Should You Sell Your Home in the Fall?

Spring is the most popular time to sell a home, yet there are some advantages to getting your house on the market in the autumn months. Although you may feel you have missed out by not putting your house on the market in the spring, the fall months for selling your home could be a feather in your cap. Look at the following four benefits to selling your home in the fall, along with tips for leveraging those to find a buyer.

Demographics Most Likely to Buy in the Fall

Serious homebuyers for this time are often millennials, empty-nesters, or relocated employees without children. Without having to consider a new school year, they are more apt to buy before the end of the year to lock in mortgage rates, avoid the hassle of a move in the winter weather, or get settled in a new location for their job before the start of a new year.

Less Inventory—Less Competition

Homes listed for sale are generally lower in autumn, so you are not competing as much with other buyers. While sellers are more susceptible to the pressure of buyers’ demands during the peak season, you have a better chance of attracting buyers to your home and getting them to accept your selling price during a slower period.

TIP: Get professional assistance with pricing your home and the right strategy for selling during the off-season

Seasonal Attractiveness

The fall brings vibrant colors, a cooler temperature, and more choices for décor. The heat and humidity of summer have mostly passed, and the new season of harvest and festivals lures people out into the environment. It is a time when people may want to make a big purchasing decision before the rush of the holidays and the end of the year.

Improve the curb appeal of your home and stage the inside. You can do this in the following ways:
1. Clean and De-clutter
2. Replace dim lighting
3. Add flowers
4. Paint and caulk
5. Purchase new pillows, curtains, and candles
6. Re-arrange your furniture for better social interaction
7. Use gas or electric fireplaces for ambiance
8. Don’t overdo decorations.
9. Photograph the property while you still have natural lighting.

Quicker Closing

Since the fall tends to be an off-peak season with fewer home sales and real estate transactions, your closing should go quicker and with less stress. You should be able to book with mortgage lenders, home inspectors, attorneys, and other vendors related to your home’s sale without delay or hassle.

There is never a right or wrong season to sell your home. Although spring may lure many enthusiastic families into wanting to buy in the warm weather, the fall can be equally enticing for others. You’ll find that many are motivated during this time to buy because they want to settle in before the winter and holiday season. Still, whatever season you decide to sell, it’s always important to prepare your home adequately and know the strategies to attract the aptest buyers.

 

Radiant Barriers Help Insulation Do More

We all know the old song and dance: insulate and weatherproof your home to maximize your utility dollars. Filling all the gaps and keeping all the climate-controlled air where it should be is a huge part of creating a home that’s not only comfortable, but efficient. Or so we’ve been told. The truth is that there’s another step in the process that many homeowners are overlooking, and it’s both easy to install and inexpensive: a special kind of foil called a radiant barrier.

What are Radiant Barriers?

Radiant barriers aren’t much to look at. In fact, they pretty much just look like really heavy foil like you’d use on your grill or on top of a casserole dish. But they make up for looks in performance. According to Energy.gov, a website produced by the US Department of Energy, radiant barriers can reduce cooling costs by up to 10% in sunny climates, and may even allow a homeowner to install a smaller air conditioning system, saving additional money over the longer term.

They work by reducing the radiant heat that comes into an attic or other space. When roofing materials get hot from sun exposure, that heat eventually transfers into the attic via radiation. So, to slow or even stop this process, a barrier that’s designed to reflect that radiant heat back out of the attic is necessary.

Many houses lack radiant barriers, either because it wasn’t invented when they were built and no one thought to add it later, or because the climate where they were built was once considerably cooler than it is now. That doesn’t mean you can’t add one, though.

Installing Radiant Barriers

Installing a radiant barrier is not a difficult process, but it can be a time-consuming and messy one. After all, you’ll need to be in your attic for prolonged periods, working with a sort of heavy foil material that can be cumbersome for a single person to manage. But it’s definitely possible as an advanced DIY project.

When you install a radiant barrier, it’s really important to not only pay attention to which side is up on the barrier material, so the proper side faces the roof, but that you install it in such a way that it won’t be contaminated with things like dust and other debris. The more dust and material that collects on a radiant barrier, the less effective it will be.

In the past, some people have installed radiant barriers on top of their insulation, but this has proven to be a poor way of installing the material. Instead of the wanted effect of cooling the attic, in these homes, the radiant barrier instead interferes with the insulation’s ability to work properly. Since they also tend to act as a moisture barrier, radiant barriers can also trap moisture inside attic insulation, causing all kinds of other problems.

