10 ways to sell your home FAST

10 ways to sell your home FAST

No matter how long your home lingers unsold, you can comfort yourself that at least you're not Mark Twain.

The celebrated author put his Hartford, Conn., home on the market for $60,000 in 1901, according to biographer Fred Kaplan. Despite repeated markdowns, the elaborate house failed to attract a buyer until the price was finally slashed to $25,000 two years later.

What was once a much-loved home -- in which Twain estimated he'd invested more than $100,000 -- became a painful albatross.

"I would rather go to hell," Twain wrote the friend who was helping him sell the place, "than own it 50 days longer."

If you want to avoid Twain's agony, you'd be smart to do some work up front to make sure your house sells fast.

10 tips from the experts

Here is some of what experts advise to speed up your sale:

Finish the "honey do" list. Just about every homeowner has a string of little repairs that never quite get done. Now's the time. Fix the screens, oil that squeak, patch the cracks, paint the trim. Stuff that you've long since stopped noticing could be shouting "Deferred maintenance!" to every potential buyer.

The cost: A few bucks if you're handy, a couple of hundred or so if you hire someone who is.

Get inspected. A pre-sale inspection can help in two ways, says real estate columnist Tom Kelly. Professional inspections can identify problems that could thwart a sale in time to fix them. And if there are no major problems, he said, an inspection can publicize that fact to skittish buyers.

"Having an inspection (report) right on the counter during the open house . . . shows the buyers that the seller's got nothing to hide," said Kelly, author of several real-estate books, including "Cashing in on a Second Home in Mexico."

The cost: Around $400.

Pack up the clutter. "Clutter eats equity," said real-estate broker Barb Schwarz, CEO of StagedHomes.com and a pioneer of the concept of professionally preparing houses for sale.

Too much stuff makes rooms look smaller and focuses buyers' attention on your possessions rather than the home you're trying to sell. That's why many professional stagers recommend removing as much as a third of your things to better show off rooms and closets.

"Since you're going to have to pack it up anyway, do it now," advised Schwarz, who said she has staged more than 5,000 homes. Buyers "can't imagine themselves living there if they can't see the space."

The cost: $150 to $300 a month for three months' storage.

Depersonalize and neutralize. The first items that should go in those packing boxes: family photos, collections and just about anything else that says "you." Streamline your artwork and consider toning down bold decorating statements, said Ilyce Glink, author of "50 Simple Steps You Can Take to Sell Your Home Faster and for More Money in Any Market." That means neutral shades if you need to repaint walls or replace carpets.

"Buyers have a hard enough time envisioning how their stuff will look on your walls," Glink said. "By neutralizing your decor, you can help give them the blank canvas they need to imagine your house as theirs."

The cost: $10 and up for paint; $500 and up for new carpet.

Clean like a fiend. "I mean Q-Tip clean," said Schwarz, who recommends taking a cotton swab to faucets and fixtures, scouring fingerprints from all the switch plates, shining windows until they're spotless and vacuuming up every last dog hair from the baseboards. "You should be able to eat off the kitchen floor, the bathroom floor."

You'll need to banish suspect smells as well; you don't want your house to become known in real-estate circles as "the cat pee place." If your pets have had one too many accidents, you may need to replace the affected carpet and padding and have the underlying floor sealed. If you're not sure how your place smells, get your least tactful friend to take a few whiffs and tell you the honest truth.

The cost: $10 or so in home cleaning products, if you do it yourself; $75 and up if you hire help.

Stage the rooms. Stand in the doorway to find each room's focal point, and use furniture placement to highlight that. The back of your sofa shouldn't block the view of the fireplace, for example, and the dining room table shouldn't be sharing space with a stair climber.

You should remove any extraneous pieces of furniture, but you may be able to "repurpose" them in another room. A wingback chair that's crowding the family room might help create a nice reading nook in the master bedroom, Schwarz suggested. The cost: Nothing, if you do it yourself; $1,500 and up if you hire a professional stager.

Tend to the floors. Keeping them spotless won't help if they're dated, worn or impossibly stained. You shouldn't spend a fortune installing hardwood or tile, though, since you're unlikely to recoup the cost. Look for compromises that can improve the home's appearance without busting your wallet.

