Selling your home during the holiday season?

Too Much Holiday Cheer Could Prevent Your Home From Selling, Experts Warn.

December 5, 2012 6:54am | By Victoria Bekiempis, DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

  

NEW YORK CITY — These real estate agents are no Grinches, but they do want to strip your home of every ounce of tinsel, oversized Christmas trees, and reindeer sleighs in the windows.
If you're trying to sell your home during the holiday season, unpacking that big bin of holiday decorations could prove to be a big lump of coal for house hunters, experts warned.
"Try not to get a huge, huge Christmas tree," said Jennifer Lee, of Charles Rutenberg Realty, who said an oversized tree only works to make your apartment look smaller. Instead, look for a tree that's smaller, to make the living space seem bigger, she said.
Sleighs in the window? Also a no-go.
"It's cute in a way, but I think it distracts from the light and obscures the view," Lee said, adding that the decoration also blocks light.


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Buyers and sellers get on the same page | The Real Deal | New York Real Estate News

Buyers and sellers get on the same page
While property values down, pricing is no longer high-stakes game of roulette
October 01, 2009 07:00AM

By Candace Taylor
Zhann Jochinke, an associate broker at Argo Residential, put an alcove studio on the market last year for $525,000. But the offers that came in were as low as $390,000.

"People were putting bids out there just to see if the person had to sell," he recalled.

More recently, however, he convinced the seller to drop the price to around $490,000.

Offers began coming in at "5 percent or less off the asking price," he said. Now, the listing is in contract, and expected to close in the next month.

After months of uncertainty, Manhattan buyers and sellers are finally making a market. In the terrifying period after the Lehman Brothers crisis, so few properties were sold that pricing an apartment became a game of roulette. Buyers, too, were unsure what a property would trade for, and their offers were all over the map.

Plummeting prices made matters worse.

(click the link below for the full story)
Buyers and sellers get on the same page | The Real Deal | New York Real Estate News