About Me

How me and Mike Holmes are alike

by John Rice

Any of you ever watch that show on HGTV called Holmes on Homes?  It is about this dude that goes in somebody’s house after the owners had a bad deal with a lousy contractor.  He fixes everything, gets it right, and in the end, he almost always gets a big hug from the people he helped.  While he is a great contractor, what folks like about him is that he cares about them and how what he does affects their lives after he is done.

I’ve noticed that I’m also getting a lot of hugs lately.  I had a closing where I represented both the buyer and the sellers.  I put together a deal that made both of them happy.   Got hugs from all of them.  Helped a couple buy their first house.  It was a foreclosure, so it was a little more complicated of a deal, plus I did a minor repair to the house so that it would pass the FHA inspection.  Got a hug at the closing.  Worked with a neat family that was pretty new to Lexington.  It was a really smooth deal until the radon level wouldn’t go down.  Got a hug at the closing.  Today, I had to say goodbye (for now) to a family that I’ve spent a lot of time with this week.  They are hopping back on a plane tonight after buying a really cool house while they were here.  We looked at a lot of houses, ate a few lunches together, and had a lot of laughs.  I got another hug.  I figure I must be doing a pretty good job because I am sure it isn’t as easy to hug a fat middle aged Realtor as it is a buff good looking contractor, even though I likely smell better.

I know I am making light of this, but it is pretty important to me.  I don’t know about you, but I’m only gonna hug somebody that I really like, trust, or has done something special for me.  Fire fighters, police, Mike Homes…..and now me, get hugs.   I think that is pretty neat.

WHY AM I SO INTO NEIGHBORHOODS?

by John Rice

I woke up today asking myself why I am so into helping people pick a neighborhood that will work for them.  I think a lot of the insight I have that benefits my clients comes from my own experiences and driving around Lexington neighborhoods since 1986.   I have owned 3 houses in my life.  One of them was too close to the train tracks.  The Fire Department used the alley behind me to practice backing up their fire trucks.  BEEP!  BEEP!  BEEP! all day long every December.  The Driver’s Ed teacher at the high school also picked the spot in front of my house to teach kids to parallel park.  Every weekend, I would look out and see kids’ with their dad’s using MY car as their victim/reference car.  I then moved to another house that was near a busy road.  The problem there was that police would pull people over, they would turn down my street, stop in front of my house, and then get arrested if they had outstanding warrants.  There are more people than I ever imagined that get arrested from a traffic stop.  Then the house next door sold to a guy that turned his basement into a casino four nights a week.  Plus the people who bought behind me and kept four large dogs outside 24 hours a day.  Trust me……..I now have a sixth sense about these things!

For my current house, I have used my 6th sense to pick a winner.  We are on a long cul-de-sac of 25 houses.  We are not so close to the corner that my kids are at risk of getting hit when people fly around it.  I am well within the perimeter of the well-defined boundaries of my area.  And, for my own personal preferences, the house sits east to west.  I don’t like it when one side of your yard gets baked in the sun in the evenings.  I am also on a high point, which is good since I don’t like having a neighbor’s house looking down on mine.  I also don’t like to hear traffic noise.  I am about a mile from the interstate, but I can still hear some noise if the wind blows a certain way.  Overall, I think I would have a hard time reproducing all the secondary things about where I am now that I like.

So, I am always asking my peeps if this or that is going to bug them if they lived there.  I find that some people get really excited about the house, but don’t notice somethings that may bug them later.  Such as noise, the view, the location within the neighborhood, a steep driveway.  I look to see if there are signs of outside dogs in yards around them, neighbors that work on cars or motorcycles (no offense, my dad has like 12 motorcycles and I wouldn’t want to live next door to him!)  I also tell people to drive around their neighborhood on a nice warm night and when everybody is coming home from work to see what it is going to be like.  Of course we also hit the PVA to see how much is rental, plus the sex offender registry and crime map.

Those were all some practical things that can make or break enjoying your house, but there is more to this neighborhood thing you need to consider.  When you buy your house, an appraiser will pick 3 similar houses, ideally within the same neighborhood.  Well, when you go to sell, an appraiser will do the same thing!  When selling is on your mind, you suddenly care about things like if you bought the most expensive house in the neighborhood or if you over improved.  Why not think about that BEFORE your buy it?  So, here is the caution tape that you generally want to stay within:  Don’t buy the cheapest nor most expensive house.  Don’t buy one that doesn’t really fit in well with the neighborhood (Think round house on Mt Tabor Road.)  Don’t over/under improve.  All neighborhoods go through cycles, so don’t buy in an area that is in decline.  There is a ton of other stuff to consider, but the bottom line is that you really want to take a close look at the neighborhood.  It is much easier to change a house than it is to change a neighborhood.

4 things you need your Realtor to do

by John Rice

I am stuck in my dining room today while the flooring guys put down hardwood in the next room.  What a good time to blog about some of the things that have been on my mind.

I recently met a couple who paid way too too much for their house back in 2007.  They want to sell it now, but they are going to take a big hit.  I know you are thinking that stuff like that is happening all over these days, but there is more to this story that just a slow market.

