Updating your home to help with your Denver home resale value can also be key for selling a house quickly.  It’s appealing for buyers to walk into a home that’s ready to move in.

Many people just focus on the larger items like light fixtures and sink faucets, which are very important. However, pay attention to the small items, like changing an old toilet seat. Take a look at your light switch plates and outlet covers; are they faded or cracked? Even changing out your thermostat for a new model can be a good move. Theses minor eye sores can keep the buyer’s distracted from the major selling points of your home!

In the recent weeks a Realtor’s rating of the real-estate market in Denver, CO has stayed nearly the same as previous months. Realtors ranked the market on fairly strongly the side of the buyers (2.2 out of 5 with the median of balance between buyers and sellers being 3.0). With prices still lower than average and buyers volume down slightly, there is still room for some haggling on the part of the buyer.

Rating for price trending was 2.8 (with the same median of 3.0 with lower meaning prices are falling and higher are rising). This is similar to what we are currently experiencing. Houses are still selling, some very rapidly still, bun on average we seem to be slowly chasing a deflating market. The good news is that this decreasing trend has slowed over the past months, and we are all waiting for the rebound in the early months of 2011.

With mortgage rates slowly starting to creep back to what some would call ‘normal levels’ buyers are still heavily motivated to buy today to secure extremely low costs of carrying a loan!

Lately in the news, following the Federal Reserve’s past announcement of QE2 (quantitative easement) and its actual implementation (formal announcement 2 weeks ago), there have been rallying cries of foul play from the states and abroad. One consensus seems to win out, however, that QE2 will help inflate the dollar in an effort to prevent possible deflation (something there is little experience handling on the mass scales such as the US economy). Even with an inflated dollar, however, overseas money is still being held in greenbacks as the alternative instruments (such as the Euro) are still facing considerable uncertainty.

How this relates to housing in the long term at this point is anyone’s guess, but in the short term it should help prices from further sliding in a already challenging market. Deflation would only lower prices further, which if later followed by inflation could cause considerable losses in any industry, so thank you for RE2, and let see how the next few weeks go!

Foreclosures not to end soon…

In recent news there have been the victory stories of people fighting and winning the loan modification and/or short sale process to avoid foreclosure. There have also been the stories of the Big Banks using flawed documentation processes to illegally foreclose on un-wary consumers. But through this all the foreclosure battles don’t seem to be slowing down.

Depending on which industry experts you follow, 3-5 years seems to be the breaking point for when they are projected to begin a tapering off. But not to fear, short sales and BPOs (bank owned properties) create a different market for a different type of home-buyer, and won’t necessarily have as large of a negative impact on the traditional resale market as some are espousing.

A short-sale buyer needs to have the patience to wait out the short sale approval process, and even start over if the bank decides to go ahead and foreclose. But we’re watching this, and will keep you posted as it continues to un-fold.