Five Questions Santa Clarita Home Sellers Are Asking in 2026

Five questions Santa Clarita sellers are actually asking in 2026, answered by an agent who only represents sellers.

Most of what you read online about valuing your home was written by somebody with a stake in your answer. So was this. The difference is the method is in here, so you can go check the work yourself.

What your home is actually worth. Every closed sale is recorded with the county and tracked by the local boards of REALTORS, but reaching that data is the hard part, which is why people accept whatever a website prints out. When an agent hands you a number, the number is not the deliverable. The data behind it is. Put the pin on your own house, expand outward, and find three or four closings inside 180 days that match on bedroom count, square footage, lot size, and year built. If somebody is comparing your single family home to a duplex in another city, ask them why.

Sell now or wait for rates. This turns on your plan at the other end far more than on rates. Sellers leaving California are usually buying into less expensive markets, Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky, the Carolinas, at a lower price per square foot. If rates come down later, you can refinance.

Who pays the buyer's agent. It is negotiable, and it always was. Most Santa Clarita sellers still choose to contribute, some decline, and those deals still get structured.

Fire insurance and your buyer's loan. A buyer who cannot get insured cannot fund. More than half the time a home gets listed, the seller's carrier is no longer writing new policies in California. Insurance shopping used to happen in week three of escrow. It has to happen in week one now.

What to fix and what to skip. Pricing comes from what has closed. Repairs come from your active competition, the homes buyers tour the same weekend as yours. Walk them in person. You rarely get a renovation back dollar for dollar.

Plus what actually happens when you ask AI what your house is worth.

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/Niv-K7YKDPA
Loom version: https://www.loom.com/share/109b1c7b2f1840ce98fe3117044c73af
Read the written version: https://santaclaritaopenhouses.com/blog/five-questions-santa-clarita-home-sellers-are-asking-in-2026-pricing-timing-fees-insurance-repairs/

Text HOUSE to (661) 888-4983 for the sold data on your specific tract. No sign-in.

Search every Santa Clarita open house free, 11 years of sold data, no registration required: https://santaclaritaopenhouses.com

