Selling a Santa Clarita Home: Pricing Truths, Appraisal Traps & the Open House Advantage

Thinking about selling your Santa Clarita home, condo, or townhome? Skip the Zillow guess and hear it straight from a 27+ year local Realtor.

In this episode, Connor MacIvor (DRE #01238257) breaks down what the online syndication sites won't tell you about your home's value, why they're built to generate leads for agents, not accurate numbers for you, and why SantaClaritaOpenHouses.com has become the go-to for local buyers who don't want to sign a contract just to walk through a house.

You'll learn:

• Why over 80% of buyers actively avoid the seller's agent, and what dual agency really means for your negotiation
• Why Connor trademarked "Seller's Only Agent™" and never represents buyers
• The 180-day comp rule appraisers actually use, and why a stale comparable can blow up your price
• What happens, step by step, when an appraisal comes in under the buyer's offer
• The truth about contingency removals and earnest money deposits (it's not as automatic as most agents claim)
• Whether a $15,000 kitchen remodel actually returns $15,000 at sale
• How "unicorn" features (views, RV parking, cul-de-sac, single story) justify pricing above the comps
• How AI is now legally and ethically used to declutter listing photos, and what has to be disclosed on the MLS

Connor lists and sells homes, condos, and townhomes throughout the entire Santa Clarita Valley, Canyon Country, Valencia, Saugus, Newhall, and Stevenson Ranch, as a flat-fee Seller's Only Agent™.

See every active listing and every open house this weekend, no buyer contract required, at santaclaritaopenhouses.com. Text Connor directly through the site with questions about your home's value.

