Open houses provide an excellent opportunity for potential buyers to experience the home in person. As Halloween rolls around, it offers a unique chance to add some novelty and charm to your open houses. The L3 Real Estate Team, one of the top real estate teams in Costa Mesa, shares some innovative tips on how to leverage the Halloween season to spice up your open houses.
Tip 1: Seasonal Decorations:
Set the scene with tasteful and fun Halloween decorations. This can include fall floral arrangements, decorative gourds and pumpkins, or a stack of hay bales at the entrance. Remember, less is more - make sure your decor enhances and doesn't overpower the home's natural appeal.
Even for homeowners who moved into a new Costa Mesa house as recently as a few years ago, the pace of technological advance is such that it’s easy to lose track of many fledgling household products that use technology in new and useful ways. Whereas earlier introductions often qualified as little more than nifty, fun-to-mess-with gadgets, many newer arrivals are well worth looking into:
More than just a cold storage unit, some smart refrigerators can sport touchscreens that put recipes right there where the ingredients are kept. They allow grocery list inputting—and make online grocery ordering quick and simple. Once Costa Mesa users get used to the convenience, it’s easy to see why running the household kitchen with a dumb ol’ fridge may one
Homes in Costa Mesa are more than just places to hang your hat—for most of us, they are also cornerstone investments. As such, they deserve the level of attention that goes with safeguarding any major investment’s ROI. For the owners of Costa Mesa homes, that translates into taking regular action to ensure their properties remain in top shape—bolstering their property values at the same time they fulfill their principal assignment of providing the shelter that keeps families safe and comfortable.
Here are five tips that go far in keeping homes in Costa Mesa in peak shape:
Regular Maintenance. Planned maintenance is key to keeping your home in top shape. This means scheduling actions like changing air filters, cleaning gutters, and checking
As the daylight hours grow longer and the weather warms up, whether you’re selling or staying put, homeowners in Costa Mesa should start thinking about spring preventative maintenance. Regular care can help prevent costly repairs and ensure that your home is safe and comfortable for you and your family. Some tried and true tips to get you started:
First, inspect your roof. Look for any signs of damage. Missing shingles are obvious, but cracks or other visible flaws can quickly grow into costly trouble. Repairing small problems now can prevent larger issues (like leaks or water damage) down the road. You may want to hire a professional to inspect your roof if you aren’t comfortable doing it yourself.
It’s a situation faced by many Costa Mesa homeowners on the cusp of getting ready to sell. You’ve developed cooking skills customized for your run-of-the-mill kitchen for years, managing everything from the electric range (you prefer gas) to the slightly-too-small refrigerator. That takes thoughtful grocery ferrying between it and the old frig (it deserves retirement) that lives in the garage. There’s nothing to it, really!
But now, it’s selling time for your Costa Mesa house. Is the best course to assume the buyer will not worry about the kitchen because she/he will want to do a full-scale remodel to her/his own specifications? Or should you start writing a 50-page manual on how to actually prepare food in this kitchen’s current state (perhaps you
Costa Mesa home security issues—and family safety as a whole—are always high priorities named by future homeowners. A recent Mortgage Professionals Association survey found safety and security to be “the most important” factors for homeowners deciding where to move.
That growing concern could be why last week’s dispatch from afar was picked up by many U.S. media outlets. Knowing that today’s homeowners are becoming increasingly edgy about the issue, they brought word from the far side of the globe of a threat that few had previously considered. The Guardian said it all with last week’s dramatic headline:
“Seal breaks into New Zealand home, traumatizes cat and hangs out on couch.”
For scads of Costa Mesa residents, 2022 will mark the first true summer vacation season in a long time. The U.S. Travel Association tells us that domestic leisure travel spending has already surpassed pre-pandemic levels (even adjusting for inflation).
For Costa Mesa vacationers, taking off for longer than a weekend will require thinking back to retrieve some of the smart traveling habits developed when yearly trips were routine—household security measures among them. For all the Costa Mesa vacationers whose homes will be left unattended, reinstituting a few precautionary measures will go far to prevent a miserable surprise from spoiling the return home. Here’s a refresher:
Secure seldom-used doors and windows that usually remain unlocked.
It may have seemed as if the springtime rise in the rates Costa Mesa home loan originators were quoting was overdue for a pause, and that's what local applicants found last week. The rate dips weren't gigantic, but they pointed in the right direction. Over the weekend, Yahoo! finance's "Moneywise" column was able to headline, "Homeownership just got 5% cheaper as mortgage rates fall off a cliff."
To applicants whose recent memories include interest rates that began with a "3," that cliff may seem to be a low one—but the NARs' senior economist was correct in asserting that purchasing a home was 5% more affordable at week's end than at its beginning. At week's end, Freddie Mac's calculation for the average 30-year mortgage rate was 5.3%—down from
When the experts make a point of advising that you remove the family photos as part of preparing your house for sale, they don’t mean to criticize your family. Even if Aunt Agatha’s scowl seems to be in every group portrait, it’s not that. It’s also not about the art of photography in general, either.
It’s about YOU.
That may not seem to be a very client-friendly sentiment, but no offense should be taken. Costa Mesa homeowners shouldn’t take offense. The overall goal of depersonalizing your home—that is, making the house as ownerless-seeming as possible—is an important part of helping house-hunters envision your property as their own. Removing the objects that reveal your family’s personality—things like awards, family portraits, and vacation
“You May Want to Invest in Real Estate While You Still Can” was Yahoo!finance’s doubletake-inducing lead article last Friday—although would-be Costa Mesa real estate investors weren’t immediately seen scrambling to closings in response. Local investors are a sophisticated bunch who tend to take high-pressure warnings with a grain of salt, anyway—and given the recent glut of dire prognostications on many fronts, Yahoo’s hint of an impending end for area real estate investment opportunities wasn’t likely to be taken very seriously.
Still…they did have a point.
There is renewed evidence that the incursion of large institutional players into the single-family and small multifamily realms is gaining steam. Their buying activity so far this year
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