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Tallahassee, FL Real Estate News

By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
528 Truett Dr, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$400000 4 Beds - 2 Baths - 0.27 acres Lot Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Coming Soon till 3/14!! Location is top tier on a lot that would be very difficult to find again! Seller will replace roof prior to closing with acceptable offer. Perfect for large family needing extra space. Exterior space with unmatched potential for entertaining large groups or happy pets! Minutes from the Capital, FSU and the highway. Showings start 3/14! Follow This Home
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
4880 Quail Valley Road, TALLAHASSEE, FL Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Click here to Get Directions$930000 4 Beds - 3.5 Baths - 1.81 sqft Lot OPEN HOUSE 4/20 from 12PM - 2PM! Nestled on a sprawling 1.8 acre lot, this White Oak Construction 4-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom luxury POOL home is ready for summer! This home has a gorgeous updated kitchen with Thermador appliances, Calacatta quartz counters, beautiful solid wood and brick floors, and detailed trim work throughout. The sitting room off the kitchen works well as a supervised study space, play area, or home office. Ample space with 3 bedrooms downstairs, an additional bedroom and bath upstairs, and a HUGE 32x24 bonus space with wet bar is perfect for both watching movies and family game nights. Enjoy the expansive back porch overlook...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
1513 Atkamire Dr #A & B, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$275000 5 Beds - Photos Maps & Local Schools Print FANTASTICOPPORTUNITY on a quiet street walking distance to FSU!! Featuring three bedroom, one bath apartment UP (APT A) and two bedroom, one bathroom apartment DOWN (APT B), this property is an investors or owner-occupants dream. Both apartments feature extensively renovated interiors and many structural updates (APT A - 2019 Roof, 2018 Water Heater, 2020 HVAC; APT B - 2019 Roof, 2018 HVAC, renovated kitchen with new appliances), but also allowing the next owner to put their personal touch on the home. This ideal location is convenient to shopping, schools, parks and entertainment for home buyers or is a great investment opportunity - do not miss this one before it is...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
1003 Hiawatha Drive, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$225,000 4 Baths - 0.25 acres Lot Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Nestled in Southeast Tallahassee, this fantastic three bedroom, two bath lives large with a well appointed kitchen with updated appliances and breakfast nook opening into the living room, a separate dining or additional living space or office space, vaulted ceilings in the private & oversized master suite upstairs with his-and-hers closets, interior laundry and an abundance of windows throughout the home that allow for much desired natural light. Updates have been completed (2020 HVAC and duct work, 2019 Roof & 2021 Water Heater). This ideal location is convenient to downtown, shopping, parks and entertainment for home buyers, or is a great investment opp...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  Are you finding that your “know it all” friend has been replaced by Google Search? The google search engine (www.google.com) is not even as old as my web site, but it has the answer to everything. And that includes everything real estate as well. If you are planning to sell a home, you better consult this know-it-all about who dominates the google search engine for Tallahassee Real Estate (or wherever you may live). Last week’s blog on Recognizing The Need For A Buyer’s Agent provided our readers with a short list of skills that a Buyer’s Agent should possess and be able to demonstrate at the initial appointment. With everything a homebuyer is going to undergo, it makes sense to have a well-qualified, top-notch buyer’s agent there to guide them. So I can’t believe when I wrote that bl...
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By Mike Carlos, Realtor, Tallahassee FL
(Keller Williams Town & Country Realty)
TEAM CARLOS | Keller Williams Realty | (850) 583-1919 3309 Cherokee Ridge Trail, Tallahassee, FL 3BR/2BA Single Family House offered at $175,000 Year Built 1983 Sq Footage 1,508 Bedrooms 3 Bathrooms 2 full, 0 partial Floors 1 Parking Unspecified Lot Size .30 acres HOA/Maint $0 per month DESCRIPTION Clean and very well maintained pool home with 3 bedroomsand 2 baths. Large living area with fireplace open to Eat-in area with bay window. Huge master suite with his and her closets. Sparkling pool, fenced backyard. Upgrades throughout including newer roof, slate entry, ceramic tile flooring in foyer, greatroom, kitchen/dining & baths,has already been connected to city sewer. Sold As/is Subject to lien holder approval. See associated docs for details. see additional photos below PROPERTY FEA...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Real estate supply and demand seems to be ignored when many “real estate professionals” provide a forecast for the housing market. While I have not studied the US housing market data as much as I have the Tallahassee real estate market, it seems to me that the single most important fact about our current housing crisis is being ignored. The National Association of REALTORS® just released it’s 2010 National Association of Realtors® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers and it is loaded with a lot of good information. But the interpretation of the survey by NAR appears to be missing something that I would love to see addressed, and that is how all of the findings work in conjunction to the current state of real estate supply and demand. Real Estate Supply And Demand Cannot Be Ignored When N...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
