When the market is a little slower, and properties are not selling, you're last resort is the best marketing techniques. First off, it will get you the clients and listings. Prove to potential clients that you are doing everything necessary to get their house in front of everybody with the best marketing tools available. FloorPlanOnline.com is the most innovative new "virtual tour" out there. We incorporate an online interactive floor plan with high quality photos to give online buyers the most information about your listings. Your clients will LOVE the special attention their house gets. Your service provider will come out and measure the house and take high quality photos of the entire house; you client will see you have hired another professional to assist you. When the other agents are telling the prospective clients that they will be doing all the regular marketing techniques, you will be the one agent with the newest high tech marketing techniques; and everybody knows the buyers are starting their search on the internet.

Once you have the listing, the interactive floor plan will help to get the most information to the potential buyers. As well as the interactive floor plan, their is the more typical virtual walk through, you can make cds of all the high quality pics, flyers with floor plans and high quality photos and more. Get more information about the tours at http://www.floorplanonline.com/ or http://www.trottaappraisal.com/ under the virtual tours link. And please call me directly with any questions!

Heres a recent sample tour:

http://www.seetheproperty.com/33704

Set yourself apart from the competition and offer your clients the best!

-Shane

A well know architecturally designed house in Essex with great views out to the CT River! Architect Jonathan Isleib designed this great house into the sloping land to take advantage of the great views out to the CT River. Stunning house, stunning grounds, with a stunning location. A very special house.

http://www.seetheproperty.com/32065

-Shane

This is one of the latest tours I did in the Noank section of Groton; it is out on a little peninsula and is truly a one of kind property. Grgeous views of the sound and down to the marina and a small private beach area. It also has a small charming boathouse. Take a look, let me know what you think!

http://www.seetheproperty.com/31701 

-Shane

Direct access to private beach and views galore. This is a well constructed house on a large parcel with views from all rooms!

http://www.seetheproperty.com/30071

 -Shane

A great property in Madison, CT. Directly across the street from Long Island Sound, a gorgeous house with great views, and a guest house in highly desireable Madison. I had the pleasure of taking photos of this great property.

http://www.seetheproperty.com/29735

-Shane 

http://www.seetheproperty.com/29843

Check this property out, a converted church in beautiful Niantic, CT. This is currently being being used as an Inn with private living quarters for the owner. Could be converted to a spectacular (large) single family residence. Restoration details and updates are exquisite, moldings, medallions, and more! I had the pleasure of drawing the floorplan and photographing the property. Unfortunately the only day we could do the photos it was overcast new england winter day, so the exterior (well sky and beautiful landscaping) is not great, but you get the point! I'm biased because I do provide services to them, but the floor plan online (http://www.floorplanonline.com/) tours just really let you get a feel for the property so well. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

-Shane

http://www.seetheproperty.com/29843

Check this property out, a converted church in beautiful Niantic, CT. This is currently being being used as an Inn with private living quarters for the owner. Could be converted to a spectacular (large) single family residence. Restoration details and updates are exquisite, moldings, medallions, and more! I had the pleasure of drawing the floorplan and photographing the property. Unfortunately the only day we could do the photos it was overcast new england winter day, so the exterior (well sky and beautiful landscaping) is not great, but you get the point! I'm biased because I do provide services to them, but the floor plan online (www.floorplanonline.com) tours just really let you get a feel for the property so well. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

-Shane

The meat and potatoes of an appraisal can be found in our sales comparison grid section; this is where we search analyse and choose the 3 best comps available. We then take these 3 comps, put them on a grid consisting of some of the more important details about each one, including sales price, noted concessions, site size, views, quality of construction, condition, room layout, living area, finished basement/unfinished basement, heating/cooling, garages, etc. These ammenities are then adjusted for superior or inferior quality, estimated based on the appraisers analysis and knowledge of the market area. This is all fairly cut and dry and resembles your typical CMA. But before we even get to this comparison grid, there is a lot of info most never even know about.

This includes the basic data of the subject property. A 12 month listing history for the subject; this is more crucial than you may think, if a property has been listed prior to the appraisal it must be analysed. The appraiser should note the listing dates, offering prices, and analyse them. This comes up often for refinances, when the property was listed for, let's say $299,900 and lowered to $284,900 with a total of 6 months listed. Never sold. Now they try and refinance and think their house is worth $300,000 because that's what their agent told them (and hence they started the L/P at $300,000+/-. But my job is to estimate what this property would have sold for today if it had been listed for an adequate amount of time prior to the date of the appraisal. Logically, I know it would not sell for $300,000 because in fact it did not sell and it was listed for less than that! So people get mad at me and say their realtor already told it was worth $300,000. This also comes up some times when a house was listed for 3 months at $299,000 reduced to $289,000 for another 2 months and then sells for $300,000 with a $10,000 sales concession or something similar to this. It's hard to say that in an open market that house would sell for $300,000 when it was listed for that much and did not sell until they lowered the price. This of course may depend on how typical concesions are in the market.

The next item on a typical residential report is anlysis of the sales agreement. Here we must note the sales price, date and concessions; concessions are always a little tricky and the sales price should not be inflated to allow for concessions (like in the example above, but if for example, a house is listed for $300,000, sells in a few weeks at $300,000 and the seller offers a $5,000 concession, that makes more sense; this all depends on comps as well, but we're just looking at the logistics of concessions here).

