TopAgent Blog

Again, we are writing this article before official sales numbers are scheduled to be released later in the week. Because of that we’ll focus on some new information that won’t be in the release this week. Official stats in January track December sales and year-end stats which are always interesting. This tells an important, but [...]

Because we are writing this article this week before official numbers are released, we decided to go inside the numbers and focus on listing inventory and sales data.  According to preliminary numbers researched by the Ellis Team, listing inventory rose again for the 3rd consecutive month. Lehigh Acres has been holding fairly steady while Cape [...]

Don’t let the headline fool you, we’re a big fan of appraisals.  The key word is accurate, competent appraisals.  So many times sellers want us to overprice a home and sell it to a northern or foreign buyer assuming they don’t really know our market.  What sellers fail to realize is buyers usually look at [...]

Banks are contacting customers who are past due or in financial trouble and offering owners or tenants up to $20,000 in relocation assistance to move out of home and hire an experienced agent to sell the home as a short sale.  Banks are also offering owners money to agree to a deed in lieu foreclosure [...]

We’re writing this article this week two days before official numbers are released, so by the time you read this official numbers will have been released. Absent this knowledge, we expect prices in August to be higher than last year and sales to be down from last year, however sales volume may be higher than [...]

We’ve been saying for months the next round of foreclosures to hit the market may be higher priced than recent rounds.  Testament to that fact one just arrived today for over $1 Million.  We are expecting another $1 Million+ property within a few weeks on Captiva Island as well.  To date banks have cleared out [...]

With foreclosures slowing down, the competition to purchase these bargains has become even stiffer.  Many people call each week hoping to land these bargain properties and few will win the prize, so we thought it might be helpful to buyers and agents alike to learn the inside secrets on being the successful bidder on these [...]

As you can see from the attached chart, the percentages of sales that are distressed are rising once again.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as we believe banks should actively work with sellers to allow short sales rather than going through an arduous and costly foreclosure process that ties the home up for months [...]

Because Bank of America is the largest servicer of residential loans in the United States, it seems quite reasonable they would have the largest number of foreclosures and for a few years that was true. A few years ago Bank of America announced it was stepping up its efforts to assist homeowners with short sales [...]

The past few weeks we’ve laid out in detail how prices have increased and some reasons that would explain why. This week we thought we’d illustrate how the distressed market is faring versus the traditional or normal resale’s and look at how that impacts prices. As you can see from the chart, distressed sales are [...]