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Selling your Home on the MLS Series, Part 1

How do you sell your home on the MLS? The first step is to contact a licensed Real Estate Agent (Realtor) to represent you and list your house for sale. Only licensed Agents can list properties for sale on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). Once you’ve contacted an Agent and signed a listing agreement with them, they will publish the sale listing for your house, and begin the process of staging and scheduling showings.

Staging involves cleaning your home and making it “showing ready,” for your potential buyers. You might use the furnishings and decor you already have to achieve this, or if you’ve already started packing and moving for your new home, you may need to rent furnishings and decor to make it appear inviting (and to make it easier for people to imagine themselves living there after they’ve purchased it). It is often better to attempt to modernize the aesthetics of your home as much as possible, to appear current and updated. You want to appeal to as many people as possible, to encourage multiple offers, and to ultimately receive the best price for the sale of your house. Some Agents might go the extra mile for your showings and include small personal touches or treats and refreshments.

It is also important to consider the first impression of your home beyond just the sense of sight – smell is also a huge factor, so be sure to leave air fresheners of some kind, and to keep them refilled throughout the sale process!

Showings

Once the staging and cleaning has been completed, it is time for potential buyers to start touring your home. Generally these will be scheduled as individual showings through their own Agent (Buyer’s Agent), and diligent Agents will send feedback to your Agent (Seller’s Agent) after the showing has wrapped up. This can include good AND bad feedback, so be prepared to hear some criticism about your home during the showing and offer process. It can be something small and subjective, such as personal styling choices, or it can be something that will actually need to be addressed, like a failing HVAC system or ailing roof.

Showings can also be done via an open house, which is usually done on the weekend as a window of several hours. Your Agent will be at the home to greet and welcome people interested in seeing your home, and to answer any questions they might have about purchasing it. There are pros and cons to an open house, so not every Agent will host one. You’ll need to speak to your Agent to see whether or not they advise putting on an open house for your home.

While all of the showings are going on, if you’re not still living in the home, you’ll want to stop by every few days to make sure the home is still clean, and to replace any air fresheners as needed. If the weather hasn’t been great, there might be dirt or mud tracked into the house. If it’s winter, there could also be slush or salt, which could damage some types of flooring over time. Most of the time, you won’t need to do more than vacuum or mop to make things shine again for your next set of showings. Again, speak to your Agent about this, as they will often do all of this for you.

Receiving Offers

When your Agent receives an offer to purchase your home, they will notify you about the offer and explain its terms to you. It’s common for offers to include requests for various concessions, and you may need to negotiate through your Agent to reach an agreement with your buyer. Read our article about Negotiations, Concessions, and Fees to learn more about what those are, and how much they may cost you.

It might take weeks, or even months, to find a buyer through the MLS for your home, and weeks and months longer to actually close on the sale. The time investment can be a source of frustration and stress. There are also the holding costs to keep in mind – you’ll need to maintain insurance on your home throughout the entire process, continue to pay property taxes for it, and pay for its general upkeep (lawncare, landscaping) AND pay for all utilities. This is less burdensome if you are still living in the home, but it can put a significant weight onto your shoulders in terms of lining up your next home, and knowing WHEN to start looking for it, or even when you might be able to close on it.

Or …Get a Fair Cash Offer Now!

Rather than putting yourself through all of the unnecessary hassles and uncertainties of an MLS sale, you can contact a local real estate investor to purchase your home instead. Local homebuyers will give you a cash offer for your home, and do their best to make the process as smooth and simple for you as possible. No need to bother with cleaning, repairs, showings, appraisals, lenders, and the constant storm cloud over your head of “will we actually close or will the sale fall through?”

Ohio Cash Buyers is a local homebuyer and investment company that is family-owned and operated. We’re local to the greater Cincinnati and Dayton metropolitan areas, with our home office located in Middletown/Franklin. Our team lives across the region, and we’re very familiar with it, as we’ve been renovating homes as licensed General Contractors for nearly two decades here. Give us a call or fill out one of our forms to see what kind of cash offer we can provide to you!

An estate is all that’s left behind when someone passes away. This includes all material possessions, such as real estate, vehicles, furniture, and physical belongings, as well as the immaterial – financial positives and debts alike. If the deceased had prepared a will to be executed upon their death, then everything is fairly straight-forward in regards to who is in charge of settling the estate and making all of the decisions regarding it. It can be more complicated, and a much longer process, if they left no will behind. In this article, we’ll be discussing the role of the Executor (or Executrix).