When installing a radiant barrier, hanging it along the contours of the attic roof or rafters is your best bet, but you’ll need to let the material droop slightly between attachment points to create a 1-inch air gap between the material and the bottom of the roof. You can also choose insulation with a radiant barrier built-in, called reflective insulation, where the barrier acts as the facing material.

Safety With Radiant Barrier Materials

Because radiant barriers are made of metal foil, they will conduct electricity. Many homeowners don’t consider this when installing them and may overlook serious hazards like contact with bare wire or old wire with failing insulation. Electricity can cause serious injuries or damage to homes, especially if the contact is prolonged and widespread, like it would be when accidentally electrifying an entire attic’s worth of foil.

When to Call a Pro…

If you’re not sure you’re ready to install a radiant barrier yourself, or you’re concerned about getting it just right, it might be better to hire a professional to get the job done. Where will you find such a person? Why, HomeKeepr, of course! Just log in and ask for a recommendation for the best insulation installer in your area, and before you know it, you’ll be reaping the benefits of an attic with excellent protection against radiant heat.

Don't Be Afraid of Todays Housing Market

 Buying a Home With a Rental Unit

Buying a home can be full of difficult decisions, and as housing prices climb, maybe even more difficult financial planning. For people looking for a different way to help pay for their mortgage every month, choosing a home with an attached rental unit might just provide the monthly bump that makes that payment a little easier to accomplish.

What Is an Attached Rental Unit?

An attached rental unit, formally called an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU), is typically a smaller living space adjacent to a main home. It might be a tiny house in the backyard, or something more like self-contained mother-in-law quarters attached to the house. It can even be a small apartment over the garage. There aren’t a lot of rules about what an ADU has to be, except that it should be fully autonomous.

The reason for autonomy is that this is what it takes to really have solid rental income potential from a secondary dwelling on a regular lot. Imagine if you were renting an apartment somewhere, you’d certainly want to have your own kitchen and bathroom, wouldn’t you? It’s difficult to rent units without these features, so typically, they’re part of any successful ADU.

Benefits to Having an ADU

Having a rental can be a lot of work, but there are also a lot of benefits to having an ADU on your lot. Not only does the rent from an ADU help pay the mortgage every month, it can also act as flexible space for whatever life might throw at you down the way.

For example, when you first buy your home, maybe you really need help with the mortgage payment, so you use the ADU as a long-term rental unit with a tenant who has signed a year-long lease. This tenant not only pays the utilities for that unit, but they also help out with the mortgage by paying rent. It’s a great situation while you’re trying to pay down your mortgage and ramp up your income.

As time goes by, you might get tired of dealing with a long-term tenant, but you can still use that unit for short-term tenancy, if allowed by your neighborhood and city. Airbnb, for example, gives you the option to rent by the day or week, so you never have to stick with a tenant for too long. You can turn off being a landlord for a few weeks and go on vacation yourself without having to worry.

If AirBnB isn’t your thing, your ADU can still be used by your college-aged child or aging family member. Remember, these are essentially self-contained apartments, so they should provide a great deal of privacy and autonomy to anyone living inside. ADUs have long been favored by people with aging parents, hence the former popular nickname “mother-in-law quarters.”

Financing a Home With a Rental Unit

If you’re looking for a house with a rental unit, you may also wonder how you’re going to finance it. Do you need a special kind of loan or is this edging into the realm of commercial financing? Not at all. Most mortgages will allow you to purchase a property that has up to four units on it. That’s a lot to handle if you’ve never had a rental, but a single ADU is pretty easy upkeep.

All you need to do is choose a property that you like and ensure that it will pass any requirements from your lender (your Realtor can help with this). Certain programs may have specific inspections, such as FHA, VA, or USDA, so you definitely want to let your lender know that you’re looking for a property with an ADU before you commit to your loan.

Ready to Finance Your Home and ADU?

Well, you’re going to need a good lender who isn’t shy about writing loans on properties that might be a little less than typical. Your HomeKeepr community can help you find them! Just ask for a recommendation for the best lenders in your area and before you know it, you’ll have a home of your own, and a small rental unit to help pay the extra bills.

Already have that ADU in play? HomeKeepr can also help you maintain it. The list of home pros that are members of the community is staggering and your Realtor can help you figure out exactly what kind of professional you’ll need to get the ball rolling.

 

Lightning Proofing Your Home

Big storms can be scary. With the wind, heavy rain, and the threat of even more extreme weather, they can also bring with them a lot of damage. While a lot of people make plans on how to react to some of the big dangers associated with storms, there’s one more common threat that often goes overlooked: lightning strikes.

