Real Estate Information Archive

Home remodels offer an opportunity to change the look and feel of your home. This can be great if you live in an older home with outdated fixtures and other hardware. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t take the time to match their remodel to their house and end up with a look that’s a bit less than optimal. The remodel won’t necessarily look bad, but it may be unsatisfactory because it doesn’t quite match the architecture and style of the house itself.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to redo everything in its original style when remodeling your home. That would all be rather boring, wouldn’t it? You simply need to make sure that you fully take your home into account when designing your remodel. This is easier than you might think, once you know what to plan for.

What Style Is Your Home?

Before you can plan out a remodel based on the style of your home, you need to figure out exactly what that style is. There are a lot of possibilities out there, ranging from Victorian and Colonial designs to Craftsman homes, Ranch homes and other more modern styles. You may already know which architecture style your house was built in, either from existing architecture knowledge or discussions with your Realtor before buying the property. If you aren’t sure, though, there are a number of resources that can help you find out. You can research home styles online, talk to fans of different architectural styles or even look at the original listing for your home if you have a copy. Regardless of how you find out, learning about your home’s architectural style is the first step to accenting it with your remodel.

Learning Your Style

Once you know your home’s style, take the time to learn a bit about it. Learn the key points of the architecture, distinguishing features and everything else that makes it stand out from similar home designs. If there are fixtures, doors, windows or other home features that are commonly associated with your home style, you should learn what those are as well. This may seem like a lot of work, but the details about your home style that you learn now will go a long way toward helping you design a remodel plan that really accentuates the best things about your home.

Adapting Your Style

Once you have a good idea of what works with your home’s architectural style, it’s time to start planning your remodel to work with that idea. You can look for fixtures that are similar to more traditional offerings but that better match your personal taste, or for example select a traditional door but opt to paint it in a color that will go better with your new siding choices. Your goal should be to find a balance between more traditional offerings for your home style and your personal decorating preferences. That way, the choices you make will fit in beautifully with the overall design of your home and its existing accents.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean everything has to match perfectly, either. There is a lot of room for you to express yourself through choices that might otherwise clash with your home style, using that disparity to draw attention either to your choice or to the design of the home itself. There are many options available to you, and because you know what’s expected for homes like yours you are free to go with the traditional or to shake things up as you see fit.

Owning a home means having a place that’s safe and secure to come back to after a long day at work, every day, forever, until you decide it’s time to buy a different home. In exchange for all this homeiness, all you have to do is keep all the broken bits together, maintain the grass and track home-related expenses. Oh yes. If you don’t do a little bookkeeping, the tax man gets his and more. Might as well keep that cash as not, right? Why You Should Track Home-Related Expenses Your primary residence isn’t an investment, this has been said time and again (especially since the market crashed entirely), but that doesn’t mean that when you go to sell you have to take a loss. Far from it. In fact, as of the writing of this article, you’ll likely qualify for a tax exclusion (meaning you won’t pay taxes on this amount of profit from your home sale) of $250,000 if you file on your own or $500,000 if you and your spouse file your taxes together. But, if you sold and there was more than the applicable amount in gains, you’ll have to pay taxes only on the profit above the mark. When you have all your ducks in a row, it gets a lot easier to see what side of that line you stand on.

Reducing Your Tax Burden is the Goal.  When your gain from your home sale exceeds your tax exclusion, there are two ways to help improve the situation with all those receipts you’ve been saving (you have been saving them, haven’t you?). First, you can deduct expenses related to selling your home, provided these are not expenses that affect the house physically. Think closing fees, brokerage commissions, and some seller-paid closing costs. The other way to reduce your capital gains burden is to produce records that account for your extensive remodeling. These are the kinds of projects you definitely need a hand with. They include, but are not limited to:

     *Adding an additional room

     *Upgrading your kitchen

     *Replacing flooring

     *Having new landscaping installed

     *Putting on a new roof

The best part? These don’t have to be from the same tax year as when you sold. If you added that bedroom three years ago, pony up the receipts and reduce your tax burden. Unfortunately, regular home maintenance isn’t included on this list of ways to save a few dollars. Make sure you keep those receipts separate.

