me a call send me an email, send me a message, and let's set up a time to chat.

Who pays for what when you're buying or selling a house: buyer edition. So if you're buying a house, sometimes when you get excited you think about the process, and you're really focused on looking at homes and that whole emotional aspect of it, you don't necessarily think about all of the little things that come along the way, and who pays for them. So when you're buying a home, the first thing once you have found the house that you love, and you're writing the offer, of the first things you're going to do is you're going to write a check to send a wire for the earnest money deposit. Now, that is basically a deposit that is going to be held in escrow. So it doesn't go directly to the seller in the state of Virginia, in the state of Virginia, that is all I can talk about because that is where I am licensed. So in the state of Virginia, it does not go directly to the seller, it gets held by the settlement agent that you're going to use to do your closing, or the real estate company that you are working with to buy your home, that generally needs to be about 1% of the entire purchase price of the home. So if your house is $500,000, you probably want to write about $5,000. As your earnest money deposit, it basically binds the contract again, it gets held in an escrow account until closing. So if you were originally going to have to bring $100,000 to closing, you will then only have to bring $95,000 Because that $5000 gets applied to whatever else you bring to closing for your downpayment, your closing costs. Another thing you're gonna have to pay for as the buyer is any inspections that you have. And we are now still in a crazy tight market, but we are seeing a good number of inspections. And they can range in price from $100 to $1,000, depending on the type of inspection. And what I always tell people is you can have as many inspections as you are willing to pay for. You have to weigh that out and discuss that with your agent, because you may know that you want to have a camera sewer inspection on one house, and on another house, it may not seem as important. So sometimes those numbers and those types of inspections depend on what you're buying, and where and all that good stuff. So remember, the seller is not paying for any inspections except the pest, Wood Destroying Insect, inspection. That is the one that they're paying for and it usually costs them $100 or less. Once you've covered that earnest money deposit and your inspections, your next cost is going to be your appraisal. And if you're going to have a survey. And your appraisal is generally going to be in the 600 to $1,000 range. And that survey, if you want to have one, a lot of lenders don't require them anymore, but they vary widely depending on the property, the type of property, where it is, how difficult it is to survey, and 100 other things. So I can't give you an estimate there. But those generally are going to be things that you're going to have to pay for out of pocket, because should the loan not go through, those people still want to be paid. So they're going to want the money upfront and not rolled into your closing costs that happen on closing day. After you get through those financial hurdles, you're not going to have to pay anything really until you get to the settlement table and then you're going to have all of your lender fees, your attorney fees, your title insurance, your points that you might have with your mortgage, there are a whole bunch of things and I have another video that kind of breaks down the closing costs, so go check that out if you want a little bit more detailed info on what your closing costs entail. But at settlement, you're going to get that earnest money deposit that you paid upfront applied to that number and then you're going to have all of your closing costs and the actual amount that you're paying for your down payment. And then you're done. But those little along-the-way fees sometimes get lost and all the excitement so just make sure that you've budgeted and that you've got the cash, even if you're putting a relatively low down payment, make sure you've got the cash to cover all those other things that you might want to do along the way or that you're going to be required to do. If you have any questions or you want a little bit more detailed information about what things might look like for you in your financial situation with the home that you want to purchase. Give me a call I'd love to chat and help you make your homeownership dreams come true.

