Today’s home buyers have more access to knowledge than ever.  They do their research on the internet, they pick up tips from HGTV, and we’ve all learned from the mistakes that were made several years ago.  First time buyers are especially conscientious of their decisions.  They understand that they are benefitting from one of the most amazing opportunities to become a homeowner, with record low interest rates, great inventory, and extremely competitive prices. Plus they often pay less to own than rent.  

One of the things that both repeat and first time homebuyers are expressing by their decisions is that bigger is not necessarily better, not anymore.  Living beyond our means will have this affect on people.  We were able to make purchases for things we had no ability to pay for just a few years ago, and the outcome of that is stress and heartache.  We bought bigger and we spent more, because we could.  Then people started losing their jobs, those who kept their jobs stopped getting raises and bonuses, housing prices started falling, and we all realized we really don’t need all this big grand stuff.

This has lead to more and more repeat buyers coming to us to sell their homes so they can downsize, either by size, mortgage, or both.  We are all asking ourselves, do we really need all this space and all this stuff?  We are seeing more and more first time buyers who are pre-qualified for a lot higher amount than they actually end up spending.  We see tons of renters wanting to buy because it will actually decrease their monthly housing payment in so many cases.  And the trend seems to be leaning toward slightly smaller homes.

“I grew up in a large home, and my paternal grandparents built a 6-bedroom home back in the 1920s in Abilene, Texas, but my favorite home is the one I now live in (972 sq ft),” says homeowner Penny Lynn. She adds that “A smaller home certainly lends itself to less clutter–when a new item comes in, an older item leaves to be recycled, if at all possible”, and points out that using less gas and electrical resources is one way of being “green”.

One of our clients who also owns a small home has a plaque on her wall that says “Simplify Your Life”.  To me, that says it all right there.  Get rid of all the STUFF and JUNK that is bogging us down and holding us back from other pursuits and dreams, and keep what is essential and beneficial.  Our clients who decide to sell their McMansions often comment that they just don’t need all that space.  Maybe they are becoming empty nesters, maybe they bought because they thought bigger was a better investment, maybe they were trying to keep up with the Joneses.  I realize there are instances where you are a large family, work from home, maybe have a music studio, and simply require more space than most.  And we still have tons of buyers who are transitioning from their first bought homes to larger ones as their families and budgets grow, and needs change.  But many repeat buyers are deciding lately that less is more.

Although our numbers here in Nashville don’t necessarily reflect an enormously growing trend toward smaller homes, the mentality of our clients certainly has.  The Small House Movement that has swept parts of the country has not hit us yet, but we are experiencing our own downplayed version of that.

Benefits of a smaller home are not just in a lower mortgage payment, but it also usually means lower utility bills, less cleaning, and less upkeep all together.  Low maintenance living.  ”Unused space most likely equals wasted space. Who wants to pay for a space they never use?” wonders homeowner Beth Schackne, who loves her East Nashville cottage that is less than 800 square feet. “Once you start to rid your life of things you no longer need, you’ll never want to go back. Lack of clutter leads to peace of mind, and that is something on which you cannot put a price tag.”

For the first time since 2006, home sales in the Greater Nashville area were up from the previous year.  December 2011 home sales ended with an 18.2% increase over December 2010, with 1,773 closings according to Greater Nashville Association of Realtors.  Fourth quarter closings were also up from fourth quarter 2010, by 17.9%.  December marks the sixth consecutive month of increased home sales.  For the year, there were 20,624 homes sold.  Although that is only a 1.8% increase over total sales for 2010, it is still a great sign of things to come.  January has started off well too with pending sales being up.

We are seeing Nashville all over these “best in country” surveys recently.  Not that any of us are surprised.. we know how much our city rocks!

In MSN Real Estate’s Best Old-House Neighborhoods for First Time Buyers, East Nashville is naturally on the list, described as “Mayberry with a twist” by East resident Carol Norton.  The article goes on to say the reason to consider buying here is “the sense of community — one seldom seen in cities or suburbs — and the creative energy and camaraderie of its residents and small-business owners.” I couldn’t agree more.

Read the full article here.

