Category: Orlando Realtors

5 Tips For Buying An Orlando Foreclosure

Posted on by Jenny Zamora

By buying an Orlando foreclosure property aka REO [real estate owned] property, home shoppers can potentially get the deal of a lifetime.

Lenders that have taken a property back after going through the foreclosure process are often eager to unload these properties and are willing to take a significant loss to do so. It’s important to know that buying a foreclosure home works a bit differently than buying a home through a traditional listing.

The following are some things that home shoppers should consider before making an offer on a foreclosure property.

1- Buying “As-Is”

Distressed homeowners that are about to be foreclosed on are sometimes disgruntled with the bank and feel like they want revenge against the bank. They may even strip the home of anything of value like the central AC unit, appliances, fixtures, etc. In my experience as a realtor in Orlando, I’ve seen foreclosure properties that have been vandalized to the point where the homeowner has destroyed windows, and walls and even filled the toilets with cement!

However, if the price is right, don’t let these things discourage you. Anything can be fixed or replaced. Before making your offer, find out how much a contractor would charge to make the necessary repairs.

2- Know What You’re Up Against

When you buy a home from a homeowner through a traditional listing, you’ll probably get some helpful advice about the home like a loose door handle or leaky faucet that needs replacing. However, with a foreclosure property the homeowners won’t be around to give you any advice or history about the home. The lender that now owns the property won’t be able to provide you with this type of information because they’re not familiar with the home.

That’s why it’s so important to have a thorough inspection done on the home or you could end up with a money pit on your hands.

3- Don’t Low Ball The Bank

While it is true that you can get a heck of a deal buying a foreclosure property, don’t think that the lender will accept any offer that you submit to them. As opposed to individual homeowners, lenders can afford to keep the property until they feel that the price is right to sell it. The best practice is to get an estimate for all the necessary repairs and make your offer based on other comparable properties minus the cost of repairs. This number should get you into the ballpark.

If you choose to send in a low ball offer to the bank, they may not even consider your offer and you could end up losing the deal.

4- Be Patient

Buying an REO property usually takes a lot more time than buying a home the traditional way from a homeowner. These lenders have thousands of foreclosure homes to deal with which means it takes quite a bit longer to get around to looking at your offer and deciding whether to accept it or not. If you want to be in the foreclosure buying market, patience is not a virtue, it’s a necessity.

5- Hire An Orlando Realtor Buy A home in Orlando, FL

Lenders have procedures and systems set up specifically for selling foreclosure properties in Orlando. This can make inexperienced home shoppers feel like fish out of water. That’s why it’s crucial to enlist the help of an experienced Orlando Realtor to help you on your quest to buy a foreclosure at a great price. If you rely on the listing agent that was hired by the bank to help you with everything, you may be setting yourself up for disappointment.  

The agent that was hired by the lender is probably dealing with dozens of foreclosure properties at the same time which means that you won’t get the attention that you deserve. By working with a top Orlando Realtor, you can have the confidence of knowing that you’re in good hands and you won’t have to worry about having to contact the listing agent about anything.

Your Orlando realtor will also be able to provide you with a list of recommended home inspectors and contractors in the area so you don’t have to spend your time researching them yourself.

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8 Things Not To Do When Selling Your Orlando Home

Posted on by Jenny Zamora

If want to sell your Orlando home fast for top dollar, there are many things to consider before putting it on the market. Working with sellers and buyers as an Orlando real estate agent since 2005, I’ve experienced firsthand what works and what could cost you the sale. These days home shoppers expect to get a good deal no matter what market conditions are. Here is a list of common mistakes made by homeowners when trying to sell their Orlando home

1- I’ll price my home high then lower it gradually until it sells.

I see this mistake all the time with Orlando homes listed on the MLS. For some reason, some homeowners have a tendency to believe that their home is somehow worth more than every other home in the neighborhood and then the price is higher than all the others.

By pricing it higher you’re missing out on buyers looking for homes in the price range where your home should be. The end result is that the home takes much longer to sell and ends up selling at the price that it should have been listed at in the first place… or even lower.

Your Orlando realtor should provide you with a comparative market analysis [CMA]. This is a report that shows you all of the comparable homes in the neighborhood that are for sale or have been sold. Use the CMA to help you determine what price to list your home for.