This episode is for general information only and isn't a substitute for a licensed appraisal or legal advice. Connor MacIvor, DRE #01238257. Equal Housing Opportunity.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As a real estate seller, you're probably contemplating, you know, the best place to start with regard to real estate, how to price it, what your value should be, and then the things that you should be doing to your residence to get it prepared for sale. Simply, if you go to the online systems, you're looking to find out what your house happens to be worth. Understand all of those are lead generation platforms for real estate agents. I don't play into any of that. I have my own branding here in the Valley, Santa Clarita Openhouses.com, and that's where a lot of buyers actually go to search for real estate because they're looking for open houses. Because now currently, the way that the uh the rules are is you need to sign a contract in order to look at houses with a real estate agent, but open houses free game. Don't need to sign any contract, you can go look at residences. So, not that houses are being still statistically sold during open houses, but they're getting that exposure, and typically those agents will then contact their agent or the agent and then have them approach the seller on their own behalf. And a lot of times, more than uh more than 80% of the time, those buyers out there are seeking agents other than the seller's agents because they understand the dual agency risks, issues, maybe not so much risks. If if dual agency is done correctly, where you have the same agent representing the seller that's representing the buyer, besides that whole bipolar nature necessary, because typically when that agent is hired by the real estate seller, just imagine this. You know, I'm working for you. Now the buyer comes to me, and I don't represent buyers personally, I'm a seller's only agent. I've even trademarked that term, but a buyer comes to me. Let's say I did represent both sides, and I would, of course, come to you, and I think that would be a proper form. And I did that for 21 years of my 28 years. I actually went to the seller and said, Listen, the buyer wants to use me. Do you have a problem with that? Totally your choice. And in some cases, yeah, seller said, Yeah, you know, I'd rather you have you on my my side 100%. Please don't represent the buyer. And then I wouldn't even in that case refer the buyer because I don't want a piece of that commission because there's a relationship established. I would tell the buyer, listen, seller doesn't want me to represent a buyer, you can go find your own agent and then have your agent present the offer to me, and then I'll thereby present it to the seller. So it's a it's a very common thing in in some circles to actually have those buyers go out there and seek out their own agent, their own agent. But that being the case, right? So then you have the buyer coming into it, and when you have that same measure representing both sides, and the buyer says, Well, you know, I really think I deserve a $50,000 credit for $50,000 credit, and you're like, okay, and you're representing the seller, that that's a that's a tough pill to swallow because now you go back to the seller and say, Well, the buyer wants a $50,000 credit because of what they found in the home inspection. Then the seller says, Well, you know, they found uh they found a couple GFCI outlets in the near the kitchen and one in the bathroom that weren't functioning. Aren't those outlets like $40 each and to have an electrician come out? I mean, I mean, expensive electrician to swap those out. $300, including parts and and and service fee and service call and going into the house for two GFCI, and they want $50,000. Well, Connor, do you really think that's right? Well, you know, that's what the buyer wants, and now I'm gonna go back to the buyer. What's your position? There's no stand, there's no side in that particular guard. Now you split your attention from both sides anyway. Just makes it a little bit more complicated, and as far as I'm concerned, real estate's very much complicated enough. But so as far as the seller goes, then wondering what your value happens to be, and like I had mentioned, the syndication sites, they're gonna be building what they're gonna tell you around a particular result. They're gonna try to tie on to some maybe emotional, uh some kind of a reaction from you to elicit you doing something. So maybe the value is not gonna be absolutely correct. Maybe they're gonna base the value on something that you wouldn't be able to say, well, you know, they're gaming me. You might not be able to prove it, but ultimately you're gonna see some very different values depending on what syndication site you happen to go with. Best case scenario is you find a website and I post, I have 11, 11 and a half years, 11 years and eight months of sold inventory for all of the Santa Clarita Valleys, and it's only Santa Clarita Valley. So if you're outside that, I don't have that system. I'm I'm fully operational here in this valley. Some agents are gonna extrapolate all over Southern California. I don't represent buyers at all. If a buyer wants to come to me and wants information about real estate, great. I'll share them, I'll tell them the whole long. If they want me to refer them to a listing other than my sellers, yeah, I'll put a referral fee together so I can also get uh get some compensation from that, but I will refer them to one of the buyers-only agents I happen to work with. But looking at the values, right? So you're gonna go on, you're gonna look at sold data, you're gonna want to make comparisons of real estate listings that have sold in the last 180 days. I wouldn't go very far past that. And of course, if you want me to do it for you, you have your own agent that you love and trust, and you have them do it, that's what they're gonna do. 180 days is kind of far, but you don't want the time that you put the property, your property on the market, you have it listed for sale, and the time of the potential close, you don't want the comps that you're using, especially if they're like at right at 160 days or 170 days, your property is already going to be uh in some process of escrow when that comparable falls off the appraiser's chart. Now they might be able to justify extending it a little bit further than 180 days, but it's going to depend on the current market activity at the time. If the market's been declining for you know a hundred a hundred of the 180 days, when they look at the value of that property that you know now has gone past the 180 days, they're probably not gonna give it much weight. They're gonna look at other properties. And like I said, if you're trying to use an older comparable to justify your selling price and you have the buyer dependent on some kind of appraisal having to happen on your residence because their lender's ordering it and that wasn't something negotiated out of the contract, that appraisal is gonna stand. And when that appraisal comes in and happens to come lower than the buyer offered, there's gonna be a problem. You're gonna have a choice. You could either step up and say, We're gonna reduce the price to the appraisal amount. Your agent, if they're on your side, they're gonna go back to the buyer's agent, say, Listen, the seller's not gonna let this property go for any less than they in the agreed-upon listing price. So the buyer's gonna have to pony up the difference, or there's gonna be some other negotiation. Hopefully, at the very beginning, your agent representing you as the seller, hopefully they negotiated something into the contract, maybe some uh appraisal agreement that if the property does appraise for less, the buyer's gonna come up with the full value of the offer as it was written. And that was agreed to. And of course, the buyers have they have lots of other reasons they can cancel. There's other there's