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It can be hard to leave your home, but it’s even harder to invest money
in remodeling a lost cause. Find out when it’s time to move, and when it’s time to stay.
In our most recent Facebook Live interview, we discussed a pretty common question: Should you stay in your home and remodel, or should you move and forget about it? There’s an entire show dedicated to this dilemma on HGTV, and today we’ll be sharing our insights on the topic and answering questions about it. For your convenience, we’ve recorded timestamps for each part of our chat. Feel free to navigate to the section(s) you’re most interested in learning more about.
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Should you stay in your home and remodel or should you move and forget about it?
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0:56 - What questions should you ask yourself to decide? 1:35 - What are your long-term housing goals? 1:58 - Can you find a house in your preferred neighborhood? 2:08 - How much will it cost to make your house what you want? 2:28 - Will your repairs be supported by the neighborhood? 2:45 - How will remodeling disrupt your family’s lives? 3:15 - What is the remodeling process like? 4:52 - What return will I see on upgrades? 5:13 - Do you have the funds to remodel? 5:40 - What should I consider when deciding to move? 6:29 - When is moving an easier solution than remodeling? 6:51 - What if my dream home needs changes? If you’re wanting to buy or sell a home, have any questions, or would like some more information, feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.
For this edition of our bi-weekly Facebook Live discussion on real estate, we’re talking
short-term rental opportunities available to you in the Albuquerque area.
Vacation rentals are typically for periods no longer than six months or a year, and people are often curious about whether or not they’re worth it. Today we’ll be answering a few key questions about them so you can make an informed decision about making such an investment. 1. Who are the ideal investors? The ideal short-term rental investor can be just about anybody. Although the property may be vacant 50% of the time, your return is going to be much higher and could generate nearly double the income. Of course, there will be a lot more maintenance that comes with keeping your rental in good condition. 2. Does the part of town matter? In the Albuquerque area, many of these rental properties are located all over, like a cabin in the East Mountains, a room in a house downtown, a suburban spot in the Northeast Heights, or perhaps in the more popular vacation spots around Albuquerque Old Town. If you look online, you’ll see a huge variety of locations, prices, and types of properties. I once saw 1,900 such properties available in our market. One was for a house for $1,000 per night with room for 16 people. It was mostly used for corporate retreats, family getaways, weddings, and so on. Five hotel rooms might run for about the same price or more, depending. 3. Is there a true market for short-term rentals in the area? If you’re a person who owns a property to be rented or you’re thinking of buying a rental property, the income could be double the usual amount. You average 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in Northeast Heights would be around $1,200 to $1,300 a month for a standard one-year lease. On that same house, you might get $150 a night, though you have to take vacancies into account, along with the costs of cleaning it and listing it on sites like VRBO and Airbnb. In general, people tend to do pretty well with them, especially if they don’t mind doing the maintenance and cleaning themselves; if you’re paying a management company to do it for you, it could cost around $1,000 a month.
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Although the property may be vacant 50% of the time, your return is going to be much higher and could generate nearly double the income.
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4. Are there opportunities for executive rentals? An executive rental is a property that someone might stay in for around a month that has all the comforts of staying in a home as opposed to a hotel. They are indeed in high demand. Right now, we have a shortage of executive rental properties, but with many of the properties listed on VRBO and Airbnb, people can rent by the month. Depending on the time, there may be people who have rented a property for a few days at a time, so finding a month-long window could be challenging. We’ve looked at some of the properties that have sold in the last year as well as what’s on our MLS for sale right now, and there are many opportunities in the area. We’ve seen a cute little house in the downtown area close to the zoo for $139,900 that has been completely remodeled. There are about 70 listings just in the MLS that would be great Airbnb or vacation rentals, or they already have established clientele as a rental property. If you’re interested in purchasing a short-term or vacation rental property, please reach out to us. Additionally, if you're interested investing in long-term rentals, you can start your search on Mashvisor. We’d be happy to help you analyze what’s out there and what would be a good fit for you.
We recently participated in an interview where we talked about how the real estate market is doing around this time of the year. From what we see, the market is still very healthy. In August, our total number of sales was up from the previous year. Although there are some news reports out there saying things have slowed down, it doesn’t mean we aren’t still an active market. We’ve just slowed down from the frenetic pace we saw this spring and summer. If you look at the charts for closed sales and homes for sale, which show a 10-year trend of closed sales and a 10-year trend of homes for sale, we see that the market consistently peaks during the summer months. For example, in May and June of last year, we saw over 1,300 homes sell each month. This year, we peaked out in May with about 1,360 homes. This chart also shows that we see this happen every year, hitting our low months in January and February, then steadily rising through the spring and summer. What we’re seeing year over year is a trend of more homes selling overall since the market bottomed out in 2011. The slowdown we’re seeing is typical of this time of year.
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Sales are still up 7% from last year and show no signs of slowing down.
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For homeowners who are in the market to sell, it’s important to know that homes are still selling and buyers still need to buy homes. If you need to sell as we head into the fall season, we can help get your home staged, marketed, and presented in its best light to the buyer pool that’s out there. People will still continue to buy all through the winter months as well. As far as homebuyers are concerned, it’s important that you know what’s important to you, what your needs are, and what your financial picture looks like. Then we can discuss your options before we start looking at houses. It’s important to have that conversation so you can best meet your goals. Finally, we just wanted to make sure we mentioned that although you might be hearing that the market is slowing down, if you look at the data you can see that it’s not. Sales are still up 7% from last year and things don’t seem to be slowing down at all. If you have any questions in the meantime about the market or about anything else related to real estate, don’t hesitate to give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