Get a Little Help From Your Friends.  Keeping track of your personal finances, let alone the expenses related to your home, can be a daunting task. There are so many ways to pay these days and so many different kinds of things to pay for. This is the very reason, though, that you must be even more careful when tracking home-related spending. Everybody has their own system, to be sure, but some are clearly superior to others. For example, if your plan is just to toss a bunch of receipts in a bucket until you get around to sorting them and manually recording each one, you may want to look into something a bit more efficient. Even an Excel workbook is out-modeled these days, but there are several different types of apps you can use to help track your expenses, including: Complete personal finance apps. Popular apps like Mint and Wally are essentially full personal finance packages that happen to store receipts. While you can give these apps permission to grab you bank information from a variety of banks all at once, you may end up with enough data that it’s a trick to find those old receipts down the road.

Dedicated receipt storage. Shoeboxed, Receipts by Wave and Expensify are far more focused on the receipt part of your financial picture. All allow you to photograph and upload the receipts in question, can export the data you collect as a variety of reports and have a cloud-storage option, so you don’t have to worry that you’ll lose your receipts if you change phones or need to reload your operating system.

PS. BTW, Shoeboxed will actually take that bucket of receipts and process them for you if you mail them in. Receipt storage designed for homeowners. Not to toot our own horns, but toot toot. HomeKeepr allows you to scan your receipts in and helps you track home-related expenses automatically. All you need to do is snap a picture of your receipt and the software does the rest. You can then sort your receipts by the service type or business so you can see at a glance how much you’re spending on your project. Unlike other receipt trackers, HomeKeepr can track and maintain records for related items like appliance manuals and maintenance tasks that are due for your home.

Are You Ready to Invest in Your Home This Year?  All this talk of bookkeeping and receipt scanning surely has you thinking about how much you’ve been wanting to redo the deck or hang new gutters. Well, today’s the day. Not only can you store those receipts in the HomeKeepr platform, your real estate agent can hook you up with some of the best contractors in your area. Just pop into your HomeKeepr community and check out who has been recommended for you. Your agent put their reputation on the line by providing these referrals, so you know they have to be good!

Cute. Cozy. Charming. Almost 1200 square feet of comfy living await you at 3635 E. Montezuma Ave. Comprised of 3-beds and 2-baths, a spacious living area, kitchen, breakfast nook and interior laundry room. The exterior offers a fenced, grass backyard with a large, covered deck, plus a spacious shed complete with electricity. The home offers some energy saving features also, such as a solar fan in the attic that automatically turns on when the temperature reaches 80-degrees, to disperse the heat of those warm, Arizona summer afternoons, as well as a radiant barrier in the rafters, and the back of the home is south-oriented for a possible solar option. The HVAC has been recently inspected and given a clean bill of health, and the entire home has been recently rodent proofed. All of the above is situated on .21-acres and was built in 2003. To see additional pictures and view the virtual tour, please visit www.3635Montezuma.com

MLS # 518301. Priced at $234,500

4/22/17 – 4/22/18 (Sedona): Total Closed Sales: Up 12% from 205 to 232, over this same time last year. Median Recorded Sale Price: Up 12% from $467,500 to $530K, over this same time last year. Price Per Square Foot: Up 3% from $246 / sq. foot to $254 / sq. foot, over this same time last year. Days On Market: The one category we don’t mind seeing a drop…The average days on market was down 9%, from 158-days on market, to 145-days on the market for the average sale, over this same time last year.

4/22/17 – 4/22/18 (Cottonwood): Total Closed Sales: Up 8% from 334 to 361, over this same time last year. Median Recorded Sale Price: Up 14% from $201K to $229,900, over this same time last year. Price Per Square Foot: Up 10% from $135 / sq. foot to $148 / sq. foot, over this same time last year. Days On Market: We are seeing a 6% increase in the time a house sits on the market, from 108 days on average to 114, over this same time last year.