Connor T. MacIvor, REALTOR®, CalDRE #01238257
Sellers only representation: https://sellersonlyagent.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good day, everybody. We're going to be getting into what sellers are actually asking here in 2026. There's a lot of information online. Most of the information online is just horrible to say the least, because most people that are telling you how to evaluate your home, how to find out what it's actually worth, they have a vested interest, just like I do. But the difference is going to be let me give you the tips and tricks on how to get that correct valuation for your residence. Now, first off, whenever you're looking, you want to find out what your source site happens to be. There's recordings. Every house that happens to close escrow is recorded with the county. That access is typically tracked by the local boards of realtors. Also the tax assessor's office. They always get that information as well. But it's not easy to pull up there. It's not like a simple system that you can go in and just grab a quick valuation on your residence. My recommendation is to find that local consummate real estate professional and see what they produce for you. Now, just to give you an arbitrary number, yeah, I don't think I would go with that. I would want to see the data behind it. And then you can do your own investigation when you're looking at the data, make sure that it's lining up. So they're not comparing your residences with residences in other cities or other zip codes. And if they are using that as a reason, then I would ask them to further explain why they're not using properties that are in closer proximity to your residence when they're making their comparisons. Also, if they're, let's say, trying to compare your residence, which is a regular, you know, box-style single-family residence, maybe like a ranch home, something very traditional. If they're trying to compare that with a duplex or a triplex in some other part or some other city, yeah, I would want to try to figure that out. What it should be is you should look at your residence as the beginning point, where the pin goes. And then from there expanding outward until you find three or four closings within 180 days that compare very closely to your residence. If you can find residences that are very, very close to yours, same bedroom count, plus or minus a couple hundred square feet on square footage, plus or minus about the same on the lot size, maybe a little bit more liberal on the lot size. And close to the same year built, you're golden. Those are probably going to be the best comparables. Now, let's say you haven't done a lot to your house as a seller. Let's say you've kind of left it as it is for the last 30 years and that's not uncommon, so don't beat yourself up. But now might be time to pay forward a little bit, depending on the type of market you happen to be selling in. If it's a complete seller's market, we're kind of a little split. We're not 100% sellers right now in the Santa Clarita Valley, so buyers do have an advantage just because it's taking a little bit longer to close real estate listings, but that also depends on the city. Castac right now is blowing up, stuff selling out there off the shelves, just flying off the shelves. But it's it's very, it just depends on the area, time of year, and the particular buyer drive that exists. But let's say you're looking at that. So you're going to be expanding and try to compare your residence with others. If the other ones have been renovated, remodeled, well, then you're going to have to see how those changes line up. And then you it's very it's not complicated to pencil out if you're going to do these changes to make yours match those sold listings to find out exactly what kind of benefits you're going to reap from that investment on your exit strategy. Some people that go in and start to fix up their residence and get it ready for sale, if that's the strategy. Don't just buy into it because some agent's telling you, oh my God, you got to do this. Have them give you proof as to why that type of leverage is going to mean something because you've lived there for 30 years, and maybe if you're going to dump 10 grand into it to do some kind of a renovation, maybe you don't get 10 grand out of it. It would be better to discount the property $10,000 or whatever, because you're not going to get penny per penny or dollar for dollar out of your fixing it up to be able to sell it. Yeah. So be wary with that. It's a very easy thing to suggest when it's not the agent's money. Unfortunately, people are funny. All right, timing. Do I sell now or do I wait for the rates to drop? Depends on your strategy. Where are you going? Are you going to be staying here locally in Santa Clarita Valley, or are you downsizing, upsizing here? Or are you going to be going to a less expensive area? What I typically find is most people that are exiting the state of California to go somewhere else, they're usually moving into less expensive markets. Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky, you know, North Carolina. Is there any other Carolina, I guess they say? But so that's where they're going. So those markets are a lot less expensive than we're seeing out here. And that being the case, typically it's not going to really matter whether you're when you're selling. Now, the strategy on the other end, because lots of times sellers out here are leaving with a suitcase full of cash from the proceeds of the residents, you have to see how that how all of that fits in. Maybe you can take taxes with you. Well, that'd be in California. But maybe there's other strategies, that's something that you also want to consider as you're going to be selling and potentially going to a less expensive market. And then timing the market on the other end. Whenever real estate starts to decline, whenever we start to have, like we had that uh the 2000 and Seville uh last last financial crash with regard to real estate, back in that time, uh state of California lost money slower at a much slower rate than a lot of other states. So if you're going to one of those other states that loses a lot faster, maybe the strategy is to sell here now while everything's nice and plump and then go somewhere else and rent for a while and then reinvest after they have some sort of a market adjustment, if that happens. That's very much reading into the tea leaves, and that's very much looking at potentialities, but nothing is based in fact. For somebody to tell you that this is indeed going to crash, this real estate market is going to reset itself or have a restructuring, nobody really knows. And especially now with all the technological advancements and AI and all of that stuff, that's that's really putting our economy in a very weird place where predictability is very much a dream, at least right now. So as far as whether you want to sell now or wait till rates to drop, it depends on your strategy on the other end. But typically, if you're selling here in Southern California, you're going to end up buying something at less