Within the will, an Executor, or personal representative, will be named. Their purpose is to carry out the wishes of the deceased, and to properly manage and protect their estate’s financial assets. This generally means that the Executor will be a close family member or friend. Occasionally, it may be an attorney or accountant, if the person did not have anyone else that they thought would be more fit for the role within their immediate social circle. In cases where real estate (a house) is involved, it is up to the Executor to decide what to do with that real estate.

The first step you’ll be responsible for handling as the Executor is to collect official copies of the death certificate (see this link to the Ohio Department of Health to see how to obtain copies). You’ll want to get a dozen or so copies, because you’ll need one copy each to provide to each bank, lender, insurance provider, etc. Then, you’ll need to file a copy of the will with the county Probate Court. When an Executor is specified in the will, the Probate Court will officially appoint you as such, and you’ll be clear to go through with settling the Estate from there.

A lot of various tasks come with being appointed the Executor. You’ll have to notify debtors, beneficiaries, the federal government, the BMV, and anyone and everyone the deceased held subscriptions and accounts with – it’s also a good idea to notify the three major credit bureaus to add a death notice to the deceased’s credit report. Another great idea is to establish a bank account for the Estate very early on. You’ll be able to keep everything clean and separated this way, and pay any bills due from this bank account without any confusion.

It’s not uncommon for heirs of estates to live in another state, making it more difficult to know what to do with an inherited home in Cincinnati or Dayton, Ohio. While some families may elect to keep the home and pass it along to someone else in the family to move into, others have no need for another house, and decide that they’d like to liquidate it instead. This is especially true in cases where the estate also has sizeable debts to settle, whether they be medical bills, funeral expenses, credit card debts, or outstanding loans. Selling an inherited house can give the family immediate cash to pay down these expenses, and possibly pocket some cash that’s leftover at the same time.

Selling an inherited home through the MLS with a Realtor is often a troublesome process that just exacerbates the stress of the entire Estate settlement. You’ll have to deal with arranging some kind of cleaning and staging for showings, and if the home is full of various belongings, that will be a costly and time-consuming event to manage. After that, you have to be prepared to negotiate with potential buyers that ask for all kinds of repairs and financial concessions. If you manage to make it through to a contract, you still have the possibility of the sale falling through due to a low appraisal value or the lender backing out entirely. THEN you still have to calculate the commissions due to the Realtors involved in the deal, which typically will run you between 4% and 6% of your total sale price, eating a solid chunk out of the funds you’ll receive at closing.

A much simpler, and much faster alternative to this method of selling an inherited house, is to find a reputable and established investor that operates in the area the house is situated in, and get a cash offer from them directly. Real estate investment provides a host of benefits to both the local community and to the folks who need to sell their homes in the first place. Credible investors know how to provide an easy and streamlined purchase without the need for Realtors and their commissions, appraisers, showings, and lenders; they also won’t ask you for repairs or extra concessions.

Ohio Cash Buyers is an established local real estate investment company that is family-owned and operated, and we’ve been buying homes from folks just like you for nearly two decades now. We’re licensed General Contractors, and we have hundreds of renovations and thousands of property purchases and sales under our belts. We provide MORE than just a free, fair cash offer for homes. We also provide connections to valuable resources and knowledge, and do all that we can to help homeowners out of all kinds of situations. Check out some of our Case Studies to read about some of these situations!

Give us a call anytime to chat with us and receive your FREE cash offer on your inherited home in Ohio (no matter where you live). It takes about 15 minutes to give us the details and information we need to provide you with our cash offer, and there’s no obligation on your part beyond that. We buy homes in as-is condition, for cash, and we can close quickly and easily. Closing is scheduled at your convenience, and can be done remotely with a Notary that can meet you anywhere. You can also just fill out the form below to get started!

How to Pay Property Taxes in Southwestern Ohio

As a homeowner in Southwestern Ohio, you have the option to pay your property taxes in a few different ways. What is probably the most convenient way to pay property taxes, however, is by using your County’s online payment feature. Depending on your County’s individual settings, there may be a small convenience fee attached to your payment (usually this is the case for credit card payments). Even so, the convenience or paying via their website might be worth the extra dollars to avoid going a paper check route in the mail, or dropping it off physically at the local government building downtown.

