The Crofton MD home rental market has always been robust and continues to be in this challenging real estate market. Crofton Maryland is a great location to live because of it’s proximity to Washington DC, Baltimore and Annapolis.
Right now if you’re looking to rent, Crofton has 29 units available ranging in price from $1,295 a month to $2,600 and month. At $1,295 you’re looking at a 2 BR/2 BA townhouse and at the $2,600 level you can get into a single family house with 5 BR’s and 3.5 BA’s.
If you’re looking for a rental in the Crofton area give me a call and I can help. 443-995-9595 or email: Rich@RichSellsHomes.com.
Despite all the bad news you read and hear in the press, homes are selling in Crofton. While they are staying on the market longer than during the sizzling years, settlements do occur every day.
June had 38 Crofton Homes go to settlement.
The least expensive was a 1 BR, 1 BA on Whitestone Court which went for $217,000 with a $13,100 seller subsidy. Only 8 days on the market for this home.
On the most expensive side of the Crofton Homes market was a 5 BR, 4 BA on Houndhill Court which went for $695,000 with a seller subsidy of $20,000. This house was on the market 40 days.
Like any real estate market, Crofton homes that are priced right and in good condition sell quickly, even in this market. Homes that tend to hang around are those that need work and are overpriced.
Buyers are out there and are more active now than at the beginning of the year.
If you want to search for any active home for sale in Maryland please visit my website at www.SearchingMaryland.com
Yesterday I was driving to Giant when I drove past a cluster of furniture sitting on the curb across from CVS.
This wasn’t stuff being put out for trash pick-up or a yard sale. Sadly, it’s someone’s life being severly affected in a negative way. Someone’s Crofton home or Crofton rental was being evicted. How distressing it must be to come home and find your furniture out on the curb exposed to weather and frankly, theft.
We don’t really know what the story is and probably never will. Somebody is trying to find a place for their belongings and a place to begin to put their life back together.
Although a lot of the reporting on the housing crisis is out of proportion to the facts, it is real and it does affect people.
If you, or your family or friends, find yourself in trouble of foreclosure you need to contact your bank immediately. You can’t ignore the problem, it just won’t go away on it’s own.
Every seller wants to know how long their house is going to be on the market. That is an absolutely fair question and one, unfortunately, that no agent can really answer. So what do you do? I would suggest that you can at least get some idea by looking at data. Let’s go with a simplistic comparison.
Crofton currently has 170 active homes on the market for sale. Last month, May, 25 homes sold in Crofton. Dividing the 25 homes sold in May into the 170 active Crofton listings gives us a 6.8 month inventory of homes, assuming no other homes come on the market in Crofton.
This is a simplistic example that an agent can refine by comparing like for like types of housing.
Almost 7 months of inventory is going to take a while to sell off during the dog days of summer.
Nevertheless, it looks like the Crofton MD real estate market is selling a little more than one home per business day and that’s not too bad.
If you would like more detailed information about Crofton real estate or Annapolis MD real estate, give me a call at 443-995-9595.
Don’t ever underestimate the genius of criminals trying to get money from you without working. I heard about a new type of fraud going on today that may be coming to the Annapolis MD real estate area.
It goes something like this. Criminals search through recent public domain information regarding house sales. They pick out unsuspecting homeowners and send them an “official” looking letter telling them that their mortgage has been sold. Of course they give them detailed instructions as to who and where to send their next mortgage payment. Them, of course. The first time the unsuspecting homeowner knows about it is when their bank calls wanting to know when they’re going to pay the mortgage. Their’s is a post office box and since most of us who write checks to legitimate banks also send the payments to post office boxes it doesn’t seem suspicious.
All they need is a few people to bite on the scam and then they move on pretty quickly.
If you ever receive anything like this in the mail, no matter how official looking, immediately contact your bank to verify that it’s legitimate.
As the seargent on the old TV series Hill Street Blues used to say…”be careful out there.”
I would never be so blunt as to tell one of my sellers that, but sometimes an agent just has to bite their tongue and try an end around.
When you’re in a house day in and day out sometimes you just don’t smell what others can smell. Pet odors, smoking and ethnic cooking are just some of the odors that can turn a buyer off. Most buyers can put up with cooking odors which tend to be temporary but pet odors and smoking…ugh.
Some odors just seem to seep into the paint and carpet. A buyer coming into one of these houses just knows there will be a lot of work to do before they’ll want to move in.
Masking odors with store bought fragrances doesn’t work most of the time. Buyers, and their agents, can smell the underlying odor, and now you have to deal with them thinking that you were trying to hide something.
Painting can certainly help with sealing walls and reducing some odors. Pet and smoke odors on carpets are rarely corrected by getting them cleaned. Many times you just have to replace carpets if the odor is too strong.
Psychologically, buyers viewing a house that has a strong, offensive odor, think that the house isn’t clean and spend less time in it giving it the once over. With all the houses on the market, “next” is the comment agents hear most frequently.
When you’re competing to sell your Bowie home or Crofton home, it has to be in the best possible shape. Clean and odor free is a minimum standard in this buyers market.
Because of the excess inventory in the Annapolis MD real estate market, agents are showing a lot of vacant homes to potential buyers.