To be fair, there’s a lot of folk wisdom about how unlikely it is to be struck by lightning (less than a 1 in 15,000 chance) and about how lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice (though it does). What this leaves out is that there’s a 1 in 200 chance that your home will be struck be lightning, or the amount of damage that one of these strikes can do. If you really want to protect your home and your belongings from the dangers of lightning, there are a few things you’ll need to do.

Protecting Your Home

The most well-known way to protect your home from a lightning strike is the installation of a lightning rod. These devices provide a simple but effective means of attracting lightning strikes and then diverting it to the ground instead of allowing it to strike and damage other parts of your home. They are an effective solution when it comes to direct lightning strikes, but you may be surprised to learn that even with a lightning rod in place your home can still suffer significant damage from lightning.

The problem is that lightning from nearby strikes can also damage your home as they gets conducted through wires, pipes, and other materials in your house. Unfortunately, a lightning rod isn’t going to help with this. Instead, it’s recommended that you have a whole-home lightning protection system that includes lightning rods as well as protection on main conductors, grounds, and other elements that can divert and redirect lightning electricity even if it isn’t coming from a direct strike.

Protecting Your Belongings

Another big issue with lightning strikes is that they can cause damage to a wide range of electronic devices in your home. Computers, televisions, and any other electronic device that’s plugged in can be irreparably damaged by a lightning strike and will have to be replaced. This is one reason that surge protectors and similar devices are so highly recommended, as they can help protect the devices that are plugged into them.

Whole-home surge protection systems are also recommended, as they can prevent a lightning surge from even reaching your outlets, preventing possible damage to your home’s wiring, and greatly reducing the likelihood that your devices will be damaged by a power surge before a power strip surge protector can trip its breaker. You should also take the time to unplug unnecessary devices during storms just in case, and to make sure that the surge protectors you connect your electronics up to feature transient voltage surge protection that place a hard limit of 1.5 times the normal voltage range, so that your belongings are protected against even non-lightning spikes and surges.

Overcoming the Threat of Lightning

One big thing that you should do to help protect your home and your belongings is to check your homeowner’s policy to make sure that it features protection from lightning-related damage both to the structure of your home and to the items within. While this is common in a lot of policies, this sort of protection isn’t always there, and it’s better to know what coverage you have before you need it. If you don’t have sufficient coverage, you should talk to your insurance agent to see what’s needed to increase the coverage your policy provides.

It’s also a good idea to talk to an electrician or other pro to get a lightning protection system professionally installed to make sure that it’s set up correctly. They can ensure that your system has everything you need to keep you safe in the event of lightning strikes on or near your home. HomeKeepr can help connect you with pros in your area to get you set up, so create a free account and get started today.

 

Good Scents: Using Smell to Entice Homebuyers

There are a number of unpleasant smells that can occur in your home. Sometimes they’re temporary bouts of unpleasantness, and other times they stick around. A lot of smells and odors can seem manageable, since even lingering mustiness or other odors can kind of fade over time as you get used to them. Unfortunately, just because you’ve gone somewhat “nose blind” to those smells doesn’t mean that other people have, and that can be a major problem if you’re listing your home for sale.

If you’re trying to entice people to be interested in your home, you need to make sure that the first thing they smell when walking in the door isn’t some awful smell that you’ve just gotten used to. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to bringing the smell of your home around to work to your advantage. With that said, here are a few things that might help.

Eliminate Smell Sources

If there are unpleasant smells in your home, the first thing that you should do is work on getting rid of the source of those smells. Enzyme sprays and other specialty cleaners can reduce or eliminate the cause of many pet odors, even if your pets have had accidents on the carpet. Likewise, a mix of ice, rock salt, and white vinegar can help clean and neutralize odors from the garbage disposal. A dehumidifier can go a long way toward getting rid of musty smells by reducing the humidity to a level where mildew and mold can’t grow. A thorough cleaning can also help, especially if it involves both vacuuming and shampooing the carpets and plush furniture surfaces.

If specific items such as a rug under the litter box or an old and musty pair of work boots are the source of the smell, get them out of the house or get rid of them entirely. Tossing things out may seem like a drastic step, but unless you eliminate the source of an odor, it isn’t really ever going to fully go away. Plus, if something is stinking up your home that bad then you probably don’t really need it around anyhow.

