Give Yourself Time to Get Ready for an Open House
Friday November 6, 2009
Unless you're Martha Stewart, you've got to do a lot of planning and work to get ready for an open house.
After you select the day and time, try to give yourself enough time to get the house in order. It's easy to become overly enthusiastic once you decide to sell, and it's difficult to be patient, lining up all your ducks in a row before that first buyer enters your home. But studies show the first few weeks on the market are the most crucial, which means you might not get a second chance to showcase your home during an open house if you don't do it right the first time . . . read more about getting ready for an Open House.
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Comments
Check out this story about the extension of the housing tax credit:
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/politics&id=7087955
If you want to skip it, here’s the interesting part (which they do not explain in detail):
1,400,000 homebuyers have taken advantage of the tax credit.
The story specifically states that NAR estimates that 350,000 of those wouldn’t have purchased without the tax credit, meaning 1,050,000 would still have purchased without the tax credit.
This means the total cost of the program breaks down like this:
1,400,000 x 8,000 = $11,200,000,000 (11.2 BILLION)
This means the total cost to give the 350,000 people who wouldn’t have purchased a home without the tax credit was the 11.2 Billion; which means:
11,200,000,000 / 350,000 = $32,000 per transaction
So:
It cost $32,000 for each individual who got the $8,000 tax credit, to motivate them to purchase a new home.
Wow.
Well, you can make numbers say anything you want. But interesting presentation. You’re missing the fact that the program costs something to administer, so it costs more than $8,000 per person. Moreover, your computation doesn’t take into consideration all the money pumped into the economy by those homebuyers who didn’t care about the credit but now will use it to buy stuff for the home, hire contractors, make improvements, etc.