We Buy Houses!

You’ve heard this before from us, but it’s worth repeating: recession or not, this is an INCREDIBLE time to buy a home.  Properties in Northern Virginia are listing (and selling) for 1/3 of the price they would have been going for 3 years ago. As recently as a few months ago, we were buying homes at 40% of their replacement value. Does any of this sound like the market bottoming out?  Sure does to us.

Some more numbers, and a bold claim

On the sales side of our operation, we continue to unload homes 3 times faster than the market average. Want some real numbers?  The last 3 homes we sold lasted 27, 7 and 0 days on the market, respectively (that “0” is not a typo; we actually sold the home before it even made it to listing). As the country’s largest home buying firm and the 8th best selling team in the Keller Williams organization nationwide, we are your go-to source for the best real estate deals in the DC Metro area, a region that includes Maryland and Northern Virginia. Because we work closely with the FDIC, Fannie Mae, Countrywide, Wells Fargo, Indy Mac and many others, we ensure that our level of access to foreclosed homes and REO’s is second to none. You can view our up-to-date inventory at www.ExpressHomebuyers.com/email and www.ExpressRs.com. We’ve said it before in this blog, but here it is again: now is the best time to buy a home in the next 30 years.  If you’d like to hear more about why we this, or if you’re interested in either seeing the homes we have available or selling one of your own, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Navigating the real estate market can be a demoralizing process.  Quality homes are few and far between, and quality homes in attractive locations that are priced within your budget are rarer still.  There are few experiences more frustrating than finding a good listing only to call in and learn that it’s been snapped up, or realizing that a bidding war has driven an affordable property out of your range.

The best advice we can give you here is to get in early, and put an offer down before the house you’re eying disappears or sits long enough to swell in price.  Here’s what we mean:

If you’ve done some research on our company, you may know that we tend to sell houses pretty quickly: this is due to our commitment to pricing houses reasonably, and the quality of the renovations we perform.  Below is the graphic we included in the recent post explaining homebuyer survey results:

As you can see, our houses sit on the market for considerably less time than the regional average.  What this chart does not show you, however, is that over 50% of the homes we move are actually sold before they’re ever listed.  How is this possible?  Easy; because we are first and foremost a homebuying operation, we’ve already bought the houses in question.

Although we hesitate to list the house before the renovation process has been completed, as the homeowner we have the luxury of arranging a showing anytime you want; in fact, people familiar with the quality of our work have even bought houses from us BEFORE the renovation process was complete, knowing the finished product would be of the same high caliber as every other home we move.  The buyers who walk away with our houses before they hit the market are those who get in touch as soon as they hear of our latest purchase; they’re the ones who keep in touch by phone, keep tabs on our website, and monitor the houses we’re working on at:

www.expresshomebuyers.com/email/greensheet.xls.