Carpets should be steam-cleaned to see if they're salvageable. If not, you may be able to reduce the costs of replacement by offering to do some of the work, such as removing the old carpet and moving furniture.

And banish scatter rugs, Schwarz advised. Little rugs add to the visual clutter and can be dangerous besides.

The cost: Anywhere from a few bucks to a few hundred bucks.

Kick up the curb appeal. By now, you probably realize the garden gnomes are a no-no. But you may not realize how many sales you're losing before potential buyers even get to the front door.

"Most people will start their search for a home on the Internet. If your house's Internet photo doesn't 'wow' them, they might never call for a showing," Glink said. "That's why your front landscaping needs to be in perfect condition."

Given the pressure to make a good first impression, you'll need to do more than trim back the hedges and plant a few pansies.

"Hire a professional landscaper to clean up the leaves, plant some fall flowers, trim the bushes and trees, and really manicure your lawn," Glink suggested. "If your front walkway is cracked, now might be the time to replace it."

The cost: $300 to $500 for the landscaping, more if you need to fix walkways or driveways.

Pick the right publicist. If you're working with an agent, you'll want one who can really sell.That means somebody who knows your neighborhood intimately and who's enthusiastic about your home. That also means someone other agents want to work with; someone who's too abrasive or who isn't trustworthy won't help your cause.

If you're going to try to sell your home yourself, make sure you're up for the job. Hawking a home can be hard work.

The cost: 3% to 6% of the sale price of your home.

Set the right price. A seller may think she's just testing the market with a high price tag, assuming buyers will at least make an offer, but buyers may assume she's unreasonable and move on.

Your goal should be a fair price -- something that's reasonable given the price of other homes in your area.

"Buyers who are actively searching for a fairly-priced home," Glink said, "will pounce on what they perceive is fair value."

Big sales stall in America's richest small towns

Big sales stall in America's richest small towns

Want to buy Billy Joel's Sagaponack home? Last month the piano man dropped the price on his oceanfront house on Long Island's East End again, this time from $19.9 million to $18.5 million. It started out at $22.5 million when he first listed the property in 2009.

Joel is not alone. Across the U.S., prices last year continued to decline even in the richest neighborhoods. Sagaponack, a village with a population of only 582 — it swells during the summer — saw home values drop 14.5% from 2009 to 2010 — yet it once again earned the No. 1 position on Businessweek.com's ranking of the most expensive small towns in the U.S. It held on to the top spot because, despite the dip, median home values were $3.4 million, the highest in the nation, according to real-estate website Zillow.com.

Working with the website, Businessweek.com identified the 50 most expensive small towns — populations less than 10,000 — nationwide where median home values are the highest. We evaluated data on 4,624 cities and census-designated places from November 2010, the most recent available. Some expensive communities, such as Bel Air, Calif., were not included as they are neighborhoods rather than cities or census-designated places. Of the 50 most expensive places — many of which are second-home markets — nearly half are in Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk counties and about one-quarter are in California. None of the towns in the ranking had a median home value of less than $1 million. (Bing: What's the median home value in your area?)

Biggest price declines
Values dropped in 33 of the 50 most expensive small towns. The biggest decline, 15.7%, came inWoodside, Calif., home to such tech billionaires as Oracle's Larry Ellison and Apple's Steve Jobs. Values in the second-most expensive town,Jupiter Island, Fla., were down 11.3% from a year ago, to just more than $2.8 million, and in No. 4,Los Altos Hills, Calif., they were down 13.6%, to a bit more than $2.1 million.

In eight of these towns — five of which are among the top 10 most expensive — values were more than 10% below levels of a year ago. Nationwide, home values were down 5.1%, Zillow.com's data indicate.

Only 17 places experienced increases in home values. The winner was Kings Point, N.Y., a wealthy suburb of New York City on Long Island's Gold Coast, where prices rose 13.5%.

In the Hamptons, "prices have not yet rebounded," says Michael Schultz, vice president in Corcoran's East Hampton office. With prices down, he says he expects activity to pick up in the first quarter this year.