The other big part is the neighborhood/market analysis. Here is where we analyse the neighborhood characteristics, including supply/demand, marketing times, growth rates, and pricing trends. Market analysis of the current economic conditions are analysed as well. When properly analysed and reported these set the whole back drop for an appraisal of any particular subject...and it is especially telling in a market like we have now, where some parts of the country are experiencing mass foreclosures and declining prices. So a lender in California reading my report in CT has no idea how our market is, while his area is declining 6,7,8% with tons of foreclosures, it's fairly stable around here. Slower buying trends, but prices are not heavily declining.

So these are a few major components we are taking into consideration before we get to looking at comps. Maybe this can help you to understand a little more about the appraisal process.

Every once in a while I run across an agent that obviously has no idea of the appraisal process, and i can't help but think if this agent knew a little bit about the appraisal process, it could greatly help the agent be a better agent. I would highly recommend all agent take a basic appraisal course, it will count towards your continuing education, but most of all, it will better you as a more knowledgeable agent.

First off there are certain guidelines we must adhere to. The first is USPAP, these are the standards we must adhere to every single time we provide a value/value range, etc, it includes a long process and full file which should hold all the information necessary to reproduce an entire appraisal (this is why appraisers are not supposed to look at a house and just estimate a value without performing an entire appraisal; it's our rules). The other is Fannie Mae guidelines, these are only necessary for mortgage related products (refinancing / purchasing). I would like to quickly give a little insight into the more important guidelines which may help you agents with CMA's, understanding us appraisers, and helping you know what comps to bring and show the appraiser.

Some of the more relevant guidelines: generally an appraiser will provide 3-6 comps; closed sales that should be within the prior 6 months (not more than 12), within 1 mile (when possible) and similar age, style, and size.  After this you can start to pick through ammenities as necessary. Every market area demands more or less variance from the "guidelines", but these are the basics you should be looking for when pulling comps. Of course pending sales are good too, especially in this current market, and active listings are used only as necessary, and weighted minimally.

 This is just the beginning of the procees, next time I will try and get more into some details and maybe some good examples. Unique houses are my favorite, that'll be a long blog all in itself!

-Shane Trotta,  Trotta Appraisal & Consulting, LLC

I recently commented on a post regarding how good professional photos are to your listings, and it got me thinking about one of things I complain about almost daily as a real estate professional; listings without photos. I can't count the number of times when I am looking through comps, it mentions updates or needs TLC but no pictures of the inside are provided, sometimes none of the outside are even provided.

I am a certified residential appraiser in CT, we provide appraisals for divorce, estate settlement, tax appeals,  all sorts of foreclosure related appraisals (including REO appraisals for banks to set a listing price), pre-listing appraisals, purchases and refinances. It's almost daily that I'm making a comment to myself about how lazy some of these agents are because they have provided no pictures, or 5 pictures of the yard. I would venture to guess some clients don't want interior pictures, OK. But I also assume sometimes the agents choose not to take pictures, I believe this is a disservice to the real estate community as a whole. Agents trying to use your listings as comps for a CMA, or to try and entice potential buyers to go and look at the house. Appraisers using these properties as comps for their appraisals. And buyers with or without agents searching the Internet for listings.

As an appraiser I rely on comps day in and day out to estimate an opinion of value for properties for many different reasons, including purchases which the agents have an interest in; sales commissions! So many times agents give me their comps (which I appreciate), sometimes they will have one that they listed, where they say, this house needed work, not as nice as this house...I can't take your word on it, my jobs relies on verified information. No information which cannot be verified should be used, especially from someone who has an interest in the sale, therefore, if there are pictures I can compare the inside of the comp to the inside of the subject and adjust accordingly. Without verification, all I can do is drive-by and inspect the exterior of the comps. So, in short not only will photos help your listing at the time you have it listed, it may be relied on as a future comp for another purchase you are involved with. If you want an appraiser to use your comps accurately, adequately comment on the condition (another issue I have is no comments, but that's for another post), and provide photos for all listings.

As of today, I am also looking at purchasing a house, and again everyday I get upset when I cannot get pictures on listings. Since I am younger, and fairly handy, and also some people, I'm looking at fixer-uppers. I want pictures too...why do only the high end buyers get to see pictures of the inside of houses? Why do agents not provide pictures of interiors of fixer-uppers? I know what I'm looking for, and it needs work. I want to see the inside on-line before I spend more time and energy to go and look at the house in person. Fixer-uppers deserve photos too, please provide photos so I can make a decision whether it needs a remodeled kitchen or just updates, is it livable and the updates can be slowly done, or does it need to be repaired prior to living in it? This is the on-line era, most people are looking at your listing on-line, give them what they need, MORE PHOTOS.

Now for the higher end houses, they almost always have photos, sometimes have good photos, and once in a while have great photos. I may be biased as I am a service provider (high quality photos integrated with interactive floor plans) for http://www.floorplanonline.com/, but a high quality "virtual tour" is an amazing way to differentiate your services from the rest of the agents in your area. With FPO, you are guaranteed 20+ high quality pictures with an interactive floor plan (example http://www.seetheproperty.com/u/24735 ). No matter what or who you use, the highest quality photos and a good virtual tour can and will set you apart from the competition. Agent's get paid good on these high end houses, paying a little extra for high quality photos is necessary, in my opinion.

To sum it up, all listings need photos, the great, the good, the bad, and the very, very, ugly. Consider it a service to the entire Real Estate community, I thank you in advance for making my job a little easier and allowing me to provide better appraisals to my clients!

-Shane Trotta

http://www.trottaappraisal.com/