price per square foot where you're going. And if you're going to be locking it in a particular interest rate, if interest rates happen to drop sometime in the future, and more than likely, if they are going to come down, it's probably going to be more sooner than later. We'll probably be able to, you can do a refinance and you can have a new interest rate at that particular level. So that's always a possibility. In addition, if you're leaving here with a suitcase full of cash, going somewhere else, and you happen to be buying into a less expensive market, you can also make an application to have that rate bought down. You can purchase a lower interest rate, but you have to do the numbers, right? You have to see if a $15 or $20,000 investment into your loan and also do yourselves a favor, too. When you're seeing these numbers, when people are giving you these numbers for buying down an interest rate, you have to write that out. You have to figure out exactly what that's going to look like in the next 10, 20, 30 years, depending on where you think you're going to be at that time. If you're going to be living at that time, and right now with AI, I know this is not everybody's favorite subject, but if they do solve medicine, then more than likely we'll be living a lot longer than we probably do now. And I don't know if that's going to be by choice, by design for only the most rich and famous, or if that's going to be offered to everybody. But you should at least have a small percentage of that, if in fact that's your thing and you would like to, maybe built into your strategy. So right now, if I'm 57, which I am, if I take that out 50 years, that's 87, right? I would expect to be very healthy and very spry and in very good condition at 87 because of what I believe the medical advancements are going to be. It's going to be a little rough for a little while because of the technology and the way people are going to be using it and the way human beings are going to have control over it. But I think the medicine thing is probably going to work out, and maybe most disease will be solved by then. So that being my strategy, yeah, I would more than likely sell now, buy somewhere else now because I might have the ability to pay something off after 30 more years, because I plan to also work until my very last day. So if that's your strategy, so there's all things to factor in. They just kind of give you, give you my thought process. So as far as waiting for rates to drop, in most cases, I would probably not. But again, it depends on your strategy. You know, some people did very well where they they were able to purchase way before the last crash or after the last crash, they waited till the end of 2011, beginning of 2012 to make their purchasing, and that was the bottom of that market. So now from you know the end of 2011, beginning of 2012 to now, what is that, uh, 14 years later? Yeah, they're doing very well as far as the real estate they own. And are we inflated? Are we in a bubble? Is the economy gonna pop? If AI is what they say it is, and if it continues to grow, there will be no stopping the growth. Therefore, all of this extra money that's been injected hand over fist, it's just gonna keep getting more. That's if it goes like that. We've never seen a market like that, but that's what the people that own the companies are saying. So I hope in my wildest dreams, that's the way it works out. But if it starts to cause issues with the economy and the stock market, because most of those top companies in the stock market are all dependent on artificial intelligence tech, well, we we need to pause maybe in some cases. Fees. Who pays the buyer's agent since the rule change? That depends. I still see most sellers right now paying the buyer's agent a fee whenever the buyer's agent's representing buyers on their listings. Personally, sellers only agent, so I'm only representing the seller's side. Um, I have some sellers, most of my sellers are very much willing to pay, but in some cases they are not. And in every case, there's always been a way to have it worked out. So even if my sellers weren't willing to pitch in for a buyer's agent, which is rare, at least for now, still, it's still rare, even after the purported changes. Now, these changes, they're really not changes, they're just more legal ease being put into the mix. It's always been negotiable whether a seller pays a buyer's agent. That's always been that way. And the fee that was required to get the buyers, the buyer to keep their the agent to keep their buyer in place on that residence, but that that's also been uh negotiation. But now it's it's more contractual, and it's always been contractual. But now, because it's been talked about, it's been talked about how it's been you know forced on people, uh, some sellers now say, well, I'm not going to pay a buyer's agent. And it seems to still work out on the other end because the buyer is able to compensate their own agent themselves. They're able to potentially borrow some money from somebody to do so, or whatever. But there are ways that that happens. So I don't see a lot of big changes on that. The fees also the buyer's agents are mandating, or and it's all up to negotiation again. But you know, they're still two, two and a half percent. It depends. But in some cases, they're quite a bit less, and in some cases, uh, they're flat fee as well. So I've seen all sorts of different things come across my desk when representing sellers. All right, so as far as insurance go, is will fire insurance kill my buyer's loan? That's another question that popped up and has been talked about since the Palisades fires and all of the other stuff going out here in California. Yeah, um, it could. It could actually ruin the buyer's ability to purchase your residence. What I inform my sellers to do now is do their due diligence up front with regard to the insurance and make sure that their current carrier is going to stay and they're still going to offer insurance on that particular residence. That's valuable information to have as you're advertising or as I'm advertising and marketing the property for sale. That's important because then that can be conveyed to the buyer. Now, that doesn't mean that the buyer doesn't need to still check for insurance and start shopping. Shopping should start taking place right at the very beginning. And I say that because in most cases, in the past, prior to the uh the water issues and the insurance issues and all this other stuff in California, what we used to have happen was the buyer would wait until week number three of a four-week escrow to grab an insurance policy. And in some cases, I mean they could almost do it a couple days before, and it always seemed to work out. Now that needs to happen earlier, especially in a lot of cases, if you're a buyer watching this, the sellers aren't having an agent that's telling them this needs to be a preparatory part of the process as you start to list and sell your house. I don't want to wait until that last minute for any buyer because buyers are out there, you know, working hand