Find the home for your lifestyle.
Because Central Oregon offers an ever changing real estate market combined with distinct properties from an urban down town condo in historic Bend to a a ranch outside Sisters, we are here to help you navigate and find the properties that you’ll love.
There are four quadrants in Bend. When we work with a new client, one of the first things is getting to know the person and getting to know what their wants and needs are. Do they want to be able to walk to a restaurant? Do they want to be able to hop on a mountain bike at their home and ride to a trail? For instance, some people love the northwest quadrant of Bend; they’re excited to just be able to get on that bike and get out in the sunshine.
Others might want some more acreage or even want irrigation rights or perhaps a spring, because they’re very focused on water. So that quadrant might be southeast Bend or northeast Bend, or even just a little bit outside of the normal city parameters.
Southwest, which is a lot of the land just south of Galveston, encompasses Broken Top & Tethrow, which is one of our fastest growing neighborhoods, and then it also goes on the other side of the river, so you have all the homes between Brookswood and the river, as well. There’s a lot of river frontage down there that people really aren’t aware of.
Northeast bend offers a lot of potential for investors that would like, maybe, a rental or a duplex next to the hospital campus, because St. Charles continues to grow and there is a viable rental area around that.
Median Sales Prices and Number of Homes sold over the past 5 years.
It’s extremely important to understand the contracts that you are signing in a home purchase or sale. We’ll go over the sales contract with you at length and highlight every word that will be necessary for you to sign and initial and explain precisely what each item means. We’ll help you understand the entire home buying / selling process. Click here for a guide on how fees are split between buyer and seller.
A few examples:
When speaking to sellers about increasing the value of their home there are two different aspects to consider: one is what the appraiser will see and the other is what the buyer will perceive as value. So when you’re thinking of the buyer and how to make your home appear more valuable to them, so much is about the first impression: your front porch, the paint on your door, the simple staging techniques that you would see on HGTV. Perhaps a buyer wants to perceive your home as having intrinsic value, things like extra storage. Is your home low maintenance or maintenance-free? When they move in, will it need paint? Is it going to need new carpets? So just replacing the carpet, making sure that all your paint and your trim in your home looks gorgeous will increase the value to the buyer.
In regards to the appraiser, they’ll be evaluating things like: When was the last time you updated your kitchen? What do the bathroom counters look like? You can do some simple upgrades that like changing the countertop in your bathroom, making sure that your lighting is up to date, making sure your yard is fenced. Little things like that that won’t cost a lot of money will increase the value for an appraiser as well.
When we take a listing we like to sit down with the seller and consider the furnishings in their home. We may move this table over there or this chair here and do some simple staging with your own furniture, which helps to minimize costs. We look for ways to make your home just pop. It could be something so simple as just taking a collection that you have throughout the house and putting it together on one shelf, or moving a table from the entry just so it feels more spacious and putting that table somewhere else. It’s a really fun thing to do and we enjoy it.
There are also occasions that call for a professional stager – perhaps your home is vacant or maybe you’re using that third bedroom with a treadmill and we want to make it look like a child’s bedroom. In those instances and others we bring in a professional stager and have several that we work with that do amazing work.
One of the most important items of listing your home are the photographs, both the interior and exterior of the home. We hire a professional photographer for all of our listings. We make sure that the weather is gorgeous and we come in, we take aerials, we get the sunshine, we get the mountain view. We do not put a listing on MLS until the photographs are just amazing. And we generally ask our photographer to take about 50 photos. MLS allows you to load up 25. And many times we’ll go over those with the sellers and say, “Which ones do you feel represent what you love about your home the best?” And then we look at the ones that we feel will be the best for marketing. Once those photographs are selected we do what we call “Go Live,” and that’s when we launch the listing. It’s a very exciting moment for us.
It’s important for sellers to understand the value of an open house. With Bend being the active community that it is, if it’s Saturday and a powder day on the mountain, generally speaking the attendance will be low at an open house. So we are selective about the days that we choose for an open house, the day and the hours that we’ll hold the home open. We’ll come in, we’ll turn on the lights, we’ll bring snacks, beverages, we will advertise the open house on MLS, on our website, on Facebook, and sometimes in the paper. What you can expect is for us to be there and you’ll be able to enjoy yourself away from home knowing that we’ll be keeping an eye on the people coming through and update you when it’s over.
Often we find that buyers and sellers don’t know what to expect with a home inspection. If you’re the buyer you’re going to be getting a report back that can be up to 30 pages. The home inspector will go up in the attic, he’ll go below into the crawl space, he’ll check every window latch, how every door shuts, weather stripping. What he will not check is the irrigation and the sprinkler system.
