Partially underground home with Bentonville address!

This is a very nice home that is located 6 miles from Bentonville, Pea Ridge and Bella Vista in a beautiful rural area of Bentonville.

There are 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 2 living areas.

Great views!

Living room

Wood burning fireplace with stove insert.  Wonderful for those cold evenings.

This kitchen has more storage than you can imagine, plus there is a pantry.

Pantry area

Master bedroom opens up to a wonderful patio.  The master bathroom has a generous walk in closet.

40 x 26 Shop with 3 rooms, wired for 220 and 110.

I’m just going to put it out there… EXIT Pro Realty has the tools to market your home better than anyone else out there.  Our agents are trained to use these tools to the advantage of their clients and themselves.   Here’s a few reasons that we can market and exposure your property better than any company in the marketplace…

1.  Listing Syndication

98% of home buyers now look for home online, first.  That’s 38 Million online home searches per month.  Are they finding your listing?  If you’re not marketing through syndication then they probably aren’t.  Websites like Trulia, Zillow, Hotpads, Youtube, and Yahoo Real Estate get the majority of this search traffic.  If you’re listing can’t be found there you’re property isn’t getting the exposure it needs to sell for the best possible price.

EXIT Pro Realty uses List Hub™ Premium as well as EXIT’s proprietary EXIT E-Listings™ to syndicate it’s client’s properties out to over 100 of the top real estate search portals in the world.  Some of these include:

2.  Additional Online Exposure

Speaking honestly, we expose your property in ways other real estate companies don’t even understand.  We blog our listings to focus our market penetration for certain groups using keyword research.  We send virtual tour videos to YouTube where less than 15% of Realtors list their properties, giving you an added boost of exposure in a marketplace where there are lots buyers but few people advertising.  We even use TubeMogul.com to further syndicate our property videos to multiple online video sites and measure it’s exposure and effectiveness.

3.  Professional Marketing Materials

Our agents have access to promotional flyer creation software, software to create virtual and video tours of properties, and a suite of creative advertising ideas and materials that help agents sell distressed, difficult, and niche market properties better than anyone else.

4.  Premium Customer Relationship Follow up and Management Software

EXIT Pro Realty owners have invested in an office wide “CRM” software that allows our agents to track every facet of their business including:

• Conversations
• Appointments
• Marketing Plans
• Contracts and addenda
• Professional contacts
• and much more…

While the idea of a relationship manager is not new, no other office in Northwest Arkansas can say that it has an Office-Wide system available to it’s agents where information can be interchanged, shared, and dispersed efficiently and effectively.  It allows us to convert more buyers into sales for our clients.  It also helps us communicate with our clients more effectively and regularly.  One of the chief complaints about Realtors in general is that they don’t communicate regularly with their clients.  This helps us do just that.

5.  Viral and Social Media Marketing

While there are a small number of agents across Northwest Arkansas with a fair deal of ’social capital,’ there isn’t another real estate company that has a centrally driven social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and the RE Net.  We encourage our agents to pursue goal-oriented social media strategies for their business.  We then supplement that with a general company presence.  All of our listings, articles, and press releases are syndicated, socially bookmarked, facebooked, tweeted, and blogged into all the major social media outlets.

If you are a seller that is unfamiliar with some of these concepts, that’s okay.  You don’t really have to know how it all works.  Just know that we are doing things in a progressive, comprehensive, forward-thinking way to grow our company and provide the best possible service to our clients and customers.  Contact us today to find out more about a marketing plan specifically for your property.  You can always contact me personally to talk about how our agents can market your home like no-one else in the area.

If you are an agent that would love help in using some of these tools or you’d like to see what EXIT Pro can do for you, then contact me or the office.  Thanks for reading.

Welcome to the Carnival of Real Estate -  Meat ‘n Taters Edition!  EXIT Pro Realty is proud to host CoRE #156 this week with just over 20 quality submissions.  So, without further adieu… on with the show!

Standard – 3rd Runner Up

While a bit negative, we thought this post was well written and had home owner interests at heart.  Jim Wang over at Bargaineering has written a good post on Your Home is Not An Investment.

Select – 2nd Runner Up

John Coley over at Lake Martin Voice gives us  a cool video and explanation of water depth in Lake Martin 101: How to Measure Winter and Summer Water Depth.  In keeping with our theme, we think John’s done an excellent job by showing his knowledge of the area he specializes in as well as his friendly demeanor.

