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LEXpert first time buyer advice

by John Rice

The most important house you buy will be your first one.

It will be the one that sets you up for the next house and the next one and so on.  You want to carry as much equity into your next house as possible.

Buy a good one and it should be easy to sell when you want to move up or take that dream job out of town.

Buy the wrong one and it can be like having an iron ball shacked around your leg.

The hardest thing for most buyers, especially first time buyers, is to think about the exit plan.  One day, you will want to sell your house as much as you wanted to buy it.

Here are some unchangeable features that are often deal killers:

1.  Steep driveways.  Kids can’t play.  Nobody wants to slide down it in the winter.

2.  A bunch of small rooms.

3.  A busy road, either in front or back.

4.  A sloping backyard.  Slopping downhill from the house is a little better than sloping uphill.

5.  Noise.  Could be a bus stop, traffic, a train.

6.  Lack of privacy.  People do not want to be in their backyard and feel like they can’t scratch their butt without a neighbor seeing them.

Keep in mind that in a fast market, ANY house will sell.  We are in a market like we were in 2005 where there are not a lot of choices.  Buyers are feeling happy to get any house.   Many people who bought 2nd tier houses back then realized their mistake in the bad market of 2007-2012.  Just because the market is hot now does not mean it always will be.

If you are a home owner who has a 2nd tier house, then now is your time to sell it!

The LEXpert tours Timber Creek

by John Rice

It was a beautiful day yesterday.  Had to put the top down and talk about one of my favorite neighborhoods in all of Lexington in the $120-160k range……Timber Creek.

If you want to be near Hamburg in this price range, your choices are pretty much the neighborhoods off of Liberty Road or Timber Creek.  I’ve always recommended Timber Creek.  It just has a lot of things going for it.  It’s got a park close by, a walking trail, banks, restaurants, gas stations, a veterinarian and other businesses, it is just across Man O War from Hamburg, and it is in an area with much higher priced houses.

I tend to think of Timber Creek as two neighborhoods really.  The earlier section has bigger lots.  It feels a lot like Eastwood, which is another neighborhood I like.  The newer section has smaller lots and more of a Masterson Station vibe.  My favorite section is the older one just because it has more space, but the location is so good that I can recommend both.

Here is a video I did of the park that is within walking distance from Timber Creek:

“Local agents won’t show your house if listed with a Lexington agent” T or F?

by John Rice

Maita yardsign

I was heading to Mt. Sterling today to stick a sign in the yard of a new listing.  I took Route 60 all the way from my neighborhood in Lexington.  It was a beautiful day to put the top down, so I did.

As I am driving down there, I was thinking about how some sellers believe agents when they say stuff like this:  “If you list with a Lexington agent, none of the (insert small town surrounding Lexington here) agents will show your house.”  I guess in the old days when agents were the gate keepers of info, that might have been true for a very small percentage of selfish realtors.   Today, buyers are seeing the houses online and they tell their agents which ones they want to see.

Even now when I list houses outside of Lexington, many sellers ask me if that is true.  All I know is that I have never met an agent that would let where the listing agent was from stand between them and selling a house.  A few years ago, I even did a some research on a little town just outside of Lexington.  I wanted to see how many houses were listed by Lexington agents verses local agents, then compare the average days on market between the two.  Well, the Lexington agents actually sold their listings faster than the local ones.

So if you live outside of Lexington and would like your yard sign delivered in a 1990 Miata, have no fear.  Local agents will show your house because that is their job and their buyers will see it on every real estate website that exists.

Guess these 2 neighborhoods that are so much alike?

by John Rice

This neighborhood use to be on the edge of Lexington.  It was a rural setting with high end houses on acre lots.  There is a section of land that later became available.  Those houses are still on larger than normal lots, but less than an acre.  It is close to upscale dining and shopping.  It has other equally desirable neighborhoods around it.  When you are in this neighborhood, you still can feel a little bit of how it use to be in the country.

Know what two neighborhoods I am talking about?  I bet some long term Lexingtonians who know 40502 will say Lakewood.  Everybody else may think Greenbrier.  Both are right.

Back in the 50s when Lakewood was being developed, it was on the edge of town.  There were no curbs on the streets.  The lots were big.  It was a rural setting.  Things like New Circle Road and The Lansdowne Shoppes did not exist.  There was no Alumni Drive.  Just a country road called Mount Tabor.  It eventually became surrounded by other nice neighborhoods.  Then in the mid 80s to mid 90s various bits of a large chunk of land became available and were developed.

In the 70s and 80s, Greenbrier was in the country too.  There was no Man O War nor Hamburg.  You took Winchester Road or Bryant Road to get there.  Greenbrier is now surrounded on 3 sides by neighborhoods like Walnut Grove Estates, Bryant Oak Place, Ashford Oaks and The Reserve at Greenbrier (which has absolutely nothing to do with Greenbrier….guess you can’t trademark neighborhood names?)

Greenbrier is in for some changing.  It has already begun.  It really isn’t a rural neighborhood any more.  It is turning into the classic upscale 40509 neighborhood much like Lakewood, or Ashland Park are to 40502.  What makes both unique are not only the larger lots, but the feel of the neighborhood that just can’t be matched elsewhere.  Those newer streets in Lakewood were full of much nicer houses than the others when they were new.  Right now, the Jimmy Nash houses are much nicer than anything in Greenbrier proper.  But what can’t be duplicated is the mature landscaping and the peaceful easy feeling you get in the older parts of Lakewood and Greenbrier……those features were part of developing the neighborhood.  Developers just don’t do that any more.

So, I think we will see more buyers viewing Greenbrier as a unique neighborhood surrounded by other upscale neighborhoods in a convenient location.  When I moved here in 1985, Greenbrier was way out of town.  It is hard to believe there is a Costco less than 5 minutes away now.  Lakewood 2.0, here we come!

Was it me or St. Joseph?

by John Rice

Benz on snow

Back when the market was terrible and buyers had a ton of choices in any price range, I said that you had to have the online presentation perfect because buyers would not take the time to come see the house if you didn’t.  I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I also thought that if we ever had a hot seller’s market again that buyers would come see any house that was in an area they liked, regardless of the presentation.  I was wrong.

Here we are in such a market.  Good houses are selling very fast.  Overpriced houses and ones poorly presented are collecting dust.  It is like buyers are not willing to go backwards in their searches.  Like they see a new listing and either go see it or totally forget it forever.  I think some of this is because buyers are setting up saved searches on sites like Zillow or realtor.com.  They are only really looking at the new listings.  In the old days, you know, around 2011, people would scroll through all the listings everyday just to see the new listings.  You really need a price reduction or status change to get back in their portals.

Here is an example:  I’ve got a listing that we put on the market during all the snow we had this past winter.  The seller wanted me to wait to update the pictures until a certain tree was in bloom.  We hardly had any showing since the outside picture had snow on the ground.  This house has an amazing backyard.  Mentioning it in the marketing remarks did not matter much without a picture to show it.  The picture above was taken the day my photographer did the shoot.  There was nowhere to park so I made my own space.  Once the snow melted, we had maybe 3 showings in 45 days.

Finally, the seller agreed that it was time to update the picture.  The tree had pushed out it’s blooms.  I got my photographer back out.  I deleted the listing and put it back on as a new listing with the new pictures.  That was less than 48 hours ago and I have confirmed 4 showings since then.

The seller, a good friend of mine, credits the statue of Saint Joseph she buried.  I get no respect ;-(