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How Can We Serve Your Real Estate Needs?
Broker/Owners Donald and Carol Leonard have together amassed over 60 years of experience, helping thousands of buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants realize their real estate goals. Together with their highly trained, professional sales staff, clients are assured their interests are being well attended to and return over and over again when their lives dictate a change in real estate needs. Some clients have been part of the Texas Star family for so long, we are now helping the third generation of those families with their home selling and homebuying needs!
We hear that question all the time. The honest answer is when you find one you want to buy! Every market has its rewards and each market has its challenges. In our current market, buyers purchasing homes below $250,000 are having the toughest time because there aren’t many homes for sale in that price range. There is a lot of competition and many times buyers find themselves up against multiple offers. That’s the challenge. The reward is that prices are good, interest rates are fabulous and monthly payments to own a home are far below what the cost would be to rent that same home. The reality is if you want to be a homeowner, it may be a little tougher to find and buy the home right now, but so worth the effort.
Knowing what we know here at Texas Star Realty Professionals, we have great success in helping our buyers achieve their homebuying goals. We know ways to help our homebuyers get a leg up on others making offers on the same home. Believe it or not, it isn’t as simple as just offering more money. That might work for a little while, but soon you will offer so much, the home won’t appraise and you are right back to square one.
The process to buying a home normally starts with a real estate agent and/or a lender. These are your first stops on the way to finding your home. A real estate agent helps you find what and how to buy and the lender helps you with how to pay for what you are buying. You can’t do one without the other. You need them both and you need them early in the process.
Inventory and Access. How are you going to find houses to look at and once you have found them, how are you going to get inside them? In Houston, approximately 95% of homebuyers use an agent to find their home. Real estate agents use the Multiple Listing Service to find those homes. Unless you are an agent, you do not have access to MLS. You have access to real estate websites, but even then, you have to contact an agent to get you inside. Agents have passed through background and criminal checks and have the ability to access homes that are listed. Texas Star Realty Professionals’ agents have over 80 years of experience working with buyers and helping them find the homes they want to buy. By the way, MLS isn’t the only place to find homes for buyers. We have put buyers and sellers together with homes that weren’t even on the market for sale.
Unless you are a seasoned (well-seasoned) buyer, you probably do not have a clear idea how buying a home works. You need someone with experience to help you through the process. We all hope for an easy, simple transaction. But, you need someone who has been through the tough ones just in case yours turns that way. You don’t want to be someone’s test case guinea pig. Agents at Texas Star Realty Professionals have closed over 3,000 homes since starting in the real estate business in 1983.
Relevant Information. Certain pertinent facts regarding closed real estate transactions are not a matter of public record. Texas is what is known as a non-disclosure state. Simply stated, sales prices are not recorded on any document the public has access to. The note, deed and deed of trust are what is recorded down at the courthouse and none of those documents disclose the actual sales prices of homes that are sold. Members of the Houston and Texas Association of Realtors have access to sales prices and other pertinent terms on the sales that can assist you in making an informed decision as to what the value of a property is BEFORE you make an offer, not making the offer and having to wait and see what an appraiser will say the value is 2-3 weeks after you have committed to a sales price on paper.
The lender is essential and needs to be one of your two first stops.
You don’t want to look at properties that will end up being ones you can’t or wouldn’t want to buy. It is a waste of time and if you start looking at price ranges above your budget, you most likely won’t like what is in your price range.
Strength of your offer. Sellers love to see you have already taken steps to obtain your loan. A preapproval letter accompanying an offer make the seller feel much more comfortable that you are serious and able to buy their home.
There is a certain amount of work and preparation that you need to go through even before you start looking at homes. We invite you to get in touch with us before you start looking. We can go over all those necessary things that will make your home search and purchase go smoother and maybe even save you some money.
Timing is certainly important when trying to determine when you should put your home on the market for sale. Sometimes, events will be such that you have no choice in the matter. Job losses, relocations, changes in personal circumstances are all examples of situations that might demand you put the home on the market whether it is a good time or not. If listing your home is a choice, finding the best time is not necessarily determined by looking at the calendar.
The popular belief is that summer is the best time to sell your home. That is because that is when most homebuyers are looking. That is true. However, that is also when most people are trying to sell their home. The percentage of homes coming on the market versus the homes selling is almost the same year round. In fact, some of the best-selling times of the year happen toward the end of the year. That is because most sellers pull their homes off the market due to the holidays. Many homebuyers want to buy before the end of the year so they can claim their homestead exemption on their taxes (ask us about this if you don’t know what that is or how it works) and because it is the holiday season with so many things to do, you can rest assured if someone is out looking at homes, it is because they want to buy.
Relevant data – Sold prices are not a matter of public record in the state of Texas. To know what your home should sell for you should know what other similar homes in your area have sold for. Agents who belong to the National, Texas and Houston Association of Realtors have access to sold numbers because of a database that all agents agree to share their information to. Texas Star Realty Professionals’ agents have been members of this organization for well over 30 years.
Experience – Agents who have been in the business for a while have gone through the process of helping sellers get their homes ready to sell. As a result the list of what to do and what not to do is not a list that can’t be reduced to a checklist on paper because it isn’t the same for every house. Outside factors like what is typical for the neighborhood will come into play just like the needs of the seller will. Those things are not the same from home to home. You need someone who has been through the listing process many times if you want to get it right. Texas Star Realty Professionals’ members have helped over 3,000 sellers with this over the last 30-plus years.
There are many factors to take into consideration when getting ready to sell a home. When, how, how much are all questions that a Texas Star Realty Professionals member can help you with when you are contemplating a sale of your home. We invite you to call on us and take advantage of our years of expertise.