Thursday, 11 Mar 2010
   
Home Selling
You’ll Never Sell Your Real Estate Business, So You Should Automate It PDF Print E-mail
Written by Alan Brymer   

Businesses, like real estate, can be planned, built, finished, and sold for a profit. But what if you own a business that buys and sells real estate? It’s not the same. The best you can do is sell the real estate that you’ve bought, and that’s the end of it. No one will buy your business and pay you several times your current yearly profits, as they would other businesses. Stinks, doesn’t it? I’ll go into the details of why this is, but also offer this self-coined truism as a consolation prize:

"You’ll never sell your real estate business, so you might as well automate it."

I. Other Businesses’ Options and Exit Strategies

Other industries have it good, or at least some of them. If you were to start a company that, for example, sells chairs, you would make your initial investment and get to work. You’d test ways to find people who buy your chairs, and you’d develop relationships with retailers who buy from you in bulk and resell your chairs to the public. Once you make enough money to survive, you grow the business by reinvesting profits, borrowing, or raising capital.

Then you get bigger, sell more, make more, and before you know it, you have a track record of several years. You could now sell your business to someone else. But, of course, the more profitable your company is, the more someone will pay for it. Each industry has its own rules of thumb, but for the most part a buyer will offer you a multiple of your company’s yearly earnings (hopefully several times).

Other things besides earnings can increase your company’s sales price, such as systemizing it. If you can show a buyer how your company runs itself without you (the owner) having to do anything, you can imagine how much more attractive it will appear to them. Who wouldn’t want to own business that spits out money year after year without much work? It’s worth paying more for.

People and companies who buy businesses also want to buy something that is scalable. This means that they should be able to grow it without having to hire a ton of people. Law firms can’t do this, because each attorney can only bill so many hours, and in order for the firm to make more money, they will have to hire more attorneys. Compare this to a software business where people can download the products from a website—you could potentially sell hundreds or thousands more copies per year before you have to hire someone new.

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Withdrawing Emotionally From Your Home PDF Print E-mail
Written by Carolyn Capalbo   
One of the hardest steps in home selling is emotional withdrawal. I don’t mean the numbness that descends after you’ve been spending two weeks solid de-cluttering, packing and organizing, I mean making your home into a sterile, personality-less collection of wood and mortar instead of the home that you have lived in for years. It can be very difficult to say goodbye to a family home and sometimes the pain of loss can sneak up and surprise you. This can block you from effectively staging your home to sell and from enjoying a positive outlook on your new home.

The first step is to pack away everything from your home that personalizes it – pictures of family, graduation diplomas, knick knacks that are more personal than decorative, toys, etc. You may even want to go so far as to remove artwork that has a special meaning. Stage the home with some generic artwork instead, perhaps. Leave decorative items that accentuate the space, like vases of flowers and some good, uncontroversial sculptures (now is not the time to show off your replica of the Venus de Milo) and a number of books, enough to fill shelves, but not so much that the shelves are overflowing.

Understandably, children might not understand right away why you are doing this. Explain that they can decorate their new rooms, but for now they need to keep only a few toys that will be packed away in a basket or box when showings are scheduled. Perhaps (if they are old enough) giving them a job to do that involves them with the home staging will help.
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Why Rent Furniture for Staging your Home PDF Print E-mail
Written by Matt Barker   
Anyone who's sold their home knows how hard it can be to best stage their home for sale with the furniture and artwork that they have in their house. Many of us use the spaces in our home in ways that suit us and our lifestyles but leave the rooms in our homes looking messy or cluttered.

The purposes of staging a home are to give the home a "show home" quality and minimize the amount of our own personalities remaining in the home so that other people can better see themselves living in the house. Most people do not buy furniture as soon as trends change and because of that their furniture may be somewhat dated, or it might be a holdover from the Nixon administration.

A few well-placed neutral or classic pieces of furniture can do wonders to brighten up a room or even just make it feel more welcoming to prospective buyers. Not everyone has the perfect furniture to complement a particular space and the furniture that you do have may not be in the best shape, especially if you have pets or children. An appropriately sized piece of art in colours that complement your room can also make a huge difference to how your house is viewed.
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