over fist to try to get everything in order, try to keep, you know, tabs on the lender, try to keep all their documents. Some of these folks are, you know, working for somebody else in the most case, and they're gonna need to get documentation from the other side or their own side from their employer. And depending on how bureaucratic they're if if they're they're if they're a Fed or if they're um some kind of local police officer with a big agency or sheriff's department or whatever, sometimes trying to get personnel to give out these documents that the lenders want for some kind of verification, employment verification, the badge and ID just isn't enough. You're gonna need more. And these other items, these other documents, it takes time. And a lot of times they don't have a great mechanism to have the documents produced. Then the documents might be asked for again. And it's not that they were misplaced, it's just that now we need to ensure right before closing that that buyer is still employed. Yeah, I know it happens. So there's a lot of that that goes on as well. So you want to make sure that if you are representing sellers and you're watching me trying to learn something, and I appreciate that, you know, have everything lined up and especially insurance. You're gonna have to have your seller contact their insurance company. And I would say more than 50% of the time when I'm listing properties, the insurance company that's in place for that seller, they're no longer going to be writing policies in California. They didn't cancel. They said we're gonna stay in force until the seller's done. No, until that particular property owner's done. But after that, we're not gonna be renewing any more policies in the state of California. Or we're not gonna be re we're not gonna be approving this residence any longer, maybe because of where it's located. So that's something to check into. And as a buyer, I would definitely recommend to do that early. And as far as if you're a seller contemplating it and you're working with me, we'll get all that wired up at the very beginning. I haven't had anything not work out of all the listings that I sell, all the sellers I represent. There hasn't been a case yet that it hasn't, we're knocking on wood, that it hasn't worked out. And I believe that's gonna still be the case. There's the California Fair Plan, there's other options. I also have some fantastic insurance brokers that I work with, well, that work with me or that I know, that are just fantastic people. So they do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting insurance and those recommendations. And finally, number five, what do I fix? What do I skip? Talked a little bit about this before, but as you're preparing your house for sale, you need to look at the ones that have sold, also the ones you're in competition with. So realistically, for pricing, you want to take into account everything that's closed escrow. That's where the pricing strategy comes in. When it comes to what you fix, then you're gonna want to look at the properties you're gonna be in competition with. Which ones are actually out there for sale that can be compared to yours, same neighborhood, same street, same track code, same area of the city, same type of uh habitability, maybe same school access, these sorts of things. So if you find those properties that are aligning with yours in those regards, then you want to see what those particular conditions are. Now, I've taken sellers to their competition to show them around these residences so they can really have an idea. Pictures are great, but there's nothing like walking through the house. And I always tell my sellers not to say anything when we're in there, keep all their comments to themselves because most residences now have some kind of camera, video and audio recording systems. So don't you don't have to get all happy. And I just call the other agent and say, I want to look at the house. And we set the sellers up and they come with me and we go inside and we have a look around and we see exactly where that house happens to be positioned. And that gives you a really good idea as to whether or not you should be taking care of things on your end. Earlier in the video, I talked about the seller that lived in the house 30 years and hadn't done anything. That's not unusual. I even said that earlier too. But what you'll want to do then is understand that, well, you might have to do a little bit more in the way of upkeep, but that's also predicated on those amounts. What are you going to be getting out of it if in fact you happen to make this investment in repairing, replacing, renovating, or whatever the property, are you going to be getting out dollar for dollar or even more? Kitchen and bathrooms are a lot of times a good bet, especially if the bathrooms have really been uh the original where you have that the uh the pink octagonal tiles that have been mortared in and just that really old green carpet, those sorts of things. Those are those are probably going to be worth it, but it'll depend. And also depends on your pricing strategy. Maybe you're pricing it for an investor to come in, just buy it, sight unseen, cash only, no investing, no in no inspections, no investigation, period. Those those buyers are out there, but those investment buyers are doing that at a discount. So what's it worth to you? And then we work out the numbers. There's many different strategies to skin a cat. I don't know why they always say skin a cat. Is that a that even wasn't popular when I was growing up, but there's lots of different strategies in real estate. Just having somebody that can explain them all so we can all come down to what's best for you, I think that's the most important thing. And then finally, artificial intelligence. People say, you know, maybe I'll ask AI what my house is worth. They're pulling those same data points from uh some of the syndication sites, which have built algorithms, computer programs to basically dial up your house and spit out a result that's going to emotionally base you or emotionally attach you to some kind of a decision. Uh, maybe selling now instead of maybe selling later, uh, convincing you that a certain thing is the best way or a certain agent is the best one. Those systems are trained on that data, and those systems have integrations that combine uh combine the LLM with these different uh real estate syndication companies. So when you're searching, local resources are always, of course, superior. If that resource is actually set up correctly, mine's Santa Clarita Openhouses.com. I'd be honored if you look. I have 11 years of sold data in there, uh, every tract, every area here in Santa Clarita Valley. So you'll be able to get an actual figure out on your own by your own due diligence and research in that system to see what your house is worth. And then, of course, when you're ready for my help, just click the button on the bottom right and I will be there. I hope you're well. I'm Connor. Thank you for watching the five things sellers are asking in 2026. We'll see you tomorrow. Be well.