I was recently in communication with somebody looking to buy a home in Tallahassee when I was pleasantly surprised by a request for a buyer’s agent. Having been in the real estate business for 20 years, I can count on one hand the times that I have received the specific request for somebody who specializes working with home buyers. Most real estate professionals do not really specialize in working with “just buyers” or “just sellers,” though don’t be surprised to hear somebody telling you they do. The ability to take a home buyer through all the hurdles that will fall in their path is much different than ones faced by home sellers. Each requires an expert and you should expect to get top service when buying a home if you work with a Buyer’s Agent. Most industries have an elite group of...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Too many homeowners do not know how to price their home to sell, so they are languishing on the market with no conceivable chance of being sold. The art and the science of home valuation is not nearly as tough as it seems, the key is understanding which trends to monitor and how to determine the strength of both the supply and demand for similar homes. Home valuation is all about competition. We all love our homes and we all have a tendency to believe that our own personal homes are special, and to an extent, all of them are unique and special. But to people who are looking to buy a home, it is all about supply and demand. Home buyers get to consider all of the houses on the market, and they are going to find the right home that fits their needs and budgets, and then they are going to ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
We often provide opinions on property values in order to help home owners determine whether or not they are going to attempt to sell their home.  Most homeowners are disappointed when they find out how far their property has fallen in value, but our clients have been happy to know the truth so that they were able to make an informed decision. Having a true understanding of the current and near future housing trends is the key to being able to sell a home in a very difficult real estate market. Keeping an eye on what has happened recently is only part of the equation for determining property values, the real pricing strategy comes with an understanding of what is about to occur. While we do not have a crystal ball, we do have hundreds of real estate graphs that can point us out in the r...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
I have written quite a bit about distressed properties in Tallahassee and equally as much about special financing opportunities in the housing market. These two separate types of opportunities represent the impetus of change for our housing market recovery, so I like to track them very closely. After compiling the data for the first nine months of 2009, I broke out a special report to see the impact that both special financing homes and distressed properties were having on the Tallahassee housing market. Here is the question I wanted to answer: Which types of homes are selling faster? Ones that offer special Financing. Distressed Properties In order to find my answer, I went to the MLS and downloaded every property that had left the market. With over 4,000 individual listings to go thr...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
I was reading through this weekend’s reader feedback and found a neat message from overseas. Often, it is reader feedback that guides the choice of topics for each day’s blog article, and “JL” from France wrote the following message which made me think about where our readers originate: I work for a Century 21 in France and I was blown away by how much more you do for your clients.  We do ads and that is it!  The French are just getting into Facebook but on the actual C21 website there is no possibility of sharing the image or ad – you cant even search by reference number!  The French are rather complacent and you would not believe how many people do not even bother to use the internet.  Most of my clients over 45 just dont bother.  It is another world over here. -JL Well based on what...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Such is the situation for Tallahassee home builders. To make a living (and feed their families) they must build more homes. But for builders to see great times again, they need to see the housing market return to a balance of supply and demand. The glut of homes on the market in Tallahassee is causing values to drop and the building of more homes will only increase this pressure. Note in the graph below, that new home prices have fallen below resale prices. The blue line in the graph below represents the average price of new homes, while the red represents the average price for existing home sales. We can observe that for the previous 18 years, new home values always “lead” existing home sales (resales). Today, we are seeing some builders take adv...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
One way to get a perspective on the enormity of the swing that our housing market has made is to look at the home sales data in a graph of trend lines. In the graph above, the yellow “dots” are the actual number of sales each month, while the lines show the average sales trend for 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years. All three trends are falling, but I think the points on the graph are just as illuminating. Note how August of 2005 saw nearly 1,000 homes sold in a  month, while January of this year saw just above 100. The current trend of pending home sales in Tallahassee suggests that we might establish a new low again in the next 6 months. The fact that we are selling fewer homes than we were in 1991 (or any time thereafter) is even more unsettling when you figure how much larger our populat...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Pending home sales provide us with an advanced look at the future closed home sales report. The reason that I wanted to highlight this graph today is that it represents a very disturbing trend in Tallahassee (as well as most US housing markets. The number of homebuyers in the market is falling, as many “wanna be” homebuyers are trapped in their existing homes due to negative equity levels. The fact is we are now back to the very bottom of the housing market established in July of 2009. Remember, this graph above shows the one-year trend of pending home sales, so all seasonality is removed (the after-summer slowdown is not what is occurring above). To add insult to injury, I believe the number of pending home sales is actually inflated due to the high level of short sales in the market....
