LA Digs - Northeast LA Real Estate Blog

You’re getting ready to put your home up for sale soon which has you making endless to-do lists of things that need to get done so that your house makes the biggest impact when it goes on the market. You've read article after article about creating curb appeal, decluttering and removing personal belongings, staging each room so it looks like a model home. There’s the deep cleaning, minor repairs to take care of, and giving your walls a fresh coat of paint. It can all start to seem extremely overwhelming and expensive!

We've seen this happen with our clients over and over and so we decided to find a way to make the process much easier (and less stressful!). 

Enter Compass Concierge. With this only-at-Compass offering, we'll front the cost of services to improve your home for a quicker, more profitable return. Exclusive to our clients, our Concierge program will prepare your home for the market. From deep-cleaning to cosmetic improvements, we'll work with you to assess every opportunity to elevate your home's value. 

And with our in-house construction company, Eagle Rock Restoration, all you have to do is decide which improvements you want to include in your preparation plan. We'll manage the project (big or small) from start to finish!

Through this unique philanthropy program, we're giving back to the community, one home at a time. 

As your agent, our primary goal is to find new ways to sell your home as fast as possible for the highest price, so we couldn't be more excited to share a new initiative with you today: Compass Coming Soon. A unique pre-marketing opportunity, Coming Soon will allow us to reach potential buyers before officially listing your home. Why is this so important? For a few key reasons:

When we consider the important elements of our lives - like buying and selling our homes - the words we use and how we think about it matters.

Helping homebuyers and home sellers buy and sell real estate in NELA for as long as I have, I’ve seen it all. Homes for sale in Mt. Washington, for instance, offer large modern homes as well as tiny bungalows. Homes for sale in Pasadena offer ginormous California Craftsman homes as well as very small ones. Many are buying and selling homes to upsize. They need more space. But we also see many trying to downsize. They require less space.

Rather than thinking “upsize” or “downsize”, for many good reasons, we might ought to consider the modern term “rightsizing”.

Right-sizing is often about our quality of life. Often a much larger home requires a lot more work and effort to maintain. That time could be better used for other endeavors. Time is the last luxury. We are ALL running out of it.

This is one of the 6 points that Leonard Steinberg, Compass' President, itemized in his daily email regarding downsizing, or  rightsizing as he calls it. I'm dealing with a couple of downsizing/rightsizing projects myself, and I know how stressful it can be. My husband and I often ask each other--how did we end up with so much stuff? Then there's my mother, who is 91 and facing the same issue with only my sister and me to help. And I'm 300 miles away! 

But enough about me. I loved Leonard's conclusion:

Scaling down your home often feels like a regressive, negative moment in life, but I see it as the exact opposite. I have bumped into clients months after they made this stressful shift only to find them happier, less stressed and with a new sense of freedom. Remove ego from homeownership and the decisions made are often much wiser.

The wisdom of removing ego from homeownership, and from all kinds of real estate transactions, is so true in so many ways. For instance, your house will not sell for more than a flipped completely done house that's bigger no matter what you think of their taste. It's not about you and how cool you think your house is. It's about buyers and what they think. And they speak with their feet these days.

"Why don't they make an offer?" Sellers ask this all the time. It's because they don't want to offend you, or they don't want to bother, or they've been trained to believe that you really mean your price.

Here's another example: real estate agents who try to dominate a transaction, like "I would never let my buyer get less than half the credit I told him to expect from the seller." What? This agent thought she had some eerie power over the seller and the buyer in this escrow. My seller said "Let's kick this buyer to the curb and go to the next one." We had a great backup buyer and we did exactly that.

We all have some interest in real estate. After all, we all live somewhere, even if it's under a bridge or on our buddy's couch. Let's figure out what we need and let go of at least some of what we want and maybe we will all be a little more content with our lives.