If you’ve already read our other recent articles regarding property taxes (you can check out the basics on Property Taxes here, and the nuts and bolts of Special Assessments here), then you already have an understanding of what Property Taxes are, what they pay for, and why they exist in general. At this point, the next most important thing to know is HOW to pay them. As we mentioned previously in the other article, if you have an active mortgage on your home, it’s possible that you are paying funds into an escrow account with your lender, which they then use to pay your Property Taxes on your behalf each year (this is reflected on your mortgage statements and balances). If that is the case, it might be easiest to simply continue to pay your taxes in this manner, rather than potentially confusing yourself, or risking overpaying your Property Taxes.

In the event that you do not have an active mortgage with tax escrow built-in, or if you just prefer to make the Property Tax payments directly yourself, check out the list below, and click on the corresponding link to navigate to your County’s tax payment website. If you’ve been considering selling your home and you’re not sure where to start, or perhaps you’ve been speaking to a Realtor about listing your home – or maybe you’ve even tried listing your house and you didn’t get the response you’d hoped for – give us a call! We’re more than happy to discuss your home and your options with you, and provide you with a free, fair, all CASH offer within 24 hours. There’s no obligation to speak with us, and if you don’t like our offer, we completely understand, and we’ll still be here if you ever change your mind.

Give us a call anytime! 513-815-5000

Being a homeowner comes with a host of social responsibilities, both to your immediate neighborhood, and to your overall surrounding community and town at-large. You likely already know about Property Taxes and why they exist (read up on that here if you haven’t seen our article about it yet), but those aren’t the only expense associated with owning a home in any particular area. Occasionally, your local government may need to perform construction or maintenance upon local infrastructure beyond the norm. When this happens, there may not be enough funding in the general budget to pay for these special projects.

Special assessments are a one-time surtax that is assigned to properties that reside only within the area that the special project is taking place – in other words, if there is an initiative to replace the streetlights along one of the streets near your house, you will receive a letter in the mail informing you about a special assessment that is being done to pay for the improvement of your neighborhood’s publicly-provided lighting. The letter will tell you when this decision was made, what it will be paying for, and how long the project and special assessment will run. Smaller projects will usually only apply to one calendar year, while larger, more complicated projects may run for several years in a row.

If you find yourself and your home subject to a special assessment, you should definitely read the letter that you receive in the mail, to see how much you’ll be responsible for paying, and if you have the option to pay it in one lump sum, or in installments. If you misplace the letter, you should be able to find detailed information on your City or County’s websites as well. Sometimes, when you elect to pay in annual installments on top of your normal Property Tax bill, an administrative fee is applied as well (usually 3-5%), so keep that in mind when making your decision on how you want to pay your portion of the special assessment.

Here’s an example of a special assessment that happened within the last decade – if you lived in and owned a home in Dayton sometime between 2014 and 2020, you may be familiar with this one:

The City of Dayton determined in 2014 that they needed to do significant work to improve their street lighting system to ensure public safety for all residents. This was a large undertaking as it wasn’t just a few streets or blocks of lights that were being replaced, but a huge swath of the entire City as a whole. To fund this project, anyone who owned property within the selected area (you can see the entire map on the City of Dayton’s website here) was charged with paying a portion, based on whether they fell into “District A” or “District B.” The assessment ran for six years, from 2014 through 2020.

“District A” was the central business district, and the special assessment surtax rate levied on those properties was at a rate of 0.0348% of each property’s assessed value. “District B” was outside of District A, and covered the residential neighborhoods, at a rate of 0.049% of the property’s assessed value. If you owned a home within District B with a Montgomery County assessed value of $125,000, your responsibility towards the streetlight project would have been $61.25 annually, for a grand total of $367.50 due.

Most special assessment tax projects won’t break the bank for you, and you may not even really notice them if you’re not paying close attention. If you don’t pay your portion in advance, it just gets tacked onto your normal Property Tax bills, so it’s easy to miss.

When selling your home, if there is an active special assessment surtax on your property (and you didn’t pay it in full, in advance), that will be subtracted from your proceeds at closing. The special assessment was placed during your ownership of the home, so you are ultimately responsible for the full bill – but even then, as shown in the example above, it’s usually a small expense that barely impacts your bottom line. In fact, some smaller projects may cost homeowners less than $25 each to fund, while everyone gets to enjoy the benefits of whatever work gets completed with that revenue (sewers are included in the special assessment category, by the way, and I think we can ALL agree that no one wants those to fail, EVER).

If you’ve been considering selling your home, but you’re worried about the condition it’s in, or you’re behind on your Property Taxes, or you’re being foreclosed on and you don’t know where to turn, then give us a call and see what we can offer you. We buy houses in all conditions, all circumstances, and we pay cash for them. Fill out the form below to contact us and see what we can do! There’s no obligation on your part, and it’s completely free.