Category Archives: Online Fun for Homebuyers

I was feeling like all real estate news had turned into an endless loop of the same material (c’mon, how many times have we seen that St. Joseph statue story already?) when I came across this item from Paul Hagey and Inman News: “Drones are ready for real estate.”

That’s right, tiny unmanned, remote-controlled helicopters are becoming affordable, and photographers are figuring out how to stabilize them for high-quality pictures and even video,  allowing prospective buyers to see views of your property that you’ve never experienced yourself.

You’ve got to admit, this is cool stuff. Even cooler when you read the part about how not even a normal plane or helicopter can get low enough — in the 300-feet-over-your-house range  –  to take photos with of similarly impressive detail and depth of field.

Of course, not every property will look good from the air. Last time I looked at my house on Google maps, it looked like a square of gray (that being the roof) set against a lot of other gray (those being the neighbors’ roofs and the cement of nearby roads) plus the occasional dot of green (uh oh, I really should prune back that jasmine vine). But the nearby high school swimming pool looks really great.

So if you’ve got a house with a pool, you may want to be an early adopter of this drone method of real estate advertising. The same goes if you’ve got a luxury property that looks more shapely from the air than my little square of gray. Or if you’ve just got a really stunning roof.

As all the news media scramble to find Valentine’s Day hooks for their stories today (I’ve seen a lot of headlines on “heart health”), kudos to Trulia for putting together a whole survey on how the singletons of the world rate the importance of homeownership in making their hearts throb.

Be sure not to stall on the first line, puzzling over who those 5% of unmarried adults who actually WANT to date someone who lives with their parents are.

More revealingly, 36% of women and 19% of men would prefer dating a homeowner to a renter. It’s not a majority, but a healthy proportion of the population — perhaps looking for financial stability and ability to commit? (Little do they know, the true fireworks will start shooting when they get a load of the mortgage interest deduction.)

While women prefer to date someone who lives in a suburban home, men have their eyes on dates with an apartment in the city. Uh oh, here we go with the Venus and Mars stuff again. But wait: The survey also found that when it comes time to actually choose a home to “fall in love” with, men and women agree that the master bathroom, followed by a walk-in closet, are the most potentially enticing features. (Sellers, take note.) ((Architects, too, but please leave some space for the other rooms.))

“You’ve only got one house renovation like this in your lifetime,” says owner David Gottfried of the 1915 Craftsman bungalow in Oakland that he and his wife Sara turned into an environmentally conscious gem. The renovation earned multiple awards and literally broke records, getting more “Build It Green” points than any previous home, and becoming (for a while) the highest rated LEED home in the United States.

The upgrades included things like redoing the kitchen and bathrooms with recycled glass tile and concrete counters; adding rainwater- and graywater-capture systems to irrigate the yard and use in the half-bath toilet; adding solar panels and a solar hot water heater; replacing the windows with double-paned glass and adding insulation; adding radiant heating and energy-efficient appliances; relandscaping with vegetables and native, drought-tolerant plants; and much more. Throughout the renovation, the Gottfrieds reused wood and hardware from within the house and from other sources.

Gottfried’s attention to detail is such that he went so far as to take each radiant heating unit (which come in white, white, and white) to an auto body shop and have it repainted to match the intended color of the room — and the rooms are, of course, painted with no VOC paint. (If you look closely, there’s a brown-painted radiant heating unit on the wall to the far right of the bed there.)

But now that Gottfried’s family needs more space, it’s time to sell the house. And that means having to somehow convey to buyers all the valuable work that went into it. “It has presented a challenge,” says Gottfried. One unusual step they took was to create a list of the home’s “Green Features,” to be passed out to visitors. But with 31 items on the list, buyers might not absorb it all, or realize what they were actually looking at while walking through, room by room.

So Gottfried came up with an additional idea — one I’ve never seen used anywhere else — to place small, elegantly fashioned signs in each room, explaining its particular green features.

To the left is the sign in the bathroom, for example, listing features like the recycled content steel bathtub, Energy Star exhaust fan, dual flush toilet, and so on.

Gottfried had also previously created a website for the home, “DAVID GOTTFRIED GREEN HOME,” which now mentions that it’s for sale. And of course, the selling agent has made sure to mention the LEED certification and other green features in the marketing materials.

Even if your home isn’t one of the greenest in the country, consider, when you sell, whether you can use some of these strategies to explain what’s special about the house — or what buyers might not notice without it being brought to their attention.

Have you noticed how agent-speak, as seen in real estate ads, tends to be either over the top or underwhelming?

More often the former, of course. Just looking at today’s local real estate section, it’s easy to pull out grand, sweeping, and did I mention grand, statements like:

“Spectacular views & magical sunsets!”"Enjoy the spacious sun drenched living room with views!” and”Truly an entertainer’s delight and magical at night!”(Does it say somewhere in the real estate agents’ handbook that you must use lots of exclamation points and the word “magical?”)

Oh, and here’s my favorite: “This gracious, four-bedroom, two bath . . . Tudor emotes a bygone era.”

I’ll give the agent a small gold star for ditching the exclamation points, but what’s with “emotes?” Sounds like the house has taken up method acting. I’m guessing she meant to say “evokes.” Or maybe she just got tired of the same old words and decided to get, uh, creative.

Now, for the underwhelming bits of prose — the ad language that makes you go, “That’s supposed to appeal to me why, exactly?”

Again from today’s paper, we’ve got, “Shows very well.”

Okay, now that’s something an agent might say to another agent, but if I were a prospective buyer, I’d wonder what it says about the house after the staging is gone. It’s like saying that someone looks really good with makeup on.

Or this one: “Grass covered back yard!” Whoa. Better put that one on your must-see list.

And my fave from this list, which isn’t an ad for a house, but for a mortgage broker, which contains the following customer testimonial:

“Buying a house is stressful, but working with Sue was one of the most positive and least stress-inducing aspects of the process.” Hmm. So how stress inducing was working with her, exactly? They should’ve stopped at “most positive.”

Just for a last bit of fun, here’s an ad from an agent who tried to do something a little different: “SWEET STARTER SEEKS SINCERE BUYER. Me: Mature 2BR stucco near shops and San Francisco expres bus. You: Looking for affordable cottage in desirable area.”

At least he left out any mention of magical sunsets.

P.S. Choosing a selling agent? Read their ads first. Some of the larger brokerages have a marketing person handling all the writing, which can add a layer of professionalism and quality control. In any case, when it comes to your house, ask to read the copy before it goes to press.