Fall is a Buyer's Season

Autumn. The days are cooler. The kids are back in school. It is a great time to walk through a corn maze,  to enjoy a pumpkin spice latte, and to buy a house. According to Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at realtor.com, buyers who are willing to close in the off-peak months of fall and winter may very well have the upper hand in negotiations.

As usual with economists, it all comes down to supply and demand.  He says that normally inventory peaks in August and begins to slow as the nights grow longer. But this year the typical seasonal decline will start a bit later. There will be more choices in September than any other month in 2015. On the demand side, now that school has started, fewer people are interested in moving, so the number of contracts decreases. This means the sellers have fewer offers, so buyers may be able to negotiate a better deal for themselves.

I can attest to this with the real life example of selling my house last year. Yankee and I had big plans of putting the house on the market in June. Quickly June turned into July and then August, and still we did not have to house ready to sell. We finally had a firm marketing date in the beginning of September, but the day before it was to go live on MLS, Yankee went under the house and found water dripping. Our dishwasher was leaking. It took another six weeks to get everything fixed, so it was October before the house was on the market.

By this time, the type of buyers looking for a 3500 square foot, five bedroom home had either bought already or were waiting until spring because the school year was well underway. When an offer finally came in after six weeks on the market, we had to take it seriously even though it was way off our target price. We needed to sell and with no other offers, we accepted a deal we would have scoffed at in July.  Our loss was the buyers' gain. They got a beautiful home (with a brand new dishwasher and kitchen floor as a bonus) for an excellent price.

So if you are on the fence about buying, right now may be the best time to climb off that fence and buy your new home. If that buying is going to be in the Triangle, I am more than happy to help find the perfect house for you and negotiate a great deal on it.

The Royal Shower

In the two weeks since I last posted, we have done more unpacking, but sadly there are still so many boxes left to go. The good news though is our first major project in the house is done.

This house has many really great features such as a very good floor plan, large bedrooms and ginormous closets. It also has some pretty bad design choices such as putting granite counter tops in the kitchen with vinyl flooring. Seriously?!

Another questionable decision was in the master bath. It is very large with lots of natural light, an eight foot long vanity and a large linen closet - all good. Now for the bad - a two foot by two foot prefab shower. And when I say it is four square feet, that is the outside dimension. The space where you actually do your showering was even tinier. There was also a small garden tub that had a bad case of the uglies and that vinyl floor I mentioned in the kitchen? It was in the bathroom too. Yay!

 

I took videos of the house for Yankee when I looked at it the first time. I just watched the one from the bathroom, and the first comments I made was "that shower has got to go." I am happy to say it is gone and has been been replaced by a beautiful, roomy tile shower.

Because I have not taken a bath since I was nine years old (sitting in bathwater grosses me out), I see a bathtub as a floor space hog that must be kept clean, so I had my contractor, Jack Misnick, rip that baby out and make us a nice big shower. He and his people build me the most fabulous shower I have ever set foot in. Okay, I may be a little biased, but it is pretty great.

One of my favorite parts of the shower - the floor - almost did not happen. Well of course there was always going to be a floor since I have not mastered the art of showering whilst floating, but the floor was not going to look like it does now. I was determined to have marble tile on the floor, and I am sure that would have been beautiful, but it was soooo expensive.  Thankfully Krysta at Florida Tile came to the rescue and picked out the tile I have now. There is some marble in there along with blue, green and grey glass. It was a third of the cost, and I believe way more interesting than a plan marble floor would be. 

I had a pretty great shower in my Georgia house. It was one of those things about that house that I did not realize how nice it was until I moved to the rental. The rental shower had nice tile work, but it had a prefab pan for the floor that I really hated and the worse part was that it had no shaving ledge. I used one of those little plastic step stools which I was really happy to toss when we moved out. My new shower has a marble ledge that fits my entire foot, so I can shave away. 

Stepping into this tile and glass masterpiece is like stepping out of my real life and into some luxurious world that I am normally not part of. Sure I may have just come in from pulling weeds or scrubbing toilets, but while I am in this shower I feel like I am the Queen of Northwest Cary.