Ways to Maximize Your Home’s Marketability

It’s time to sell your home because you are ready to move on, move up, or move out of state and relocate.  Since real estate has been on the steady track to recovery, chances are good that your home will sell relatively fast in this emerging market.  However, there are ways to maximize your home’s marketability to be able to compete against all of the other home owners who are having the exact same hopeful thoughts as  yourself.  Take note of the concepts below when you are preparing your home for sale.

Keep it Simple:
The way to sell a home successfully to a potential home buyer is to help them imagine their furniture, children, pets, friends, and life in your currently occupied space.  You may want to consider going ahead and packing away the items in your home that make you “uniquely you,” which could include African animal heads on the wall, an extensive doll or teddy bear collection, or a series of books from a particular author alphabetized on your bookshelves.  You never know what people may find strange or offensive, so you want to minimize their exposure to these types of personal belongings.  In the kitchen, living room, and even your master bedroom, get rid of the clutter and clean up the surfaces to allow buyers to “fill up” the spaces with their imaginary lives.
 
Keep it Clean:
This may be a common sense concept for many home sellers, but your definition of clean and a potential home buyer’s concept of clean may be totally different.  Don’t take any chances: go from the outside in and the floor up.  You don’t necessarily have to hire someone to pressure wash the exterior of your home to clean it up, although, here in Louisiana, homes can accumulate mildew in

less than 2 year’s time, so it might be time for a thorough cleaning.  If you want to put some elbow grease into it, you can actually just mix up buckets of lightly bleached water and using a long-handled scrubbing tool for those stubbornly stuck-on spots, you can “wash” the exterior of your home to make the paint look fresh and almost new.  More work can be done by washing your windows both on the outside and the inside, making your floorplan more light and airy while also making the glass sparkle.  Vacuum and MOP your floors on the inside of the home – this will make your home smell fresh as well.  You can either rent a steam cleaner with a scented deodorizer in it or use a powder deodorizer in your vacuum cleaner for your carpets.  Once you have scrubbed every inch of every surface in your home, cover up any remaining odors and put your best foot forward by buying plug-in’s for each room.  They are very powerful and will probably last for the hopefully 30 – 45 days it will take to sell your home.  You never get a second chance to make an excellent first impression.

Keep it Maintenanced
There is a good chance that it will rain in Louisiana while you are trying to sell your home – a chance that it may even rain very hard.  You will want to make sure that your home is kept in good repair throughout the entire selling process.  Before you even start the cleaning process, make sure you REPLACE damaged parts of your home – this includes dents in the walls, water leaks, cracked door or window frames, broken windows, and chipped formica or granite.  If you are not selling your home as a KNOWN, as-is renovation project, you don’t want a buyer to bypass purchasing your home because they see that work will have to be done as soon as they move in.  When selling a previously-owned home, there may be an understanding that it has already been lived in by other people, but you want to give them the illusion that they are buying a home that is in superior condition and will need little to no work at all.

Keep it Exposed
If you use the Internet for professional or personal use, you know that there are websites out there which maximize your home’s marketability through the use of social media.  You can be your own online agent for your home by taking excellent pictures (or having your really talented photographer friend take pictures) of your home and then posting to your personal social media pages.  If you do not yet have an online presence, ask one of your tech-savvy friends to help you by posting the listing for your.  In addition to social media, you can also sign up for real estate websites for free such as trulia.com, zillow.com, activerain.com, and redfin.com to post just your house for sale on the Internet.  Remember, the more pictures and descriptive information that you add, the more your listing will show up in the search results.
After all of your hard work, and your new home sells; you may be interested in building a new custom home on a lot in one of the excellent subdivisions in St. Tammany Parish.  You can Contact Ron Lee Homes at 985-626-7619 or E-mail Info@RonLeeHomes.com to get started on building your new home.