2- Whoever buys my house can worry about the minor repairs.

Home shoppers are looking for a deal and they will look for any excuse to try to discount the price. Some buyers won’t even submit an offer if the home needs repairs, no matter how minor they may seem to you. Fix anything that needs to be fixed, including the small things that you may think, are no big deal.

3- Curb appeal is no big deal, wait until they see the inside!

Big mistake!…and guess what? Most buyers won’t even bother to go inside your house if it looks run down on the outside. Trim the trees, cut the grass, touch up the paint and plant a few flowers by the entrance. You only get one shot to impress them as they drive up, don’t blow it!

4- I have to do some serious upgrading to get my house sold.

Don’t make any major improvements to your home for the sole purpose of getting it sold. Homeowners sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if they do major upgrades like building a pool or adding a bedroom that they will automatically get a return on their investment. Not true, especially if your house is the only one in the neighborhood with a pool because there won’t be any comparable properties to yours to justify the significant increase in price that you’re looking for.

5- Buyers aren’t swayed by small incentives

What you may consider being no big deal might be a huge deal in the eyes of an interested buyer. Believe it or not, offering something as simple as a 1 year home warranty that only costs a few hundred bucks could be the difference between the buyer submitting an offer or not. Speak to your Orlando real estate agent about what incentives you can offer to sweeten the deal.

6- By not hiring an Orlando real estate agent, I can save money by selling on my own

Selling a home will be one of the biggest decisions of your lifetime. You can lose valuable time and money by not enlisting the help of an experienced real estate agent. Real estate agents will not only take care of marketing your home and reviewing offers, but they will walk you through the home selling process from the beginning all the way to the closing of the transaction.

Most homeowners that start out by trying to sell their home on their own ultimately end up hiring a listing agent after they get little or no results.

7- I want to be there for all showings because no one knows my house better than me

Don’t do this! Let your real estate agent do what you hired them to do…sell your house. Buyers can sometimes feel uncomfortable when the homeowners are present and this prevents them from visualizing the home as if it were theirs. Try making it a point to not be there when your house is being shown. This will allow the potential buyers to move throughout the home freely while envisioning it as their own.

8- It’s my way or the highway!

Don’t approach the sale of your home as if the buyer were your enemy. Remember, the goal here is to get sell your house so be open to some negotiating. Again… let your Orlando realtor do their job by handling the negotiations. Never try negotiating directly with the buyer as emotions and opinions will certainly get in the way of what both of you are trying to accomplish… to sell a house and buy a house.

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TOR 012: Who Pays The Realtor’s Commission?

Posted on by Jenny Zamora

Hello and Welcome to the Top Orlando Realtor podcast, if you’ve been here before, we are happy to have you back 

I’m your host John Conde with ORC and today we’ll be talking about how real estate agents get paid on a traditional real estate transaction. 

How Orlando Real Estate Agents Get Paid

  • Real estate agents aren’t like other professionals who bill for their time hourly or present an invoice at the end of a project. If a Realtor doesn’t produce, they don’t get paid.
  • Realtors should never charge an upfront fee.
  • Real estate commission is based on the sale price of the home.
  • Everything in real estate is negotiable… including realtors commissions.
  • Commission usually gets paid by the seller.
  • Orlando short sale transactions are different than traditional transactions

Thanks for listening!

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Short Sale It or Keep It? What Should You Do?

Posted on by Jenny Zamora

When you first purchased your home you probably never thought that you would one day need to come out of pocket or short sale your Orlando home to get it sold.

No homeowner ever buys a home thinking that one day their home will have no equity or worse yet, it will be worth less than the unpaid mortgage amount. The truth is most homeowners buy believing that their home will increase in value. Most of us were brought up being told that buying Orlando real estate is a foolproof investment and you’re guaranteed to make money when you sell your house.

 

There are never any guarantees that you will be provided a return on your Orlando real estate investment. Although some homeowners are in the position to sell their homes at a nice profit, many will either break even or won’t have the option of selling unless they come out of pocket to cover the difference.