It is still a great time for a Seller to come on the market if they are thinking about selling their home.  Inventory remains low and Buyer demand for "the next best thing" remains very high.  If you price your home right, we are seeing multiple offers and offers going well over asking price.  If you or someone you know are thinking about selling, please don't hesitate to contact us for a free, no obligation MAP Review, which is our complimentary Marketing and Pricing Review we will do for you to help you understand how we would market your home and where you would be in today's marketplace. 

We are here to help! 

"One Call Gets Us All!"

Fill in the blank… “I have a _________…” It doesn’t take a psychic to know what word you chose. Was it “dream”? Good chance it was. We all know this line from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech. So when we hear those first three words, it sort of naturally comes to mind. But what many people aren’t aware of is how much he affected the lives of real estate agents, buyers, and sellers. It was his death that gave Congress the last push needed to pass the Fair Housing Act, back in 1968. It’s pretty involved, but to put it simply… This was put in place to ban racial discrimination in housing. You can’t be refused the rental or purchase of a house, based upon your race. Seems simple enough to most people now. A given, if you will. But it didn’t happen overnight. And believe it or not, it still can and does come up. But guess who’s a big part of making sure this Act is followed… On the front lines, it’s real estate agents. We’re tasked with making people aware that discrimination based upon race (and many other things) are not acceptable, and they must refuse to work with anyone who wants to do so. Real estate agents are proud to be a part of this ongoing history. Today is the day where we take a moment to reflect and pay him respect. It’s also a good day to share some insight into how much more responsibility real estate agents have than meets the eye.

Market Stats Update for December:

SEDONA:

Total Closed Sales: Up 15% from 181 to 209 (over the same time period last year). However, it is down slightly from 215 which we saw last month.

Median Recorded Sales Price: Up 9% from $475K to $519K (over the same time period last year). This is about a 1% gain from this time last month.

Price Per Square Foot: Up 4% from $238 / sq. foot to $248 / sq. foot. No change from this time last month.

Days On Market: Down 8% from 157 to 144 (over this same time period last year).

COTTONWOOD:

Total Closed Sales: Up 4% from 321 to 333 (over this same time period last year). As we saw with Sedona, this figure is also slightly down from the 340 we saw last month.

Median Recorded Sales Price: Up 14% from $197,250 to $225,000 (over this same time period last year). No change from this time last month.

Price Per Square Foot: Up 9% from 131 to 143 (over this same time period last year). No change from this time last month.

Days On Market: This has crept up slightly over this time last year by about 9%, from an average sale taking 110 days last year, to about 117 days current day.

With a continued low inventory driving the prices, we are still in a Seller's market.

If you would like a brief, no obligation Marketing Strategy Review, please feel free to contact us, we are here to help; team is what it takes!

"One Call Gets Us All!"

From our family to yours, we wish you a blessed holiday season and hope that all your holiday wishes come true!

Good Friday to you all! I just wanted to take a moment and let you know some "good news!" The housing market in Sedona, Cottonwood and the Verde Valley continues to improve! Have a look at the numbers below.

Sedona (11/17/16 - 11/17/17):

Total Closed Sales: Up 26% from 171 to 215 (from this same time last year and up 3% from last month).

Median Recorded Sales Price: Up 10% from $467,500 to $515,000 (from this same time last year).

Price Per Square Foot: Up 6% from $233 / sq. ft to $248 / sq. ft (from this same time last year and about 1% gain over last month).

Cottonwood (11/17/16 - 11/17/17):

Total Closed Sales: Up 6% from 321 to 340 (from this same time last year and up about 1% over last month).

Median Recorded Sales Price: Up 15% from $195,000 to $225,000 (from this same time last year and up about 1% over last month).

Price Per Square Foot: Up 10% from $130 / sq. ft. to $143 / sq. ft (from this same time last year and up about 1% over last month).

If you or someone you know is looking to sell or buy, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are here to help you or them with all of your residential real estate needs!

AULT&ASSOCIATES - Team Is What It Takes.