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7-Part Series of Education Workshops for Local St. Tammany Parish Businesses

As an increase to 2014’s workforce development series, the St. Tammany Economic Development Foundation will be sponsoring a 7-part series of education workshops for local St. Tammany Parish businesses, a year-over-year increase from the successful 5-part series which was hosted in 2014.  Founded in 1981, the St. Tammany Parish Economic Development Foundation (STEDF) has been

highly integral in the attraction and retention of new business to the parish.  Even before Hurricane Katrina, this foundation had been gradually increasing business opportunities to the Northshore.  After Hurricane Katrina, the construction growth and economic development of the region has lead to national recognition of the I-12 corridor being one of the fastest growing regional areas in the United States for new business opporunities.


In 2014, the St. Tammany Economic Development Foundation was responsible for the creation of 315 new jobs and the retention of 276 jobs with the completion of 13 projects which saw $54.3 million in investments.  The foundation is diligent in businss retention in St. Tammany Parish by utilizing “retention visits” to existing businesses to gauge their satisfaction and confidence in the local economy.  According to their annual report, the STEDF visited 112 different times to businesses which, all told, provided 7,891 jobs for residents of St. Tammany Parish.

This forward-thinking, proactive, and “preventative” approach to retaining business on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain has been the mission of the STEDF.  They are continuing that mindeset by offering the seminars and classes below:

April 28: Healthcare and Biosciences
May 19: Manufacturing
June 23: Digital Media
July 14: Construction and Coastal Restoration
Sept. 22: Energy, Oil and Gas
Oct. 13: Education and Training – Jump Start, Two-Year- and Four-Year-Colleges
Nov. 10: To be determined

“We hope this series will increase your knowledge of workforce opportunities, connect you to resources for workforce enhancement and training and provide insight about the future needs and trends of the workforce in our region,” Ashley Cangelosi Llewellyn, programs manager for the foundation, said in a news release.

To attend any of these workshops about workforce development opportunities, attendees must register in advance during the enrollment period for each program.  The classes themselves will be held in the STEDF conference room on Koop Drive in Mandeville from 9am – 10am with doors opening at 8:30am.  To register for the April event, email stedfinfo@stedf.org.

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Act of Sale for the Nearly 300 Acres of Land in St. Tammany Parish

The act of sale for the nearly 300 acres of land that currently encompasses the former Southeast Louisiana Psychiatric Hospital – now known as Northlake Behavioral Health – will be held, Thursday, March 26, 2015, at 2pm.  The sale is between the state of Louisiana and St. Tammany Parish.  The parish negotiated a sales price of $15.4 million to buy the property, and the parish

plans on utilizing the land for a few different purposes: possible expansion for Pelican Park, a new roadway from Hwy. 190 (Florida St.) to 1088 reducing congestion for both Hwy. 190 and Hwy. 59, and to bolster the government’s wetland mitigation bank.

St. Tammany Parish’s wetland mitigation bank is served by Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank which also serves the wetland preservation needs of Washington and Tangipahoa Parishes.  It will also review requests for credit from areas outside of these areas on a case-by-case basis.  The idea is that builders and developers may purchase a one-time credit from the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank to offset the impacts that their construction will have on the wetlands involved with the project.  They must offer another portion of the project that is close to or adjacent to the job that they own in exchange for this credit so that the wetlands in other areas are preserved.

“When impacts to jurisdictional wetlands are unavoidable, a one-time credit purchase from the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank prevents mitigation cost overruns and irrevocably transfers your perpetual mitigation liability to Ecosystem Investment Partners (EIP), one of the nation’s leading providers of environmental credits,” according to the website for the Mossy Hill Mitigation Bank.
St. Tammany Parish’s Pelican Park may purchase as much as 100 acres of the land involved in Thursday’s act of sale to expand upon its already 321-acre park. In conjunction with the expansion is the hope that St. Tammany Parish will go ahead with the road building / expansion project between 190 and 1088 in order to construct a second entrance to Pelican Park on this cut-through road.

The “fate” of Northlake Behavioral Health is secured through this act of sale because one of the conditions of the purchase was that St. Tammany Parish leave the buildings and land belonging to the psychiatric hospital campus intact and operating as a behavioral health hospital.  Meridian Behavioral Healthcare, the current company that mangages operations at the hospital through a privatization program has expressed interested in purchasing the entire campus and land from St. Tammany Parish.

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