Choice – 1st Runner Up

This not-so-shabby article from Moolanomy Personal Finance, How to Sell Your Home Fast – 9 Tips to Get the Most From Your Home Sale is a great collection of general tips to help sellers make their home more salable; always a good thing.

Prime – CoRE Winner!

Joe Manausa over at Tallahassee Real Estate Blog rakes in the top award for his excellent article Consider Paying Home Mortgage Discount Points.  It’s concise, informative advice from a real estate professional.  We loved it.

Other Favorites…

The “Old 96er” Award

This one goes to Torrey Brothers over at HotWholeSaleRehabs.com for Top 50 Reasons to Invest in Real Estate Right Now! for shear heft.  It’s a pretty informative article as well.

The “Yukon Gold” Award

This one goes to a good article that didn’t really follow along with the main pack.  That said, Mark Menzella offered a great introduction to 7 Days to Better Your SEO Search Engine Optimization – Day 1, Title Tags.

That’s about it for the CoRE #156.  Stick around and check out our new Brokerage Blogsite, EXITproRealty.com.  We like it, we think you might too.

Congrats to all the winners.  There were quite a few really solid articles this week, these just happened to be the ones that tickled our fancy.  Make sure to submit your post to the Carnival Next week when it is hosted at MiOaklandCounty.com.

I had just about forgotten that I signed up EXIT Pro to host the Carnival this month.  This past Tuesday I started getting blog carnival emails and realized… “oh yeah, we’re hosting the carnival this week.”  With that said, this week’s carnival theme is “Meat ‘n Taters.”

No offense to the vegetarians…

We’re BIG on technology around EXIT Pro.  One thing we try to keep our agents from losing sight of is the fact that real estate is about people, not technology.  To keep that in mind for us and for the rest of the real estate community, we thought we’d get back to basics and talk about the meat ‘n taters of real estate.  We also love to propagate the stereotypes of  the deep south so the theme accomplishes two goals.  This week’s carnival winners will be loosely based on how well they apply some of the basic real estate principles of networking, prospecting, closing, yadda yadda.  Of course, we’ll recognize other posts that tickle our worcestershire (that’s a steak joke).

Bring on the articles and submit some posts!  We’ve got 25 or so agents with their steak knives sharpened and ready to slice into some juicy real estate blogs!

I think the picture speaks for itself.  I’m tired of bad (aka unprofessional) real estate photos.  Each week I’ll display one or more photos that just make my skin crawl.  Feel free to stare at this atrocious photo, laugh, or cry as the mood strikes you.

40/29 News just did a feature story on new home sales activity and a rise in home prices in Northwest Arkansas.  If you were waiting for ‘bottom’ to buy or refinance you may have already missed it.  But it’s not too late!  Check out this video from 40/20 News featuring our own Executive Broker, Larry Robison, talking about new home sales.

Here’s the link to the video about New Home Sales and Home Prices in Northwest Arkansas.

There’s a lot more to it

If you watched the whole 2 minute or so video you would have heard that home prices in Northwest Arkansas rose from $137,000 in February up to $168,000 in May.  That’s my statistic that we gave them and I can explain that number a little bit.

Did home prices rise by almost 23% in three months?

The short answer is no, not really.  But it’s still very good news.  The numbers in February were so low because a greater percentage of the sales were foreclosed or distressed properties.  This artificially drove the average sales price down to $137,000….actually $137,521 to be exact.  In May, we say a much more significant number of home sales were traditional property sales, driving the average sales price back up to $168,181.

Here’s the graph of average home sale prices over the past few months:

Encouraging isn’t it?  It’s also encouraging that there are builders building new homes and filling up subdivisions again.

What’s the moral of the story?

• Take advantage of interest rates
• Take advantage of the 8,000 tax credit available to buyers until the end of the year.
• Take advantage of historically low home prices that are already disappearing

The moral is TAKE ADVANTAGE.

Feeling the need to search for homes?  Head to my map-based home search here.

You Get What You DON’T Pay For

The economic stress that has been brought upon us has everyone looking to save more money.  We are now being more creative than ever before in order to get the biggest bang for our buck.  I see anything from carpooling and bicycling to gardens and sewing once again.  One thing to keep in mind is “You get what you pay for,” however; in this instance “You get what you DONT pay for.”

How Hard Can It Be??