For the fourth consecutive month, home sales in the Greater Nashville area are up from the same time period last year, this month by 15.6%.  Closings for single family homes in October 2010 were 1,284, compared to 1,446 in October 2011.  Condos were 144 in October ’10 and 188 this October, multi-family homes remained almost the same, and farms/lands/lots increased from 49 to 77.  In addition, there were 1,742 pending sales this October and 1,439 last year.  Inventory is down from last year, 20,165 compared to 22,826.  So there aren’t as many choices for buyers right now, but the incentive of taking advantage of record low interest rates along with depreciated pricing are pretty motivating factors for eligible home buyers.

Nashville also continues to be a very attractive market for many relocating buyers. According to Alice Walker, President of the Greater Nashville Association of REALTORS, “Many of these new residents are coming from markets highly affected by the economic downturn.. Newcomers seem pleased with buying opportunities, both in inventory and price, available to them here in the Middle Tennessee area.”

I hear this on a regular basis from many of my clients moving from out of state. While we have experienced a depreciating market here and unemployment rates are not as low as we would like them to be, our economic and housing market as a whole is still far stronger than many other areas. And we continue to grow and add jobs. Nissan recently advertised need for over 1,000 employees for its Smyrna plant, and with Opry Mills reopening and the anticipated opening of the new convention center downtown next year, thousands of additional positions will be filled.

Use your iPhone to help update your home!  HouseLogic, from the National Association of Realtors, has chosen its six favorite home improvement apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod.  Some of these work for Android as well.

ColorSnap by Sherwin-Williams is free, and matches real world colors with paint colors.  So see a color you really love and would like to duplicate?  Take a picture and the app will identify it.

Home Improvement CALCS has more than 115 calculations that can help you determine, for example, how much mulch, attic insulation, block wall, volts, or tile you need.  And the list goes on and on…

Ruler 2 is there for you when you forget your ruler (best for smaller objects).

iHandy Carpenter includes a plumb bob, surface level, bubble level bar, steel protractor, and a steel ruler.

Dream Home helps you bring the latest interior design trends into your own home.

I.D. Wood contains information on over 200 different woods from all over the world.  It also includes lumber cutting techniques, dimensional lumber conversions, nail size reference, and more.

Full story here.

In Middle Tennessee, single family home sales in July increased almost 16% this year compared to sales from one year ago.  1,692 single family homes sold in July ’11 in nine Middle TN counties including Davidson, Williamson, and Wilson.  Condo sales also increased by forty units compared to July ’10, and their prices were also up 5.4% from last year, a very positive increase.

GNAR President Alice Walker reported to The Tennessean, “The July home sales increase reflects what we’ve been saying during the past six months — the market is steadily recovering.”

Full story here.

Although hiring a professional home stager is very beneficial to sellers, there are also easy and inexpensive ways to make your home more attractive to potential buyers.

De-cluttering is absolutely free and so essential.  Hiding your home behind too much stuff is distracting.  Having personal and sentimental items out makes it more difficult for buyers to imagine themselves living in your home.

Have a very honest friend come over to share their thoughts about your home.  Someone who doesn’t live there is more likely to notice the things we see every day and may overlook.  Have them walk through and point out anything that stands out negatively.

Make your home sparkle and shine!  Yes, it is a big hassle constantly keeping your home clean for showings, but it’s so important.  Something that may help is having a professional come in and do a deep cleaning before you go on the market.

Add colorful flowers to your vases.  So simple, yet so effective.

Read all of home stager Debra Gould’s tips here.

You can’t hide from it. As much as we don’t want to admit it, we are a visual society. Don’t judge a book by its cover? Well who doesn’t, literally? When you’re at a bookstore browsing, are you really going to waste your time picking up a book that has a bland and boring cover? Of course you aren’t and don’t you pretend you’re not as vain and ADD as the rest of us. You’re going to pick up the book with the big bold letters and fascinating cover art. You don’t have time to waste on taking the chance of a plain book cover actually being a great book.

Well the same goes for houses. It KILLS me all the homes I see every single day online that have horrible photos.  Studies show that approximately 90% of todays’ buyers find their home on the internet. Say a buyer does a search for homes in East Nashville’s 37206 zip code. In this zip code alone there are currently 214 homes in the MLS. Do you think the average busy home buyer is going to want to browse through and analyze 214 homes in detail, or do you think they are going to just look at the ones that catch their eye? They are at work trying to quickly view these homes with one eye on the boss’s office to make sure he’s not looking, or at home juggling multiple chores and/or children simultaneously. Who has time to go through every single one, much less time to go out and see every home in person?

