HomeGain.com announced today that it has released the results of its nationwide home improvement and home staging  Home Sale Maximizer™ survey. Past findings from the survey have been a guide for thousands of home sellers in preparing their homes for sale.

HomeGain recently surveyed nearly 600 real estate agents nationwide to determine the top 10 low cost*, do-it-yourself  home improvements for people getting their home ready to sell.

The top five nationwide home improvements that Realtors recommend to home sellers, based on average cost and return on investment (ROI) to sellers, are:

1. Cleaning and de-cluttering ($290 cost / $1,990 price increase / 586% ROI / 99% recommended)
2. Lightening and brightening ($375 cost / $1,550 price increase / 313% ROI / 97% recommended)
3. Home staging ($550 cost / $2,194 price increase / 299% ROI / 80% recommended)
4. Landscaping ($540 cost / $1,932 price increase / 258% ROI / 93% recommended)
5. Repair Electrical or Plumbing ($535 cost / $1,505 price increase / 181% ROI / 92% recommended)

Costs are averages and rounded up.

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This next video features Lise Desormeaux of RMR Real Estate Marketing Results at the August 2009 HomeGain Nation Live Real Estate Forum in San Francisco.

Lise presents powerful tips to REALTORS® who work with home sellers for maximizing the value of the home sale through professional home staging.

Lise refers to HomeGain’s Home Sale Maximizer™ guide for homeowners as a “must have tool” when selling a home.

Watch the video of the Home Staging session: “How to Sell the Value of Home Staging to Sellers”

Keep checking back as we will be adding more videos over the few weeks!

Watch more session videos

Also see more HomeGain Nation videos on the HomeGain YouTube channel and on the HomeGain Nation Blog. Continue reading this post

Max, the orange HomeGain Gorilla, is taking a spin around the streets of New York. Max is on a Find a Realtor/What’s My Home Worth? tour that encourages New Yorkers to find and compare New York Realtors or to look up home prices on HomeGain’s instant home valuation tool. This is Max’s first motor tour since hitting the streets or San Francisco and Phoenix last year.

Max’s driver, Hoke Wolliz, is handing out free Home Sale Maximizer brochures,  a useful tool for anyone planning to sell their home.

If you spot Max, let us know!

Better yet, send us a photo of the “Max Mobile” and we’ll send you a Max gorilla of your own.

Next up for Max: San Diego, California — Max will be visible there this Fall in anticipation of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) Annual Conference and Expo.

Follow Max!

Check New York City Home Prices

 
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Although, in Shakespeare’s words, “All the world’s a stage,” in the world of theater, a play is rather hard to enact without a stage. It’s been tried over the years, but traditional theatergoers prefer a conventional stage.

And so do homebuyers.

GREAT. Yet another blog on staging, you say. One more appeal to get sellers to pay money they don’t have to sell their home in a market that’s upside down like the Poseidon. Why bother? Haven’t we heard it all?

In the immortal words of Bullwinkle the Moose, “BUT WAIT! There’s more!”

The three pillars of a successful sale are: Preparation, Promotion and Price. Of the three legs, price is without question the most important of the three. Using the Pareto Principle, price actually accounts for 80% of a successful sale. Currently, discount pricing reigns supreme as REOs are flooding into the market like water through the cracked levees of New Orleans. How can a normal seller HOPE to float a normal sale against the incoming surge of lower priced homes?

Believe it or not, there are buyers out there who don’t want an REO.

They aren’t “handi” types. They don’t have the will or desire to “make the house their own.” They can’t “see the potential” and quite frankly, aren’t interested. And not everyone has the Martha Stewart gene for using a twisted fork as a curtain tieback. Many of these buyers are actually willing to pay more to buy a nice house that’s ready to move into.

Scratch most REOs off your list.

This is where an understanding of buyer psychology is critical. Sellers need to realize that Continue reading this post

We launched a new “what if” feature to our instant home valuation tool earlier this evening. The new feature allows users to receive an instant home value estimate. Once the user gets their estimate they can play “what if” and hypothetically add an extra bedroom, bathroom and/or some extra square footage. After entering the “what if” data the user gets a new home value estimate.

HomeGain’s home valuation tool is part of our AgentView offering that features real estate agent profiles, blogs and listings in an advertising free environment. Continue reading this post

Last night we launched a new design of our web site.

The new HomeGain.com  makes it easier for visitors to find real estate information and to connect with local Realtors quickly.

We’ve made the agent blogs, agent profiles and  agent listings more accessible with direct links to these sections from HomeGain.com.

Also available directly from HomeGain.com is our instant home values tool and the popular Home Sale Maximizer tool that helps home sellers determine which home improvement will provide the best return on investment.

Visitors to HomeGain.com can also find and compare Realtors with our Agent Evaluator product and can search MLS listings in the View Homes For Sale section.

Please take a look and let us know what you think.

Louis Cammarosano