This couple used a well-known agent in town.  They moved from a much more expensive part of the country.  To them, ALL the houses looked like a bargain.  They told me they didn’t want to use her again since she didn’t tell them that they were buying the most expensive house on the street.  She also didn’t do a Comparable Market Analysis (CMA).

I thought, well maybe there were multiple offers.  Sometimes if a person finds the right house and there are other buyers in the picture, you got to move fast…………Nope.  Not a multiple offer situation.

Well, being a little OCD, I thought that I would do a CMA based on the date they bought it.  It is easy to do.  I just plug in the date of the sale and look back 6 months to see what else had sold that would have been comps for the house.  It was as if it was early 2007.  The exact same info available to the other agent.  The only surprise was that they only over paid by $7-10,000, rather than the $10-15,000 I had suspected.

So, I have 4 things your realtor should do for you.  There are countless others, but these 4 will eliminate a lot of potential bad surprises for you.

1)  You guessed it.  Your realtor should do a CMA.  Sometimes my clients will ask me how much they should offer based on the asking price.  I usually tell them that we first need to find out what the house is worth.  If it is over priced by 10% and you offer 95% of the list price, you have just over paid.  You HAVE to know what the house is worth independent of the asking price.

2)  You need to know who owns the houses around you.  A quick check of the PVA website will let you know if  there are a lot of rental houses around you.  Nothing scares buyers more than buying in a high rental area.  See, the PVA site will tell you where the tax bill is sent.  If it is sent somewhere other than the house in question, odds are the occupant is not the owner.  I once had a client who fell in love with a house and was ready to buy it.  A PVA search revealed that about 40% of the neighborhood was rental.  One of the big builders in town owned about 20%.  I could have sold them that house and saved all the time we spent looking at about 20+ houses after that, but that is not my business model. 

3)  Your realtor should check the crime map before making an offer.  That will tell you what kind of neighbors you’ll have and/or what kind of people are coming into your neighborhood.  Bear in mind that a neighborhood under construction will have a lot of theft from people taking tools, material, copper from vacant houses, etc.

4)  Your realtor should verify the schools for the house.  I see a lot of wrong info on the MLS, especially for schools.  Sometimes agents get lazy and do things like assume that the closest school is the one.  My kids are in a magnet school that you can only get into by lottery.  I was amused to see that one realtor had put the school as the disctricted elementary school.  Can you imagine buying that house and thinking your kid was going there?

There are lots of other things a realtor should do, but to protect yourself, make sure they at least do these 4!

My Top 10 Fave Things about life in 40509

by John Rice

40509.  I use to drive the country roads that are now lined with neighborhoods when I was a teenager.  I always like the feel of this part of town.  A lot has changed since then…….Oh, this isn’t about nostalgia, it is a Top 10 list, so here I go:

#10  You can live out here with just about any budget.  There are townhouses/condos in decent neighborhoods from the $90’s all the way up to McMansions.  Most of the area seems to be $180k to $250k.  There are lots of great neighborhoods like Autumn Ridge, Andover Hills, Chilesburg, Stuart Hall, Brighton East, West Wynd, and Eastwood Club.

#9  The schools are getting better all the time.  There is a lot of excitement and expectation about the new Liberty Road Elementary.  Some of 40509 goes to Athens-Chileburg ElementarySchool (ACE).  It is a good school.  We also have a newer middle school, Edyth J. Hayes.

#8  We are close to the interstate.

#7

Why did I switch to Re/Max??

by John Rice

Well……I finally did it.  I had been thinking about moving to Re/Max for about a year now.  A couple of weeks ago I finally made the move.

I am sure  there really is no perceivable difference between my last place and Re/Max to most people.  Both are well respected places.  If I wasn’t a Realtor, it wouldn’t make much difference to me as long as I still got to use the agent that I liked.

I only wanted to make a change if it was going to be better for not only me, but also for my clients.  I really want to take my business to the next level.  I love what I do and want to do it more and keep getting better at it.  Re/Max is the place to be for all of that.

Re/Max is really set up to be about the agents as opposed to the company.  I pay a set fee for the year rather than a non-stop 80%-20% split based on a full 6%  commission like at the old place.  This gives me the freedom to negotiate my fees.  Real Estate these days takes place on the computer.  You’re really paying me for what I know more than for my time.  In the old days, it took a lot of time to list and sell a house.  The effort and time involved has decreased, but the cost hasn’t.  I’m happy to give people a break!  Oh yeah, plus all the calls from the yard sign go straight to me rather than some agent sitting by the phone who has never been in my client’s house.  Wouldn’t you want somebody telling a perspective buyer about your house to be me??

The training is fantastic!  They have all kinds of videos, webinars, and stuff that is only a few clicks away at all times.  The website is the best.  They even have this thing where if somebody calls me, I can push various websites (school district, crime map, etc) to their screen from my phone!  Is that cool or what??

I really love the cutting edge tech aspect of Re/Max.  A lot of people think I am really in to tech stuff, but to me it is all about the most efficient way of getting something done.

I could go on and on, but I am already up to 377 words.  The bottom line is that as much I liked my old place, I wanted to go somewhere that would make me a better Realtor and help my clients in their needs.