I am showing homes tomorrow to two different out of state buyers who only have time to see maybe 10 homes each before leaving Nashville to make their decisions. They’re both looking in multiple areas. They’ve been looking online for months from their home states at hundreds of options that meet their criteria. So you know where those homes with the horrible teeny tiny blurry dark pictures are on their list? Do you have to ask?

Sellers, if your REALTOR is not either using a professional photographer to photograph your home or is not a talented photographer him/herself, you need to have a talk with that agent. They are doing you a huge disservice. If you have photos of your home online that are blurry, that are small and can’t be enlarged, that show snow on the ground when it’s July… unless you’re a foreclosure under-priced by $50,000, good luck having any showings in today’s market.

All that being said, the great news is this is such a simple thing to do! Photographing a home does not cost a lot and is not time consuming. I know with the professional service we use, they shoot the home for about an hour (depending on the size of course) and edit all the photos within a day to make them ready for marketing. The money we as agents spend for our listings is just a small fraction of the benefit of having beautiful photos capturing each home, telling its story.

Guest blog by Nashville Finance NABor, Phil Miller.

If we are honest, it still comes down to the natural laws of supply and demand for the housing market to fully recover. We may not hear this on the news, but in my opinion there are plenty of people out there that would like to buy a home, whether it be their first home, or another home to generate income and long-term wealth. If we dig deep, there is no shortage of buyers to eat up this inventory; just a shortage of people who qualify to buy a home in this panic-stricken mortgage world. Well, I will retract that. I would argue that there are plenty of people who actually DO qualify under today’s standards, they would just rather not deal with the pain of going through it. With rates this low, it should quickly be a seller’s market, even with our high unemployment. If the news were to get out that underwriting guidelines have loosened a little and the big lenders are beginning to actually lower their required credit score tiers, we mortgage professionals and Realtors would have full inboxes once again, very quickly. The good news, we may be seeing the first signs of that. ☺

The Private Mortgage Insurance companies and big banks alike are beginning to see that they MUST bring more buyers into the marketplace in order to keep lending, and profits, at good levels. They seem to be realizing that they have been in some ways, ‘cutting off their nose to spite their face’, I guess. Although the concessions they are making are small and by no means immediately opening the floodgates to anyone and everyone like we witnessed during the housing bubble, they are at least going in the right directions. The banks, mortgage insurance companies, securitization and government reacted to the foreclosure mess, and they should have. They may have gone too far too fast with the tightening, causing hundreds of thousands to a million many potential buyers to change their mind and just rent; that remains to be seen. They are still out there. And so is a whole new graduating class this spring! Let’s hope the diligent analysis of the performing loans continues to lead those who make the decisions to continue opening doors to more and more people who are ready, willing and able to be great homeowners.

I‘ve been getting a ton of inquiries from consumers who are concerned about buying and selling homes in Spring Hill in light of the potential theme park moving in.  One inquirer had just gone to contract on a home yesterday a few miles north.  So, what is my opinion?  Honestly, I think our amusement park excitement is a hoax.  While no REALTOR can make any guarantees on future value, I honestly think that now many details are coming to the surface, your value when it comes to the theme park is going to be just fine.

Photo credit: Sanford Myers/The Tennessean

The facts seem to be:

• This same park was proposed in Las Vegas and failed.
• The story that they were in talks with Gaylord about moving the Opry here are completely false.
• CEO of Big International Group of Entertainment Dennis Peterson says there will be two resort hotels with 4000 rooms each, when Gaylord’s Opryland hotel is the largest, under-on-roof hotel and doesn’t even come close to that number of rooms.
• None of the renderings on ITEC (the theme park consulting company) come close to matching the *cough*cough* quality of the artist rendering.
• TDOT has never been contacted about creating a new exit.
• Festival Tennessee has not been trademarked.

All speculation aside, IF the theme park does come in, values in the immediate area could be affected.  In similar cities like Atlanta, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Cleveland areas near the park have seen lower residential values and not-so-impressive commercial values.

Here’s a bit more from a commentary I left in another medium:

I’m a REALTOR. I had a situation where a “development company” wanting to buy a large tract of land here in Middle Tennessee for a “theme park” worked with me for over three months, corresponding with all the officers, assistants, CEOs, etc. I grew suspicious after a few months and started heavy investigation on my own. Every officer seems to have been made up and no address was accurate. One man was playing all the parts.

I just have this huge fear of Ashton Kutcher showing up on camera any day to say, “Hey Nashville, You’d been Punk’d!