Friday, December 19, 2014

When Negotiations Stall Over a Baton Rouge Home for Sale Negotiating for a Baton Rouge, Home for Sale after an Offer Turndown, When Sellers Won’t Negotiate: 3 Tips for Baton Rouge Home Buyers


When Negotiations Stall Over a Baton Rouge Home for Sale


Negotiating for a Baton Rouge Home for Sale after an Offer Turndown


When Sellers Won’t Negotiate: 3 Tips for Baton Rouge Home Buyers


 

Part of the art of listing a Baton Rouge home for sale is to highlight features that will catch eyes in a wide assortment of different groups of prospective buyers. It’s “the more, the merrier”—and very often the ultimate buyer winds up being unlike the typical prospect you would have thought most likely.

For prospective buyers searching Baton Rouge homes for sale, the same is true: the seller of your future dream home could be anyone. It could be a motivated young professional dealing with an out-of-town promotion, or an elderly librarian hoping to hand the home off to a loving family. Or the seller could be a stubborn, angry tyrant, willing to compromise on nothing. You never know.

Sooooo…what can you do (other than walk away) when you’ve found the right Baton Rouge home for sale and made a reasonable offer—only to have it summarily rejected? Perhaps even with a ‘you don’t understand value’ thrown in for good measure? In short, what’s left for you to do when a home seller refuses to negotiate? Some ideas:

this is a quiz that will tell you how “Decade Sensitive” you are when it comes to Baton Rouge home décor.


2. Find Common Ground for an Amicable Deal


Sellers who refuse to budge on their asking price might respond to other negotiation tactics that allow them to rethink their position without losing face. Perhaps the seller won’t take a nominally lower offer—but would be willing to contribute some money to update the home, pay for the first year’s insurance, or expand the inclusions (perhaps adding in the new appliances they were planning on taking).

3. Know When to Move On


Some sellers don’t know how to recognize a good offer—just as some correctly know that a better one will come if they wait. When buyers find themselves butting heads with immovable owners, sometimes it’s best to just walk away and find another suitable home for sale.

For buyers and sellers alike, having an experienced Baton Rouge Realtor® on your side provides an advantage that’s hard to pass up. It’s why giving me a call is your strategic first step!  

Monday, December 15, 2014

Snap Quiz: Baton Rouge Home Décor—by Decade! Baton Rouge Home Décor: How ‘Decade Sensitive’ are You? To What Decade does Your Baton Rouge Home’s Décor Belong?


 
 
Snap Quiz: Baton Rouge Home Décor—by Decade!
Baton Rouge Home Décor: How ‘Decade Sensitive’ are You?
To What Decade does Your Baton Rouge Home’s Décor Belong?

 First of all, a Spoiler Alert: It’s not fair to peek down where the answers are! Now that we’re clear on that, this is a quiz that will tell you how “Decade Sensitive” you are when it comes to Baton Rouge home décor. It took a little browsing around to put this together, but it sure was fun.
The idea is to match the décor item with the decade it is most closely associated with. Ready? GO!
 


A.    Popcorn Ceilings                 
B.     McMansions
C.     Sherwood Green & Stratford Yellow
D.    Stainless Steel Appliances
E.     Shag Carpets
F.      Sustainable Materials
G.    Kitchen Islands
The 50s
The 60s
The 70s
The 80s
The 90s
The 2000s
NOW


 

       

Now that you’ve matched the items with the decade, you’ve probably noticed that there is a lot of ambiguity here, because Baton Rouge home décor themes didn’t just go in and out of style at the beginnings and ends of decades. The answers are combed from a variety of sources, but here is what the consensus (sort of) agrees on:

THE ANSWERS

The 50s: Answer-C. Sherwood Green and Stratford Yellow were first popularized for kitchen appliances during the postwar era. The 50s can be forgiven for these unnatural apparitions, which might have had something to do with the advent of vinyl flooring in the kitchen …

The 60s: Answer-A. Popcorn Ceilings – Thank you, The 60s, for giving us this innovation. They were popularized for conveying a “textured” look, adding insulation, and cutting down sound. We’ve been scraping them off ever since…

The 70s: Answer-E. Shag Carpets (of course!). Sometimes associated with the 60s, but unmistakably reaching peak popularity in the 70s, a “period when wall-to-wall carpeting was fairly new.” Its fluffy look and feel remained popular until The 90s, when it is said to have “faded into oblivion.” Hardly—it’s still causing vacuum cleaner jams in Baton Rouge homes with cool “vintage” décor.