Fewer high-end sales
Home to wealthy Wall Streeters, corporate executives and celebrities, the Hamptons saw both unit sales and prices down year-on-year after rising in early 2010. The third-quarter drop in the median sale price in the Hamptons-North Fork market was due to a shift away from high-end sales — only 11 homes sold at or above $5 million in the third quarter, down from 20 sales a year earlier, according to a report by Miller Samuel, a New York real-estate appraisal services firm.

"Across the board, everyone brought their homes down 15% to 20%. Sellers are becoming more realistic" and buyers are more conservative, says Harald Grant, senior vice president in Sotheby's International Realty's Southampton office.

After a strong first half in 2010, unit sales in Sagaponack and nearby Bridgehampton were down 18% year-over-year in third quarter, and the median sale price was down 53%, according to a report from real-estate brokerage Corcoran. Despite this short-term softness, "Sagaponack is a strong market because it has cachet," Grant says.

A premium to rub elbows
What makes small towns such as Sagaponack attractive is their proximity not just to natural beauty and first-class golf courses but also to other wealthy people. That's why the most expensive small towns often cluster around major financial centers. A survey of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas by consultancy Capgemini shows that New York City had 667,200 high-net-worth individuals, or people with investable assets of $1 million or more, in 2009 — far more than any other metro in the country. Other wealthy areas include the Los Angeles metro area, 235,800; Chicago, 198,100; Washington, D.C., 152,400; and San Francisco, 138,300.

Of the 50 most expensive small towns, 22 are in New York — namely, Long Island — and 13 are in California. Others were in Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Washington. A wealthy town in Tennessee, Belle Meade, made the ranking for the first time.

Some well-known markets are less active. "Our really high-end market is almost frozen," and buyers do not seem to want to buy above the $6 million level, says Paul Grover, a partner in Robert Paul Properties, a brokerage in Cape Cod, Mass. With Wall Street turning around, he says he expects that demand will pick up, "but we'll see it in New York first."

View the full list of the 50 most expensive small towns in America on BusinessWeek.com.

That note of hope is one that many real-estate brokers and home sellers across the U.S. share. In expensive small towns like Sagaponack, however, even the battered prices might strike many Americans as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. It's hard for someone who lives in a house valued in the mid-six figures — or less — to empathize with sellers asking prices in the seven- or even eight-figure range. But no owner likes to take a haircut when selling his home. Just ask Billy Joel.

When Will Real Estate Values Begin to Appreciate Again?

When Will Real Estate Values Begin to Appreciate Again?

When will the nation’s property values begin to appreciate again? This is the $64,000 question that real estate professionals, investors, and mortgage professionals would like to know. The truth is nobody can accurately predict the return of the real estate market.  Like everyone else, I can’t predict the end of this crisis either, but what I can do is tell you what will have to happen to facilitate that change. The answer is quite simple: America must reinvest in herself once again. Without an investment, real estate is as worthless as the Dollar is today.

Think back, or read a history book, about how families in the ’40s and ’50s used to buy homes. Young couples lived with Mom and Dad during the “courtship” prior to getting married, until they had saved 20% to put down on their “dream home”.  They made an investment in America, (i.e. the American dream). In the years that followed we have devalued that investment in lieu of credit and the easy access to it. Property values rose artificially and our nation became addicted to credit.

The value of the dollar has been demolished due to the same principle. When we place value in assets based on their ability to be easily bought and sold versus the value that has been invested in the asset, we devalue its worth. For example, two years ago I could have bought an $800,000 house. The owner of that asset (the $800k house) placed value on his asset based on the availability of buyers who could buy the home. The problem is, this homeowner probably had less than 5% invested in the home. Where do you think that homeowner is today?

Had he put 20% down on his home, he would then own a valuable asset in which he has a real investment. This outlay of cash forces him to buy and sell his home in the same manner he would move an $800k investment around in the stock market – very carefully. Thus, the home has REAL value. However, having bought the home with little or no money down, the asset became disposable and so follows the real estate market.

So, as I said earlier, I cannot predict when the real estate market will bounce back, but I can tell you what needs to happen before it does. America needs to reinvest in herself by getting back to solid buying and selling principles. This strengthens home values, which encourages investors who employ builders who employ carpenters, painters, real estate agents, loan officers and so on. America was built on the “American Dream” which has turned into the “American Nightmare”; she can only be rebuilt by hard working Americans, not by Wall Street.