A Realtor knows the market you live in.  This includes the surrounding counties, not just your subdivision with the house for sale down the road…. Listing your home with an agent will allow your home to be added to  the MLS (multiple listing service).  Now, instead of your home being marketed by one person (YOU), all the Realtors within that board could bring you buyers…. Sound fair?  I know what you are thinking.  How hard can it be to put a sign and flyers out in the yard and host an open house with sugar cookies and lemonade?  Well, my friend, that’s what Realtors do.   We please our sellers.  There is so much more to the picture than what is being physically observed.  However, the sellers do not see whats going on behind closed doors.  They do not know we mention their house for sale at the weekly office meetings, or send out mass emails to the other Realtors, or even host a Realtor open house so that the local agents can physically see the home and enjoy a nice lunch.

Apples to Apples?  I don’t think so……

I like to compare it to any other professional service you might pay for.  Have you ever tried to clean your own carpets, groom your dog, or THE worst, detail your car?  Exactly…… Yes we can do it three times the length of time as a professional and half the price, right?  The only problem is the wasted time and effort and the poor results.  Realtors are professionals too.  We have been educated in this field and have a desire to provide optimal customer service.

Let’s Take The Guess Work Out!

By using a licensed real estate agent, it could limit the liability in so many aspects during the sale of your home.  We have been trained in negotiating contracts and dealing with banks and title companies.  When FSBO (for sale by owner) owners negotiate a contract, minor mistakes can easily be made that could lead to major problems.  I can help limit the liability of an unforeseen circumstance by providing you with my knowledge in the real estate industry.  Although there are no guarantees, I can rely on my fellow coworkers to take a look at my work before I submit it to contract. One last idea I would like to throw at you is the emotional aspects of your home.  This is a place where you might have grown up, started a family, or even raised your own children.  While negotiating a contract (especially the price) it would be fair to say that its not an easy task to swallow.  I would like to help make the decision making process as easy, less confusing, and rewarding as possible.  This can be done when I represent you as a seller and I personally deal with the buyers or their representing agent.

Lastly……

Realtors know the cost of selling a home is not inexpensive.  We are paid based on our knowledge, training, and mostly our customer focused service.  Besides, once I sell your home, I am readily available to get you into the next home of your dreams.  Call and set up an appointment today.  I would be more than happy to take a look at your property and assess its value not only to you, but to the market it compliments.

How can a first time home buyers credit benefit me?

During the economic crunch every little bit helps.  How about a tax credit that inspires college students, newly weds, and even those who have not owned a primary residence in years, to make one of the most rewarding purchases Americans strive for??

As a Realtor I am here to help you with that.  Buying a home can be very exciting and overwhelming at the same time.   It is essential to take the appropriate steps while coming to a purchasing decision.  The good news about the tax credit is that any home qualifies: new construction or preowned.  There are no limitations other than the income used to qualify for the mortgage.  In other words, as long as the home has been purchased and lived in as the primary residence after January 1, 2009 and before December 31, 2009, the credit can be applied to your 2009 tax return.  As always, please seek financial advice from your certified public accountant.

Who qualifies as a “first time home buyer” ?

Anyone that has never had the glory of home ownership is automatically qualified for this tax credit in 2009.  However, if you were once a homeowner but have not owned in the past 3 years, then the credit also applies to you.  When it comes to joint ownership, if either spouse has owned a home as a primary residence in the past 3 years then the married couple does not qualify.  Since we are strictly dealing with primary residences, a vacation home or rental property does not affect the qualification for the first time home buyers tax credit.

Tax Credit or Tax Deduction? Let’s not get confused!

One thing I like to educate my buyers on is the difference between a tax credit and a tax deduction.  This particular credit for 2009 is $8000.

A tax credit is a dollar-for-dollar reduction in what the taxpayer owes. That means that a taxpayer who owes $8,000 in income taxes and who receives an $8,000 tax credit would owe nothing to the IRS.

A tax deduction is subtracted from the amount of income that is taxed. Using the same example, assume the taxpayer is in the 15 percent tax bracket and owes $8,000 in income taxes. If the taxpayer receives an $8,000 deduction, the taxpayer’s tax liability would be reduced by $1,200 (15 percent of $8,000), or lowered from $8,000 to $6,800.

With that being said……….

….. Now is such a good time to become a homeowner.  Low interest rates, reasonable prices, and tax incentives is evidence that owning a home can be affordable and rewarding at the same time.  Talk to your Realtor today.  We are professionals that strive in today’s market and committed to providing optimal customer service and begin lifelong relationships.

If you have any questions feel free to contact me.  I will be glad to set up an appointment in hopes of finding the perfect home for you!