Real estate in Orlando like other commodities, is mostly subject to supply and demand. If the employment rate is up in a community and the local economy is strong, then there will be more demand for homeownership. On the other hand, if the community is experiencing a higher than the normal unemployment rate, then this will create less demand for homes.

Historically most of the time what happens is that although home values may go down, they eventually go on to stabilize or even go higher than before. The only exception to this is when a community is mostly employed by a single employer which goes ends up going out of business or an industry that’s experiencing a sharp downturn like what happened in the city of Detroit and the American car industry.

 

Do You Really Have To Sell?

You only take a loss if you sell. Unfortunately, my wife and I bought our home in Hunters Creek at the height of the Orlando real estate boom in 2005. Then just two years later, just like that, our home’s value was cut in half. But we still owed the full amount of the loan. Fortunately for us, this was our dream home. Hunters Creek is where we planned to raise our children and live our lives for at least the next ten years.

Since then, property values have gone back up but my point is that the home values didn’t affect us because we weren’t planning on moving anyway.

 

Try An Orlando Short Sale

Luckily real estate investing in Orlando is not as volatile as other investments can be. If you’re familiar with investing in stocks then you know that stocks can lose or gain 100% of its value within a few days. Homes, however, can go up or down in value also but it takes months and even years sometimes.

If homeowners with negative equity can’t afford to bring money to the table in order to sell, they’re left with only a few options. They can either keep the house, continue to make payments and hope that one day the home’s value goes back up or they can do a short sale on the home in order to get it sold.

A short sale is when the lender accepts a discount on the payoff so that the home can be sold at fair market value. In most cases the homeowner will have to prove financial hardship and be in default on the mortgage at least 30 days.

If negotiated correctly by your short sale realtor, the transaction will be recorded as a full payoff and the bank promises never to come after you for the balance of the loan. There are also “cash for keys” programs available to homeowners in which the short sale lender gives thousands of dollars back to the homeowners for relocation assistance. We’ve gotten our Orlando short sale clients anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000 back at the closing.

 

 

 

Orlando short sale expert

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Pricing Your Orlando Property

Posted on by Jenny Zamora

I remember when real estate in Orlando was booming at an alarming rate back in 2005. Orlando listing agents were able to put up ridiculously high listing prices and people were paying it because they were afraid that by the following week prices would be even higher.

In today’s Orlando real estate market it’s more important than ever to price your home accurately from the start. Have you ever wondered how Orlando real estate agents determine the right asking price for their house? There are many different factors that can help in determining the value of a house although, it’s not, and never will be an exact science.

Everyone knows that supply and demand dictate the asking price of any product, especially real estate. So, if the supply is low the price will be adjusted upward to meet in order to meet it. Basically, it comes down to the sales price of the most recent comparables in the same neighborhood where the home is located in. People can speculate about the market and how much a home is worth until they’re blue in the face but recent sales in the neighborhood are what matters most when it comes down to it.

The appearance of the property, its size, and its location play major roles in coming up with the asking price. Upgraded features can sometimes warrant an upward adjustment in the asking price. However, if you haven’t had any 2nd showings or offers after two weeks or so, then the price is probably a bit high. Depending on what your situation is you can either lower the listing price or stick to your guns for the long haul.
Setting the prices on new homes is a different beast together because the developer is the seller and the better a developer understands the market, the more successful they will be. The builder must first know how much it costs to build the home. The developer offers different models and the prices of the home are then based on type, square feet, features, and lot sizes. After factoring in construction cost and the profit a builder needs to make, a sale price is born!

One of the problems encountered with existing homes is that it was decorated to someone else’s taste. This can sometimes be a plus, but most of the time it isn’t. As an Orlando listing agent, I’ve had to encourage several clients to paint over that burgundy wall or remove the rusty chandelier from the hallway and if needed, I will recommend that the whole inside of the house be painted white or off-white. When you realize what a difference it makes in the eyes of a buyer, it’s well worth it.

The curb appeal and amenities of a home also contribute to determining the price. Homebuyers are out looking for the best deal, so if your house is the best deal out there, then it will sell the fastest. If not, then your home will probably sit o the market for a while.

Need help coming up with a listing price on your home? Feel free to contact one of our Orlando listing specialists for a FREE consultation. we’re here to help!

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