Who pays for what in a transaction, seller addition? When you think about closing costs, as a buyer, there are lots and lots of fees that add up. But let's talk a little bit about if you're selling your home, what are you going to have to pay for, because it's not all just give me the money at the end of the day. So in the market that we're in, now we're seeing relatively little in the way of repair costs. So one of the big things or one of the big unknowns, perhaps when you're selling your home is if the buyer has an inspection, and they are able to ask for repairs, and you agree to do those repairs, what those are going to be costing you. And that can depend largely on what needs to be done, if the buyer wants, you know, is demanding that they be done. And who does it, what the repair is all of that stuff. So that is one of the biggest things you want to budget for if you know that your HVAC is in rough shape and that that is going to be something you have to deal with, you want to make sure that you've stocked a little bit of money away, or some contractors will let you pay at closing from your proceeds after your home sells. But ask them first because many of them don't. After you get through that you're really only going to have to pay for the termite wood-destroying insects, whatever you want to call it, a lot of people just call it the termite report, but it is a wood-destroying organism report. And what that means is you're going to have to pay for and arrange or your agent will arrange for a pest control company to come in, do an inspection, make sure there's no termite damage and here in central Virginia, it is very wet, it is very humid, we've got a lot of that sort of thing. So hopefully, you've had a contract all along as you've owned the house, and there's no issue. But once they come in, they're either going to give it a clean bill of health, or they're gonna say you need treatment, which almost always costs between 750 and $1,000. And heaven forbid repairs. And that can range. You know, depending on the repair, go nuts. You can spend all sorts of money on that. But as long as you've got a clean bill of health, that Wood Destroying Insect, wood destroying organism, the report should only cost you about $100. That is going to be required for the sale unless it was waived in the contract because it is a provision of the contract that we have our boilerplate template contract here in central Virginia. Your biggest fee though as a seller is going to be the Commission's because they do come out of the proceeds at the end of the day. So whatever you pay your listing agents, and from that whatever goes to the buyer's agent, that's going to be your largest amount. At the settlement table, you're going to pay that you're going to pay that wood destroying organism fee, and then you're going to cover the attorney fee or settlement agent fee for them to prepare the deed. There are some taxes because of course the city, the county, the state, they all want a little bit of paint and you know little bit of the action. But overall, with the exception of the Commission's your closing costs as a seller are going to be relatively low. Not a whole lot that goes into there if your house is in good condition. If you have any other questions about what it's going to cost to sell your home, what it's going to look like at the end of the day, and how much you're going to end up with, then give me a call. I'd love to talk to you, help you look at the numbers, break them down, and see if it is a good time for you to sell and what you're going to end up with at the end of the day.

If you spend any time at all on social media, you probably hear people talking a lot about buying houses to invest in short-term rentals and what a great source of passive income that is. So you maybe thought, Should I buy a house and use it as a short-term rental? Let's talk about some of the details that you might want to think about. You may have heard the old saying, you know, you make money on the front end, not the back end. So if you're looking at a house, to be a short-term rental, make sure that it's not something that's going to need a ton of work that's gonna then price you out of that short-term rental market to recoup your money. Also, make sure that if you are looking in an area that maybe you're not as familiar with, you are familiar with, or get familiar, with the zoning laws and regulations or short-term rentals in that area. Because they don't allow it and you definitely don't want to buy something to use as a short-term rental, and only to find that you can't. If the property is not currently furnished, or if you don't like the furnishings, then make sure that you're calculating into your budget, all those furnishings that you're going to have to put in to make it be fantastic. Because, you can get a great rate for a short-term rental, but not if it looks like everything came from you know, the goodwill. When you're doing your calculations, you also want to include things like who's going to manage it, who's going to check on it? What are the fees going to be? How is it going to get cleaned? Do you have an HOA in that neighborhood or area that needs to be paid? All of those little things get an idea of the utility costs, that sort of thing, and I have a great spreadsheet that you can plug all those numbers in. So if you want a copy of that or you want to get a little bit more information about buying a short-term rental owning a short-term rental, what to look for, and the do's and don'ts. I'd love to talk to you happy to help and put you on the right track to finding out all of the information that you might need to know to make a decision if it is in fact a good call or if maybe you want to go another direction for your investment.

So what do I do with my dog or my cat or my ferret or my bird or whatever if I'm getting ready to show my house? Your pets themselves. The physical beings. Make sure that you either have your, especially dogs, make sure that you have them created or in a comfortable spot where the potential buyers can actually see the home, but your animals are not going to be underfoot, scaring people, potentially running out the door, or anything else. My best advice, give them to a friend or family member or board them for a couple of days, at least when you first start the showing process. Get the dog hair off of everything. If you have pets that make a mess, or you've got dog toys, or cat toys, or giant cat towers everywhere that are distracting for a potential buyer, get those out of the way. Do a deep clean. Get the evidence of your lovely fur babies out of the way so that people can make an objective decision on their own. I'm going to go back to that same thing from number two and reiterate the cleaning. Lots and lots of people will run the vacuum and think that's good enough but I'm telling you a deep clean will really make a difference and get away some of the smells that we sometimes as they say become nose blind to. That goes to the backyard too. Trust me nobody wants to take a look at their potential new backyard and find that they have stepped on something on the way back into your house. That's not good for anybody. Trust me. If you're thinking of selling following these tips are really going to help you get your home on the market if you do have pets. It will make it easier for people to see your house for people to show your house and for your pets to not have to deal with strangers coming in all the time. If you have any more questions, I'd love to help you get your home ready and your pets ready to make the move that you want to make.