Vacant homes can either look spectacular or they could look a bit depressing. Once you take down all your pictures and remove all your furniture you would be surprised at all of the little nicks and spots that show up. Without something to take the buyers attention away, every little thing that’s wrong seems to be exaggerated.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when selling your empty house:
- Curb Appeal: You may not be there but buyers may be coming to see your house regularly. The curb appeal is extremely important. I’ve seen many buyers drive up to a house that doesn’t have decent curb appeal and never bother going inside. Grass and bushes need to be trimmed. Put a new coat of paint on the front door if necessary. Gutters, downspouts, etc…you get the picture. This is the entrance to your house and if it doesn’t appeal to buyers they will just move on.
- Paint: Without pictures and furniture the bare walls will show every irregularity. A simple coat of paint will do a lot for a room. New paint is probably the single best investment you can make when selling your vacant house.
- Carpets: Wow…same as paint. Once all the furniture is on the truck all those spills over the years can look pretty bad. If it can’t be cleaned than you should consider replacing dirty and worn carpet. Offering a carpet allowance is an option but I’ve found that replacement is a better way to generate buyer interest.
- Staging: Empty houses look like, well, empty houses. In many cases they aren’t very appealing to the eye. Many buyers can’t really visualize what it would look like with their furniture. This is where staging can help. The placement of selected pieces of furniture and accessories gives your vacant house a more lived in feeling. It can also help to focus buyers attention on the areas where you want them to focus, rather than on the areas that may be a challenge.
Another thing to keep in mind about your vacant home for sale is homeowners insurance. You should contact your insurance carrier and make sure they know that the home is vacant. Many insurance companies will require a slightly higher premium when a house is vacant.
An owner of a Crofton home for sale stopped in the office this weekend and was complaining to me that agents weren’t showing her home and how unfair that was. She wasn’t using a REALTOR® but instead was trying to sell it herself. I welcomed her to the sometimes frustrating world of real estate. She thought all she had to do was plunk a sign in the yard and droves of buyers and agents would be beating a path to her door. Money in hand, no doubt.
She ran smack into a strong buyers market with a current excess of inventory. Nonetheless, she did have a nice townhouse to sell, although it was overpriced. She “knew” what Crofton townhouses were going for in her development so she didn’t need any real estate agent to help her with pricing. OK, no help asked, none given, no problem.
When I asked her whether she had a lockbox on the property she said no. I then mentioned that without a lockbox, it would seem that agents and their buyers would have a difficult time getting it to see the house. She offered that her telephone number was on the sign and all anyone had to do was call. As we continued to talk it came out that she wouldn’t leave work to let people in but that they could make an appointment for a time when it was convenient…for her.
Wow! Gripe about agents not showing your home but no lockbox on the property so that they can get in. Take a bite out of the reality sandwich, it’s a buyers market and you have to make it convenient for them or they’ll just say…next.
If she doesn’t change “her” behavior than her house is going to be on the market for a very long time. Agents don’t generally discriminate against showing FSBOs but if you want to sell your house you have to make it available to be seen.
Every once in a while we see a new listing come into the market where the pricing just doesn’t make any sense…especially in the Annapolis MD Real Estate market as it is in 2008.
A new Crofton home for sale appeared in the MLS a couple of days ago and by most pricing standards it sure does look like it’s overpriced by about $50,000. Overpricing by that much in this market is a sure death knell to sell the listing. Of course we would like to see it in our community but we’re just not there yet.
Crofton MD real estate hasn’t seen the abysmal downturn that other parts of the country have but we’re also not in a hot sellers market either.
Looking into the tax records it seems that the current owner purchased the house during the hottest part of the sellers market a few years ago. I’m sure they’re just trying to recover their original sales price plus whatever brokerage fees and recording and transfer taxes will be due but I think they’re in for a sad awakening. Buyers are much more sophisticated today to fall for the old pricing scheme of listing high so we have room to negotiate. During the hot sellers market buyers didn’t want to waste their time making an offer that wasn’t full price…or higher. That certainly isn’t the norm today in the market. Offers are routinely made that are so far off the list price sometimes it’s embarrassing. Great for the buyer if they can get it, not so great for the seller if that’s the only offer that’s come in on the house.
The market will change again, it always does, but price is the most important factor in selling a Crofton home today.
Pricing $50K over where it should be is not a good strategy and will only lead to disappointment.
The Annapolis MD Real Estate market is saturated with short sales today compared to just a few years ago. Loosely defined, a short sale is a situation where the homeowner owes more on the property than it is worth and is in the process of selling the home. The short sale scenario is that the homeowner has contacted their bank and the bank has agreed to allow the sale for less than they are owed.
When this happens the bank is usually in control of the transaction after it’s placed on the market. This isn’t necessarily bad but it does introduce extended time frames into a transaction since all approvals have to come from the bank. If you’re expecting an answer in 48 hours on the contract you just submitted…you’re going to be very disappointed. 48 days maybe but certainly not 48 hours.
Remember you’re dealing with a corporate entity when the bank has to make a decision. They don’t have any emotional attachment to the property. To an employee it’s just another transaction. When you’re looking at a huge pile of transactions to deal with, your offer isn’t all that important to the bank. Important to you maybe, but not as important to the bank.
They will get to it…eventually. It is frustrating to submit an offer and than hear nothing back for days and weeks. Having your agent call the listing agent can’t hurt but it may not help to get a faster decision. In many cases the agent doesn’t have direct contact with someone at the bank, rather most of the transaction is done via voicemail, email or a website portal.
Hang in there. If it’s the property you want, patience is going to be the keyword when dealing with short sales. It may very well be worth your time.