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Yesterday a home seller asked me “how long does it take to sell a home?” Now for the long-time readers of the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog, you know this is a touchy subject for me. The short answer of course (with appropriate liquidity in the market) is “4 to 14 days”, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Occasionally, I have to get up on my soap box and harangue real estate professionals who provide statistics about “days on market,” or how long it takes to sell a home. This is the most visible evidence of somebody in our industry having no clue about what it takes to sell a home, so I will attempt to explain why it not only is misunderstood, it is also mis-measured. First of all, selling a home is not rocket science. All you really have to do is tell the people who are ready to buy a home ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
So you have a home to sell (in the worst market of the past 100+ years) and you’re trying to figure out how to choose a real estate agent. You know that you need to interview some agents for the job of selling your home, but you have no idea what to do. Use this brief article as a reference to the key steps in choosing the real estate agent (real estate company) to market and sell your home. If you read many articles on how to choose a real estate agent, they will often recommend that  you interview two or three agents. Personally, I would recommend that you interview just one, and that would be the one that your research told you is the best one to get your home sold. Use the following processes and you will be able to find that agent in your area. The Nature Of The Real Estate Broker...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Quite a few of our recent posts have been on creative financing in real estate, and many referred to using a residential lease agreement during some portion of the creative purchase of a home. The lease is important in creative home buying as it allows the buyer to occupy  (or use the property) prior to closing. Recently, a reader “DR” had a few questions about a recent blog article [Rent To Own Homes] where he addressed the issue of seller default prior to the closing of the transaction, but after a residential lease agreement had been executed. He asked: With rent to own homes, what happens if the “buyer” pays their higher-than-normal deposit and their higher-than-normal rent, but the home does not appraise for the purchase price in the contract? With interest rates as low as they ar...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
If you are a regular reader reader of the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog, then you know that I am an advocate of using a lease purchase agreement (rent to own homes) and many other forms of creative financing for real estate. But just because that I advocate the use of this form for real estate acquisition does not mean that one can use it without careful due diligence. Home buyers need to understand some risks of buying “rent to own homes” through a lease purchase agreement, and how they can mitigate these risks. Just last night I received a comment from a reader who recently found this out. KC wrote: Here is our situation, we moved to the Tallahassee Real Estate Market from out of State. We signed a lease purchase agreement on a 4 bedroom 2 bath home for three years. That way we could g...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
In less than half an hour, the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) will publish the monthly existing home sales report. Based upon the recently published Pending Home Sales report, I would not be surprised if it shows a seasonally adjusted rise in the number of homes that sold over the past year. But don’t get too excited. When the Pending Home Sales report was published a few weeks ago, the chief economist for NAR (Lawrence Yun) explained: “The pace of a home sales recovery still depends more on job creation and an accompanying rise in consumer confidence.” So basically, a smarter way to anticipate future movement in both existing home sales and pending home sales is to watch the jobs report to see whether the local market is creating or losing jobs. All in all, the existing home ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
I was just going through my Google Analytics and Mint Analytics for the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog and had to chuckle about the sources of some of my traffic. The image on the right shows the traffic I have received from pictures over the past 30 days. Apparently, if you know a little about real estate search engine optimization (SEO) and how to properly upload and use an image, you can get some great long term traffic results (which also means great google juice). Here are some simple steps that you can follow that over time, will help you build google juice with pictures in your blog: Take the extra time to clean up your picture - The picture will only get popular outside of your blog if many people want to copy it. Make sure you make the picture display as best it can. Purchasing a...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
If you want to know how to buy a home with bad credit, then you have come to the right place! If you think you are alone in your Tallahassee home search with a bruised credit history, then I have some very good news for you. The whole world of banking and finance is teetering on the edge of self-destruction. Poor lending practices that occurred during the boom of the housing market have forced most US housing markets into a state that has not existed during my lifetime. I suspect a lot of people are going to have to learn how to buy a home with bad credit, because “bad credit” is what most people will have. Today, most MLS systems track homes for sale that offer some sort of financial assistance, and Tallahassee is included in this group. In the past, this was a very small group of hom...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Short sale versus loan modification … what’s a homeowner to do? Yesterday I wrote a “sell house” blog, but what about keeping the home? After yesterday’s blog, I received numerous messages asking for my opinion. One reader wrote: My house is in the market, I am applying for load modification affordable home… What should I take? the short sale or wait for modification approval? Please give advise. Thank you so much. -N. So basically, here is a homeowner who has applied for a loan modification under the Home Affordable Modification Program who is also considering becoming a Tallahassee short sale. The advice being sought comes down to one simple question … Do You Want To Keep The Home? That’s it. That’s all. I do not know if the reader wants badly enough to keep the house. Most likely, th...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
I was searching the term “sell my house” on several real estate message boards to see if any good ideas were posted that could provide guidance for a troubled home seller. I found one that I think is very interesting due to the current nature of the housing market, where roughly 60% of homeowners who try to sell their home end up failing. The reader inquired about the need for a REALTOR® when selling a home. He wrote: I need to sell my house in Florida, should I get a Realtor? I am selling a home for what I owe the bank. So, my property is beeing sold for less than other homes in the same community. If I get a Realtor, I would have to raise the price to the same price that everyone is selling. So, I can cover the realtor expense. But it will give me more exposure. Should I get a realtor...
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