How You View Your Home Makes a Difference

In the End It is Always About Price

A few flowers add a lot of beauty

For those needing to sell  their homes because of job transfers it is going to be difficult in this economy.    Fifty percent or more of the homes sold in Tucson each month are Bank owned properties.  These homes are hard to compete against with buyers. The only thing that will get a seller a quick sale is price.   In the end it is always about price.

Invest in your Tucson home

If you don’t have to sell right now, I’d take advantage of the low prices of construction materials and labor and make those changes and repairs to your existing home.  You might as well make it nice, take care of deferred maintenance, and increase the desirability of your property.  When you do put it on the market you will have a property that shines from the first day on market.

Personally, I’ve never purchased a home as an investment or as an ATM.  I’ve bought every home because we needed a place to live.  Some purchases were because of proximity to schools, most because of work related changes.  The economy played no part.  Sometimes I made a little, but where I had to buy meant I had to pay more, and sometimes I lost.  But in each case my family had a home.  A place for our “stuff”.  It was never about making money.

Real Estate as an Investment

I buy my cars to have something to drive.  Other people buy cars as an investment.  The same is true of Real Estate.  But we don’t talk in the same terms with a car buyer for transportation and a car buyer who is buying as an investment.  The commodity is the same, the logic, need, desire, and motive for purchase are entirely different.

Much of the reporting we hear about the real estate market in the US is based on the idea that all home purchases are as an investment.  This simply is not the case.  Many of us who purchase a home have a strong emotional attachment to this place we have made and call home.

Changing your view

For an investor, there’s nothing really to change.  They don’t have an emotional attachment to the property, it is an investment.  But to those of us who bought the house to make a home for our family it is very different.  We need to change our view when it is time to sell.

I always here agents telling their sellers to take down all the family pictures when they put their home on the market.  The reasoning goes that it is hard for a potential buyer to see their family in a home where there are family pictures everywhere in the house.  (I don’t particularly agree with this approach).  However, it is a step that can help you divest.  Being logical about this place we are selling can be easier if we have prepared ourselves to move on.  Dis-associate the memories so to speak.

Focus on the future and where you will go next to build your nest, or empty nest which ever the situation might be.  Try to keep the process in perspective and don’t get caught up in the details that can scuttle the process and transaction.  How you view your home as you get ready to sell your house makes a difference.