Less than an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles, the affluent Anaheim Hills neighborhood has plenty to offer homeowners, including a quiet atmosphere that’s within easy reach of Irvine’s commercial hub. As a result, homes don’t sit on the market for long here.
“People who come to the neighborhood are looking for a great place to raise a family — good school districts, good shopping, close proximity to employment centers, access to freeways, not too far from the beach,” says Mike Kelly, a real estate agent with First Team Real Estate, where he and his partner, Travis Fairweather, are one of the area’s top real estate teams.
But just because buyers are eager to get their hands on property in this highly desirable area doesn’t mean sellers are guaranteed to get the offer they’re hoping for. To help you get the best price for your Anaheim Hills home, we contacted the area’s top real estate agents as identified by OpenHouse, an agent referral company (and a U.S. News partner), asking them to share advice on how to make a home appealing to buyers. Here’s what they had to say.
[See: The Best Apps for House Hunting.]
Present the best face of your home. Making a good first impression is key. “Staging is paramount,” Steve Thomas, with Thomas Real Estate Group, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, tells all his clients.
Kelly agrees, “Once we put your house on the market, it becomes a product. You’ve got to make it look the best that it can look.”
But that doesn’t mean you have to pack up your life and hire a staging company. Cleaning up clutter, touching up the paint and landscaping the yard are all things you can do rather simply, with some good advice from your agent. Showing buyers a bright, clean, open floor plan can have a substantial impact on the speed and price of your sale.
“Staging can mean the difference between whether a house sits on the market for 30 days before an offer comes in, or if it gets multiple offers and maybe some bids over the asking price,” Thomas says. “In our business, there is a saying that buyers know if they are going to buy the house within minutes of walking through the front door.”
Keep the landscaping simple. Although drought-tolerant options like artificial grass and granite have become popular throughout the Los Angeles metro area, buyers in Anaheim Hills have mixed feelings about these new and costly looks. “Today, people are definitely leaning towards drought tolerant planting, but I haven’t seen it affect the price in a significant way,” Thomas says.
Thomas recommends keeping your landscape traditional while being aware of environmental conditions. Having flowers or succulents in a tidy, well-maintained front yard is cost-effective and drought-tolerant, all while making your home look fresh.
[See: Current Design Trades That Will Date Your Home.]
Have a professional photographer manage your exposure. The first place most buyers will encounter your home is on the internet. Providing photos on a multiple listing service system and other real estate sites is, according to Kelly, “vitally important.”
“It’s shocking to me how many real estate agents don’t use a professional camera,” he says. “The photos they’re taking are our clients’ gateway to the world.”
If that gateway is dark, blurry or dull, the potential buyer might lose interest in the house. “Our job is to expose a seller’s house to the world. And the better the exposure, the higher the demand; the higher the demand, the higher the price,” Kelly says.
List your home on a Friday. Although different agents have their own opinions, all of them agree that in the Anaheim Hills housing market, a listing should be new and fresh. Once it’s been on the market for several weeks, buyers assume there must be something wrong with the property or the price.
Thomas’ firm has its own strategy based on buyer behavior. “A lot of people do their shopping on the weekends, sorting through listings online and then going to open houses over the weekend. So we try to time our listings so they come out on Friday and are fresh for the weekend.”
[See: 10 Unorthodox Ways Your Real Estate Agent May Market Your Home.]
Find an agent you can count on. California homeowners can legally sell their own homes without help from a real estate agent, and some people feel like the strong market is a good excuse to save money on commissions, or to hire family members or friends to do the job. Given the amount of access to real estate listings provided on public sites like Trulia and Zillow, it may seem like an attractive idea. However, you should think carefully before assuming you know better than a licensed agent — especially one who’s been buying and selling homes in Anaheim Hills for years.
Kelly has seen many mistakes like this made by non-local agents, who are often friends or family of the seller. For example, listing a home in the city “Anaheim” rather than the specific neighborhood of “Anaheim Hills” can make it easy for buyers who are only looking in Anaheim Hills to overlook your property.
As for Thomas, he and his firm have a standard process for new clients: “A lot of sellers come to us with a price in mind, but it might not have any basis in the market reality, so we run the data and give them a fair idea what they’re looking at so they don’t waste their own time trying to sell if they don’t actually like the price.”
Getting the best price on your Anaheim Hills home is worth what you’ll pay in commission to your selling agent. “We can pinpoint certain valuable characteristics in a home that a non-local wouldn’t know about,” Kelly says.
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How to Get the Best Price When Selling Your Home in Anaheim, California originally appeared on usnews.com
