Shrubs and Strategy
Spring is the time of the year in our area when the tourists are coming down for Easter weekend. Many of them are from up north where they’ve spent weeks of bleakly cold and nasty weather, and the warm weather starts a month later there than it does in the south.

If you’re trying to sell your home in Myrtle Beach, this is the prime time of year to get prepared. You’ve invested in updated appliances, cleared out personal articles, and painted and wallpapered the inside until it’s squeaky clean and smells as good as a new car. What else can you do?

Don’t Under-estimate first appearances
Whether it’s in the photos you display for the MLS listing, the slideshow your realtor has on the website, or the first thing a potential buyer sees when they pull into the driveway, put some time and money into landscaping.

According to Southern Living Magazine, a 1999 survey conducted by Gallop Polls showed that good landscaping could add 7 to 15% to the market value of a home for sale. Smart Money Magazine advised investing 5% of the home’s value in landscaping to reap a 150% percent return. If those numbers sound impressive, then read on.

Never have I seen what a difference a professional landscaping company can make until recently when the condominium complex I live in changed the HOA Board and went from having several full time amateur groundspeople to hiring a company to take over our landscaping. Our complex had grown shabby and mis-matched with attempts to make flower gardens, chopping down shrubs and just plain messing up the looks of the place.

Within a month of having a professional company take over, the look of the complex has become uniform. Plants are being placed correctly for the conditions, flowers are blooming at the entrance, trees and shrubs have been trimmed and shaped, and some of the holes created by removing perfectly good holly bushes and shrubs are being filled in for a look that is already making a difference in our overall appearance and sales potential.

Unless you’ve had professional training in lawn and plant care, or have the proverbial green thumb, you should hire a landscaping company to clean up your home’s appearance. Don’t go to Lowes and buy the little white bric-a-brac and some cheap flowers and turn your yard into Granny’s pet project. Especially when it comes to real estate in Myrtle Beach or other resort areas, a buyer is expecting a certain look, and if your home isn’t reflecting that look, they will look past it for the one that does.

Do have lots of colorful flowers and a green, green lawn.
But let a professional choose for you and do the all important edging and matching of colors that will add so much more than those tiny purple flowers under your yellow shutters and next to the pink hydrangias that make the neighbors wince from across the road.

Paint the porch, bring on the potted plants, and make a big ceremony out of the coming summer, but do it with a professional eye and make your house the one that gets noticed in photos and from drive-bys. Keep the walkways and other exterior elements to a single theme and watch the details.

Your potential buyers are watching too.

For more tips on selling Myrtle Beach real estate, or to get new Myrtle Beach MLS Listings in your email, visit our website at http://www.myrtlebeachcondos.net
If you’re interested in 1031 Exchange information, contact us!
Also see our Beach Life Blog.

Questions?
With no end in sight to the problems with the sub-prime mortgages, real estate owners are facing foreclosure and the damage that it does to their credit. As a last resort, sometimes a homeowner can negotiate with their bank or mortgage company to do a “Short Sale”. This is when in lieu of complete foreclosure, your lender will let you try and sell the home for less than what you owe. They may or may not excuse the balance left after the sale.

This kind of sale can benefit both the buyer, the bank, and the seller. Though their credit is probably already damaged, late payments are not as crippling as a foreclosure, charge-off, or bankruptcy on a credit rating. If, and only if, the lender will agree not to report this as adverse to the credit bureau, it can be a great option to direct foreclosure proceedings.

The bank is neither obligated to agree to the short sale, nor to help your credit rating, so try all other options before you set out to short sale your home. A rate freeze might be preferable, and could allow you to keep your home until prices rise again or a buyer offers you enough to clear your obligation.

If the foreclosures are prolific in your neighborhood and the homes around you are losing equity quickly, the bank could be more agreeable to the short sale and your request to help save your credit. When this is the case, it’s imperative that you move quickly, as every passing day affects the price you can ask, and the deficiency balance that will be left.

Tax Changes in 2008
One good thing this year, the IRS has changed the rules and will not treat any forgiven part of the mortgage as income. The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act is part of the government’s effort to help the beleagured homeowners.

Contact us to learn about buying homes in short sale, foreclosures in Myrtle Beach, or condos and homes in Myrtle Beach. We also service Pawleys Island, Little River, and Conway real estate.

Grande Dunes Marriott

Burroughs and Chapin Co. Inc is a name that anyone who has spent much time in Myrtle Beach is very familiar with. They own most of Myrtle Beach, I think it would be safe to say. They owned the Pavilion, and the strip of near beachfront land it was on. They developed and own Broadway at the Beach, Grande Dunes, Coastal Grand Mall, Nascar Speedpark, Myrtle Waves, and numerous hotels, golf courses, and other huge projects.

I think they probably owned most of the land that other things are on at one time. They control our politics and most of what goes on with Myrtle Beach as a city. They are probably the single largest owner of Myrtle Beach real estate that exists.

According to an long article in the Sun News, they are now going to expland their interests outside of Myrtle Beach and more into North Carolina, and even Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia. Is this the Southeast’s next version of a corporate Donald Trump?

B & C is also one of the county’s biggest source of jobs and employment, in the past providing 1400 full time jobs and 1000 seasonal ones when the Pavilion was viable. Certainly the closing of the Pavilion will change the demographics of our summer workforce. Not sure if this will have much of an impact on the economy here or not. Most of those employees I think were teenagers, and many were imported from Russia and other far-away and sometimes exotic countries.

With our new resort status revolving so much around the high-priced Myrtle Beach condos and golf course villas, these kids would have probably been hard-pressed to find decent housing, so it might be a good thing to reduce their numbers. What most of the vacation rental companies and resorts are doing now seems to be shipping in maid support from places like Jamaica, and piling them into the old leftover beach houses, 10 to 20 deep, and then shipping them home when the season is over. Like the Hispanic populations who make up most of the restaurant staff and landscaping jobs now, it’s cheaper and easier to give them the jobs for the season than to constantly be dealing with teenagers and spoiled young local people, I would imagine.

Burroughs and Chapin go on to say that they are often approached by interested parties to sell some of the giant amusement places and shopping complexes, and do not rule out selling anything for the right price. A new CEO, Jim Rosenburg, took over in August, and is the leader in the idea of transitioning over into other areas.

“We’re willing to play a different role outside of Myrtle Beach,” Rosenberg says. “We’re prepared to bring in whatever expertise somebody needs for a joint venture. We’re finding that there’s families out there that own large tracts of land that don’t know what to do with it, and they are starting to hear about us. They know we’re a family-owned company and are coming to us knowing we’re harmless.”

I don’t know personally how “harmless” they are or aren’t, but it should be interesting to see the company grow and expand in the future, and to see how that affects the massive developments they’ve contributed to the economy, as well as homes and condos in MYrtle Beach, SC.