The Stepping Stone Group Real Estate Video Blog with Betsy Voegtlin: 2015

Happy Holidays, Fairfax!

There are many great Fairfax area homes for sale! Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, Click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call me at 703-798-9882 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions

On behalf of my team, we want to extend our seasonal greeting to everyone in Fairfax. Happy Holidays and have a Happy New Year! We hope you are surrounded by a lot of laughter, joy, friends, family, and love. We wish you the best this holiday season!

We’re excited for the new year. We have some great things in store for our clients in 2016. In the meantime, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for your trust, business, and support in 2015. We’re so grateful for our clients, friends, and family over the years. You mean so much to us.

If you have any questions, as always, please reach out to us via phone or email! Happy holidays.

What Simple, Inexpensive Updates Can You Make on Your Home?

If you are looking to sell your home, your goal is to get the most money possible in the shortest amount of time. One of the best ways to add value and appeal to your home is through home staging. Home staging is the art of selling a home faster by making a home more appealing to the right buyer. You have a lot of options for how you want to go about it. You could hire a professional staging company, which could be substantially costly. However, most of the time, a few simple fixes is all it takes to transform a living room.

Today we are going to go through some of our most favorite, inexpensive home staging tips for you. We hope these will help you save both time and money when it comes time to sell your home.

A fresh coat of paint is always a good idea. Neutral, warm colors work best for highlighting the natural light in your home. This will make it easier to brighten the room with some colorful accessories and pull everything together.

A common design problem facing many homeowners is that they have no real entry way, as their front door opens up to the living room. To fix this, you can add a table, some lighting, and a rug to "fake a foyer" and make it feel like the living room and entryway are two different spaces.

A patterned rug, some pillows, or bright curtains add a ton of texture and an eclectic layer to the space, which is essential to a well-designed room.

In some cases, a "make-under" is just what you need. In the case of most fireplaces, taking some accessories and clutter away enhances the look and feel of the room greatly.

You could spend well over a few thousand dollars with a staging company, or you could do these fixes yourself for around $500. That's a small investment considering the value that you add to your home by adding those pieces.

If you have any questions for us about staging your home or anything else real estate related, give us a call or send over a quick email. We are always here to help, and would love to hear from you!

How We Helped Will Smolinsky Buy and Sell a Home

"I have used Betsy three times now, my wife and I have used her twice together, and I bought a condo right before the recession. Betsy is great, she does a good job of educating you on the process, what she thinks your home is worth. She was really helpful, especially for a first time home-buyer. The first condo I bought with her, my loan fell through on the day of closing, so there was a really nervous three hours or so, and she was a comforting voice of reason steering me in the right direction for sure. She did a great job of staging both the condo and house my wife bought together, and she told us what we needed to do to make everything look good. She does a good job from the time that you contact her about being interested in buying, to keeping you on the front of what is going on. She checks in regularly to keep you from worrying. It shows she is just as concerned about getting you into a home as you are. She does that really well."

How We Helped Scott Streicher Buy and Sell a Home

How We Helped Scott Streicher Buy and Sell a Home:

"I've bought and sold four or five houses with Betsy. The last two sold in less than a day. One of them sold in around four hours. I've had great results with Betsy. I absolutely adore her. She is very personable, very good at follow up and she made life so easy for us. When we put our home up for sale, she took care of everything from A-Z. She took care of scheduling all of the inspections. She's very good at all of the follow up, and kept us on track. It makes life a lot easier when you're buying and selling a home."

How We Helped Don Clarke Buy and Sell a Home

How We Helped Don Clarke Buy and Sell a Home:

"I got a wonderful house, which is a direct result of all the hard work she put in. We found a house we absolutely love. I was not convinced we even needed a house, but my wife insisted on an upgrade, as we're getting ready to have kids. That's when we found Betsy. Let me tell you, she was absolutely wonderful. She was extremely patient, and really helped us buy and sell a house at the same time. We were selling the one we were in as well as buying another. She knew all of the right questions to ask, the right places to look, and was able to narrow it down to what we were looking for while applying our wants to houses in the area. You never felt like a number. She was always in it for the long haul, and that was to make sure we found what we were looking for, so I truly appreciate that from her." Betsy Voegtlin Testimonials

Betsy Voegtlin Reviews: How we helped Robert Franklin buy and sell a home

Betsy is phenomenal. She found us our first house and when we were ready to sell it, she came in and helped us through the sales process. She walked through and realistically told us what needed to be done in regards to replacing things and cleaning up. When we did everything she suggested, she walked through again and gave us a touch up list. We were very aware of what other people were looking at, and what was going to sell the property the quickest. The sales process went relatively quick. Two weeks in we had a buyer on the line.

She was very quick and helpful with the paperwork. She explained everything so that we had an understanding of what we were signing. It's good to have someone dumb it down for you, so its easy to digest. When we accepted the contract, she walked us through all of that.

When the buying agent had some problems, she stepped in to resolve them, so that we could sell our property faster. You have tendency to appreciate the extra work that she does.

- Robert Franklin, Homeowner

How Important Is Staging when Selling?

Selling your home involves a lot of different steps. One of the most critical steps in preparing your home for sale is home staging. Today we are very excited to be joined by one of our favorite home stagers, Victoria, from Voilà Designs by Victoria. She is here to discuss with us why staging is so important when you are trying to sell a home.