other issues in the contract that they could potentially cancel for. And again, would you be able to prove that they're doing it maliciously just because the appraisal came back? It depends on how the time frames were secured at the beginning because buyers have a certain amount of time to perform inspections and anything they find that makes it so they don't want to purchase the residence, it's applicable in the in that inspection process or that timeline. So if the appraisal comes in early and they still have extra days to do inspections, maybe, and you can't get an agreement on whether you're going to meet somewhere in the middle or whether you're gonna cover it. Covering it, of course, would be would be the way the buyer would be happy, or you put it all on the buyer, they can cancel for other reasons as well, as long as they still have that commit contingency uh in place, so it's not completely fulfilled. And something that came up yesterday with a client of mine discussing the contingency removals, and this is for sellers. A lot of agents kind of sell that as being, you know, this is the kryptonite, this is the thing that's gonna really make a difference. Once you get that buyer and you have them remove all of their contingencies, or when the date comes after 17 days or whatever it is, that means that deposit, that earnest money deposit that they put into escrow, it's gonna become property of the seller. Folks, that's that's also open to litigation. Now, in a perfect world, if everything was done correctly, the buyer could still pull back and say, you know what, hey, I'm not giving up my deposit, I'm canceling for this reason. And yes, I understand I remove my contingencies, but there's no way I'm gonna let this 3% of the offering price, a million bucks, 30 grand. I'm not gonna let that go to the seller. I'm gonna fight that. And then, of course, there there's no rule that says the money gets automatically handed over. Understand that it could be open to litigation, and everybody could be telling the buyer, hey, hey, you agreed to this, you removed those contingencies 100%. You decided to cancel knowing that that deposit becomes part of the seller, buyer could say, sure, you go ahead and see what happens if you let that happen. I'm gonna hire an attorney right now, we're gonna stop this whole process, and thereby they would. Then that whole thing would have to play out. So don't take it on the account that you know, just because the contingencies were removed and and everything on paper shows the right, the buyer still has a right to sue, to sue and fight over it, just like I could sue you for child support not even knowing you. I mean, that's just that's just the way the legal system works. So watch out for that. So that's that's the establishment of value, and there's a lot of intricacies to that. The other thing is what you do to prepare your house for sale. A lot of that's gonna depend on competition, as far as if you're gonna really be injecting real money into it, but there's not a lot of cases that I can show you that says if you're gonna put a kitchen in, you're gonna put 15 grand getting your kitchen put into a property in order to sell it, that you're gonna get $15,000 out of it. Probably not gonna happen. Same thing with bathroom remodels or any other changes to the property. Your competition's gonna be important, you're gonna want to see what the competition has. You know, God forbid they all have done everything to the proper, and you sat there for 30 years, never touched a thing. You know, you're gonna want to make it clean, you're gonna want to maybe put some paint, you're gonna want to make it pretty as pretty as possible. But you know, you can shine it all you want. It's it's still gonna show that aged wear and when buyers are out there looking for properties, unless your price point justifies the condition of the property, which is gonna be a very important strategy. If you have competition, if you don't have any competition, nothing to worry about, it's gonna go. And if as long as you have it priced within the comparables, it's gonna go. But if you're competing with three or four other properties in that neighborhood, yeah, there's gonna be some issues. Now, if you have the perfect place property, and I run into this as well, you're gonna have properties that are are kind of like a unicorn property, which have a lot of special attributes, maybe a view, maybe RV parking or a space for RV parking or a boat, maybe you're on a cul-de-sac, maybe you're a single story, right? Each of these five things are really, really valuable for real estate. And it could be that now you have a unicorn property, so you're gonna be able to mandate a higher price than even the other comparables that were sitting in the neighborhood. And it's also gonna depend on the appraiser. If they're gonna be writing an offer on your property that's dependent on a loan, the buyer pays the appraisal from the lending company, the appraiser comes out and it's gonna evaluate the seller's property. And if I'm representing the seller, then that's typically coordinated with me, even though I don't represent the buyer. I'm the one that potentially will meet the appraisal, appraiser, and it depends on strategy. We have to see what company they're coming from because in some cases it's better to not to have the agent there, if at all possible, to actually have them meet with the actual seller. And also depends on the seller. If the seller's like a you know a very intimidating individual, well, that could help actually uh now that I think about it, but it just depends. So it's all very strategic the way it's played out, trying to get the seller the best benefit, of course, while protecting the seller's bottom line and not putting them in any kind of legal jeopardy uh throughout this process. But as far as preparation of the residents, that's kind of my thought on it. As far as trying to get comparables, that's uh again looking at the syndication sites, just be careful. Once you put in your address and and you would tie that with a real person, you're gonna get bombarded by all sorts of people. Just play it safe. You can go to Santa ClaritoOpenhouses.com. You can hit me up there via text, you can ask me questions on that particular platform. But that's kind of how that selling end of it plays out. And then, of course, once the property is prepared for sale, once the professional photography is done, and it's gonna depend on drones, drones, you know, staging, it's gonna depend on competition in those ways. It's a lot of cases that the properties just need to be decluttered, just need to be really clean, just need to have the uh the clutter in the property actually removed. And there's a lot of things that can be done with AI now with photographs. It used to be that was thousands of dollars in two or three weeks on a turnaround. I can take pictures and use nano banana and some of the other systems I built out, the AI systems that are actually going to take take photographs of properties and modify them, not giving them that fash eye appearance or making them bigger or adding windows and that other nonsense, because that's not that's not ethical, nor in some cases legal. But actually removing furniture and not changing anything else, but removing furniture, staging them in the photographs, as long as it's displayed, displayed on the MLS that this particular photograph was modified using artificial intelligence by adding furniture or these sorts of things, it all works out. And buyers then have an extra ability to have those mental curtains laid, and it's going to help them. But I'm not talking about trying to mislead, and there's enough of that crap online. You know, I save that my sellers from that. Anyway, a little bit of an update sub Santa Cruz Openhouses.com. Connor with honor. We will see you in the next one. Thanks for watching. Lots of YouTube videos out there. Let me know if I can help. Be well.