The 80s: Answer-B. McMansions, aka “garage Mahal,” “starter castle,” and “Hummer home.” They may have been around since The 70s, but the term first appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990. Even the wisecracking nickname couldn’t curb the irresistible advantages of the mass-produced luxury home. Unexpectedly, some of them turn out to have been quite well-built.

The 90s: Answer-G. Kitchen Islands. If you placed these in The 80s, you’ve got a good argument, because that’s the era when modern kitchen design really took off. In The 90s, though, the ‘island’ first took its place in the majority of new kitchens spacious enough to make it practical. They are still everywhere, so you’re forgiven if you put them in The 2000s or Now.

The 2000s: Answer-F. Sustainable Materials. Even defining “sustainability” can get you into an argument (it could be salvaged wood countertops; might be granite), but the Green movement that took off in The 60s began to get serious government support in the New Millennium.

NOW: Answer-D. Stainless Steel Appliances. You can’t get away from them: today’s prospective Baton Rouge home shopper is finding glistening stainless steel refrigerator and oven doors in kitchens all over the place. This finish may have been around for more than a decade, but is NOW available at so many price points it’s hard to think of a single décor item that is as widespread—or one that’s more likely to stay popular long into the future.

With or without the stainless steel appliances, if yours is one of the Baton Rouge homes that will be listing this winter, do give me a call!

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Creating Baton Rouge and Denham Springs Listings That Stand Out from the Pack, Some Baton Rouge and Denham Springs Home Listings Add Life to Cold Facts, When it comes to Baton Rouge and Denham Springs Listings, it’s all about The Story!


Creating Baton Rouge and Denham Springs Listings That Stand Out from the Pack


Some Baton Rouge and Denham Springs Home Listings Add Life to Cold Facts


When it comes to Baton Rouge and Denham Springs Listings, it’s all about The Story!


 

If you had to come up with a single characteristic that the most effective Baton Rouge or Denham Springs home listings have in common, there are several good candidates:

 A really well-crafted listing catches your eye with superior photography, for sure. But that’s not possible with every property. Good photographers know how to select the best angles, use light effectively, and eliminate distracting details (or at least downplay them). But since all homes aren’t equally photogenic, there are built-in limits to how even the most skillful listing creator can count on visuals to make a listing stand out.

Careful attention to detail is common in superior listings. The best Baton Rouge and Denham Springs listings don’t skimp on the details, or on brief adjectives that further enhance them—especially when they serve to differentiate a home from the pack. You can test this for yourself by scanning through some of today’s listings in Baton Rouge and Denham Springs. The best ones often have one or two relatively insignificant details that give a property character; that make it memorable. “Spacious walk-in closet” may not be nearly as important as “completely remodeled kitchen,” but for a certain number of prospective buyers, that can turn out to be the one detail that strikes a responsive chord (and creates a mental note to check this one out!).

Descriptions that employ proven advertising principles almost always make superior Baton Rouge and Denham Springs listings. One standby: arouse curiosity (headline writers are experts at this). An example might be “Brick barbecue center.” ‘What the heck is that?’ prospective buyers will ask themselves. Even if outdoor cooking isn’t even on their list of priorities, they might not be able to resist scheduling a home tour to find out…and sometimes a buyer is created!

But if I had to pick the one single characteristic most likely to be found in truly effective local listings, it would be this: The best Baton Rouge and Denham Springs listings in some way tell a story—add character to the cold facts. They stand out from other listings by engaging more of the reader’s imagination than others which are merely an illustrated bunch of data.

The ‘story’ may be a phrase that hints at a property’s interesting past: its historical origin or that of the neighborhood; a prominent previous owner; or an unusual construction history. For a fixer-upper, the story might be an expansive invitation to imagine how a creative Do-It-Yourselfer will be able to transform the property. For a luxury listing, the story might be an appeal to experience the full array of lavish trappings as the suitable reward for the accomplishments of a lifetime. The story may be fleshed out or merely hinted at by a well-worded phrase—but when listings contain the elements of a story, they add memorability.

Creating a stand-out listing is only one of the many elements that go into a successful Baton Rouge and Denham Springs home-selling campaign. I hope you will give me a call when it comes time to get your own home into the hands of a new owner!