When you are selling a home, you have to understand that it is no longer your home. It has to be viewed as a house, a piece of property, a business investment that you want and need to sell. If you want to sell in today’s market, you’ve got to appeal to today’s buyers. This is where the home staging comes in.

Maximizing the space is one of the most critical aspects of staging. You have got to show the rooms to be as large as possible. Staging to sell is different than staging to live, so you’ve got to always have today’s buyers and their perspectives in mind. Maybe your home is a little older, so bringing in some fresh, new touches may help immensely.

When Victoria stages a home, she is looking for something modern, fresh, and clean. It’s really important that all of the elements of the home look as visually compelling and visually appealing as possible. When you have a vacant home, it doesn’t really translate to the buyer and doesn’t show as well with photography either, which is another important part of your home sale.

If you have any questions for Victoria, please get in touch. All of her contact information is on her website, which you can click here to visit. If you have any other questions for us, feel free to give us a call or send us an email. We’ll be here for you, every step of the way!

Betsy Voegtlin Reviews: How we helped Barry Smith buy and sell a home

"I’ve utilized Betsy’s services on two different occasions: the first to purchase a home, and more recently to both sell a home and buy a new home. On both occasions she worked diligently to successfully purchase us a home using her outstanding skills and understanding of the marketplace, and was able to sell our home for the price we were looking for. I’ve never met a more professional, confident individual." - Barry Smith, Homeowner

Betsy Voegtlin Reviews- How we helped Michael Drueen buy and sell a home

"My ex-wife and I purchased and sold a town home and ultimately purchased the house that I’m currently residing in. It’s been five years since we sold the town home, and it’s still listed as the highest selling unit in that particular community. We sold it at the top of the market and got premium dollar for it. That’s largely due to Betsy’s work.

If you want to talk about going above and beyond, we were actually on a boat in the Caribbean when Betsy hunted us down via satellite and contacted the ship’s captain in order to get a message to us that a deal was eminent. We worked out the final details of the deal somewhere in the waters of the Caribbean drinking Piña coladas, while she was clearing all the paperwork up north." Michael Drueen, Homeowner

Why Are We so Excited?

We have some very exciting news to share with you today. My team was recently recognized by the Washingtonian’s “Best of Washington” list under “Top Real Estate Agents”. It is a huge honor for us to be recognized, so we just wanted to take a moment to say THANK YOU on behalf of our entire team for voting for us.

We know this honor stems from our past clients having great experiences and our personal philosophy of not just looking at this business as transactional. We are always here to serve you, answer questions, and provide you with any help you need at all.

If you have a minute, it would be great to hear from you. We are so grateful and honored to be in business with you, and we look forward to continue serving you and keep our reputation of “Best in Washington” going.

If you have any questions for us, just give us a call or send us an email. Until next time!

How Can You Put an Accurate Value on Your Fairfax Home?

Today I'd like to talk about Zillow. It's a great resource to find homes, but not a good resource to use if you're trying to price your home to sell. I recently saw an interview where the CEO of Zillow was speaking, and even he said that Zillow's Zestimate can be off by as much as 8%. In some instances, that number can be off by as much as 25%!

For a home that is worth $200,000, a difference of 8% is a difference of $16,000! That is a significant amount of money. This is why you must take these Zestimates with a grain of salt. Zillow is not a pricing tool, it is an aggregate of homes that are around the neighborhood that have recently sold.

While it's helpful to have that information at your fingertips, it's better to speak with a real estate agent in order to get an accurate value for your home. We can place a very accurate and attractive sale price on your home if you allow us to come out and look at your property.

We would love to help you sell for top dollar by placing an accurate value on your Fairfax home. Please don't hesitate to contact us!

How Can We Serve You In Northern Virginia?

Happy New Year, everyone! We hope your 2015 has gotten off to a great start and you and your family are doing well. I wanted to share with you today our goals for this next year. At The Stepping Stone Real Estate Group, we hope to help 60 families achieve their dream of homeownership in 2015. We look forward to being able to not only meet that goal, but exceed it.

We would greatly appreciate your help in allowing us to achieve our goal. If you are thinking of buying, selling, or investing in real estate, or know somebody who is, we would love for you to give us a call and let us know how we can help. It would be our honor to serve you or anyone you know looking to buy, sell, or invest in real estate.

Conditions in Northern Virginia are perfect right now for buying or investing in property. Interest rates are extremely low, and there are now even 3% down payment options, which is making real estate more affordable than ever. As we head into the spring market, we are going to see a healthy level of inventory continue to rise and we are going to have a lot of buyer demand in just a few short months.

We are here to serve all of your needs at any time. If you have any questions for us, please feel free to give us a call or send us an email. We would love to hear from you, and we want to be with you every step of the way!

Why Hire Betsy Voegtlin to Sell Your Home?

Simply put, our objective when selling your home is to get you the most money, in the least amount of time, with the fewest inconveniences. No matter where you are selling in Northern Virginia, our team is relentless in ensuring we achieve your every home sale or home buying goal.

That is why, through the years, our clients turn to us again and again for real estate representation. We have built the Stepping Stone Group, one client at a time…earning their trust, leading with integrity, and building successful long-term relationships.

At the Stepping Stone Group, we’re with you every step of the way. That’s not just our slogan. It’s our promise.

Betsy Voegtlin

Keller Williams
Stepping Stone Real Estate Group

10300 Eaton Place Suite 120
Fairfax, VA, 22030

Betsy@steppingstonegroup.com

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