If you’re the seller sometimes you’re thinking, “How do I get my home ready for a home inspection?” At the least, you need to make sure that the areas of access are cleared so that it’s easy for a home inspector to get into the attic and easy to find the crawl space. More tips: make sure your smoke alarm batteries are good, that your smoke alarms are working and that all your light bulbs are working. If a light bulb is out, the inspector may call for an electrician because they think that the light isn’t functioning and they’re not allowed to touch the bulb.
Many people feel that listing their home around the holidays is too much of a challenge. We think differently. What we appreciate is going into a home that has the fire going and Christmas or holiday decor scattered around; it just makes a home feel really homey and cozy. One thing to be careful of when selling a home during the holidays is not have too much decor. You want the home to still feel spacious. But that sense of a Christmas tree or the Christmas potpourri, something cooking in the oven is welcoming to a potential buyer especially when it’s snowy or rainy outside. It’s a terrific way to represent your home in the best light possible.
It’s important for first time homebuyers first to understand what their long term home ownership goals are and what type of home best suits their needs. (Here are 100 things to watch for in a real estate transaction.) And it is very important to be pre-approved for a home loan (Click here for a checklist of documents they’ll likely ask you for.); to meet with a lender and look at your credit score and really understand what price bracket you are in. It’s important to get an idea of how much a lender is willing to give you and how much home you can afford. Sometimes a bank will give you a loan that’s larger than what you can actually pay for and afford, and so it’s important for you to understand what your mortgage will be and what your finances look like. (Here is a list of 6 simple tips to help the home loan application process go smoothly. And an interview with a local home mortgage officer about what tends to go wrong with home loans.)
One of the best things we can offer first time homebuyers is to come in and sit down with us and we can go through the entire process and to make them feel at ease with applying for a mortgage. Often we get first time homebuyers who aren’t quite qualified to buy, so they start working with a mortgage broker and then within three to six months they are now a buyer. (You’ll enjoy this interview with a couple who were first time home buyers with an FHA loan.)
Many first time homebuyers don’t know what their credit score is and don’t know if they can qualify for a home loan. But even if your credit score is a little low, we’ll take the time to help you get up to the point where they can buy. And when you’re ready to buy, we’ll take care of all the small details for them like getting CC&R’s and the HOA contract to review.
A great place for first time homebuyers to start is to create a home search or even several searches on our website and to drive by the different neighborhoods to really understand if that’s the neighborhood where they want to be in and if schools are important, to research the schools.
Often we find that buyers and sellers don’t know what to expect with a home inspection. If you’re the buyer you’re going to be getting a report back that can be up to 30 pages. The home inspector will go up in the attic, he’ll go below, he’ll check every window latch, how every door shuts, weather stripping. What he will not check is the irrigation and the sprinkler system.
If you’re the seller sometimes you’re thinking, “How do I get my home ready for a home inspection?” At the least, you need to make sure that the areas of access are cleared so that it’s easy for a home inspector to get into the attic and easy to find the crawl space. More tips: make sure your smoke alarms batteries are good, that your smoke alarms are working and that all your light bulbs are working. If a light bulb’s out and inspector may call for an electrician because they think that the light isn’t functioning and they’re not allowed to touch the bulb.
The first rule in the home closing process is: do not select a Friday for your closing day. Don’t have that moving truck at the house at noon on your closing day or even 5PM. Schedule it for two days (or even three) after. If you are closing on Friday and then have your money not come in – a problem with the lender or maybe the cut off time didn’t happen and, or there’s a snow storm back east and wires didn’t come out and then all of a sudden you can’t move in over that weekend. We try and have our buyers schedule closings on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, allowing a day or two for potential issues.
One of the most notable benefits of buying a previously owned home is that they often have a larger lot size than new construction. Another benefit can be buying in an appealing, established neighborhood that doesn’t have any empty lots to build on.
When a buyer comes to us wanting to buy a farm in Central Oregon, the first question we always ask the buyer is “Have you owned a farm before?” Some people come from out of state and say, “My goal is to buy a farm.” If you have never had a farm, there are many variables to consider: irrigation rights, septic systems, boundaries, cattle raising. There are important questions to answer: What are your goals for the farm? Do you want to raise livestock? Do you want to farm lavender? Perhaps you are moving here because of our new legalization of marijuana and want to become a grower? If you are planning on coming here and having grow houses, what power is available to the site?
Some buyers who think they want to buy a farm but may just want to have chickens and one horse. In that case, they may be very comfortable owning just three acres and getting their feet wet before we take you up to that 20 acre farm or that 200 acre farm.
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