Improve Your Home’s Scent

As you work on removing unpleasant scents from your home, you can also work on adding pleasant ones. Provided that the weather allows for it, spend a few days with as many doors and windows open as possible (shutting off the HVAC first, of course) to air out the house and get fresh air everywhere. You might also want to set up fans to help circulate the air so that it reaches as many points in the house as possible. This will serve the dual purpose of getting out lingering odors and bringing in fresh scents from outdoors.

Air fresheners and air sanitizers are also useful in this regard. Opt for something with a light scent that’s either fruity or floral, but not overbearingly so. After all, your goal is to leave the air smelling fresh but not smelling like perfume. Before people come to look at the house, put out fresh flowers in key rooms to help improve the scent of the room without having to rely overly on sprays or other artificial air fresheners.

Bring in the Pros

With some odors, you may not be able to fully get rid of them on your own. In these cases, it’s a good idea to call in professional cleaners and explain what the problem is. These pros use specially-formulated cleaners and other solutions that help them break down the causes of even some of the nastiest smells to get your home smelling fresh and clean before you list it.

If you’re not sure who to call, HomeKeepr can help. Our app can connect you with cleaners and other pros in your area to help with anything that you need before putting your home on the market. Best of all, creating a HomeKeepr account is free! Sign up today to get started.

 

Trellising 101: Climb, Plant, Climb!

Growing a garden is the ultimate act of faith. After all, you never know if your plants will thrive or if they will cease to be long before reaching their full potential. Hopefully, with diligent care, and a little luck, your plants will grow big, strong, and glorious. When it comes to growing climbing plants (often referred to as “vines,” “climbers,” or “lianas”), two of the most important parts of their success are having the right kinds of things to climb and the right help to get started on their way up.

What Is a Climbing Plant?

The term “climbing plant” is kind of a giant catch-all term that includes a range of plants with long, flexible stems, and some mechanism that allows them to reach great heights in their native environments. However, some climbing plants will also just become shrubs if they have nothing to climb, and others will climb for a while, then set roots where they land before shedding their climbing tools all together.

But in most cases, when people think of climbing plants, they think of plants that are vining. These plants climb over structures and other plants using several different mechanisms. This can include stems that twist around supports, leaves that twist around objects or one another, curly tendrils that wrap around supports, long roots that help them cling to solid surfaces, or hooks like thorns that help them move upward.

Although it’s common to see vines sold as ornamentals, there are also a number of climbing plants that are part of the vegetable garden. For example, cucumbers and tomatoes are both vining plants, which makes them perfect for vertical gardening.

Trellising Vining Plants

Climbing plants can be easy to grow, if you give them appropriate things to climb and help them get a foothold when needed. Trellising a plant isn’t difficult, but choosing the right trellis can be sometimes. Not every plant will respond to every trellis, so it’s very important to consider the method by which your plant climbs before choosing a trellis for it.

For example, if your plant climbs with tendrils, it will do best with a wire trellis with frequent horizontal cross pieces. Because it needs to be able to reach up and wrap the tendrils around something substantial but narrow, the thick, flat trellises can be difficult for this type of vine to climb. On the other hand, if you’re trying to grow something that uses its roots to climb, like Virginia creeper, you need those trellises with the wide, flat components. It’s very difficult for this kind of plant to climb up narrow trellis material because it has to have some significant space and texture to allow it to really grab on with its roots.

So, whether you choose your trellis first (maybe you already have one in mind) or you choose your plant first, they need to be compatible. For many climbing plants, something as simple as mesh fencing can make a magnificent trellis.

How to Train Your Vines

Training vines to their appropriate trellises is surprisingly simple most of the time. As long as your trellis is close enough to the ground that your vine can reach it quickly in its growing process, often all you have to do is wait and let the plant do its own thing. If your plant is a bit more resistant, that’s ok, there are ways to encourage it to grow up.

A common technique for training vines onto a trellis is simply to wait for it to grow long enough for you to start winding it through the trellis material. Be very gentle, as you’ll need those delicate growing tips to remain undamaged, but loosely weaving it through the trellis as it grows will help it establish a framework for where it should be hanging out, so to speak.

With vines that need to attach to flat areas using their roots, you may be able to tie them on loosely until the root has firmly secured the plant. Use a cloth tie if at all possible to reduce the risk of damage to your plant. Before you know it, you’ll be able to untie the plant and let it get on with growing.

Still Need Help Moving Your Plants Up?

If your vining plants are still giving you trouble, or you simply don’t know which vine is right for your really magnificent arbor, it may be time to consult a landscaper or other plant expert. Your HomeKeepr community can help you find them, no matter where they may be! Just ask for a recommendation for the very best plant brains in your area, and in no time, your glorious dream of green will become a reality.