Hello all, welcome to WFHR's rapid support.
For this May 13th, 2025,
have your host, James J. Mailoff here.
Being joined right now by our great friend, David Farnbrill,
with Realty Radio, David, how you been?
I've been well, thank you.
It's wonderful to be with you again, James,
and nice to be presenting Realty Radio as a podcast.
Yeah, it's fun, and where I, you know,
I've really been enjoying the conversations with you, David.
I think that they're only gonna grow
and get stronger with this format.
And one of the things that I appreciate is,
while I've been talking about this topic
for many years on the radio,
I feel like you look at things with a different angle
at times or bring something to the fold
that we haven't had a chance to really dive into.
Today, I think is a similar topic.
And in part because it's such an ever-changing topic,
a fluid topic, where we're going today.
Right, and I do try and put an analytical slant on things,
but also my aim when I'm on these segments with you
is the same when I am working with my clients.
It's what's the best thing I can do
for the people who I'm serving.
So what I'm trying to do is to say something
it's interesting to the person who's listening today.
Yeah.
And speaking of, we're gonna lock in on local right away
to get into a quick market analysis of this here area.
Yeah, I was looking at the figures for Wisconsin Rapids 54494,
which is just the east side.
And I was looking at the year-on-year price increase
and that has come out at just above 9%.
Now, that to me is entirely predictable.
It is consistent with the price increases
we've had for the last couple of years.
I remember I was sitting here about a year ago
and we were looking at the same figure
and about a 9% increase in 54494.
And the prediction from Zillow at that point
was that we were only gonna have about 3% increase
for the next year, which is the one that I was just reporting on.
So in fact, they constantly under-predict
the increase we're going to have.
So right now, they're actually looking
at a half a percent decrease for the next year,
but I just don't see it.
And the reason for that is that we still have too many buyers
and not enough homes on the market.
And while that equilibrium is imbalanced,
we're going to continue to have house prices going up
and we're gonna continue to have homes selling.
And I was just talking about 54494.
You see a very similar picture in 54495.
In fact, sometimes you see a slightly larger price increase,
just fractionally, because the house prices were a little lower
there and people see that as an opportunity
to get a bigger bang for their buck.
And it's gonna be similar in all our local municipalities
like Pitzville, Vespa, Portheadwoods, Beer,
and then when you go to places like Stevens Point
and Marshfield and Rome, it's gonna be the same sort of story.
You sometimes see it's gonna be 10% or 8% instead of nine,
but there's not a huge difference in central Wisconsin.
Now, when you look at the national picture,
you see all sorts of things happening
and you see things happening in big cities
with very large populations, which can skew the averages.
But what we're concerned about here is central Wisconsin
and we're seeing a healthy price increase.
It's not huge, it's not gonna over-inflate prices,
but it does mean that if you buy a home now,
then you're looking at a reasonably good investment.
Yeah, as I said at the beginning of this,
I think that real estate is interesting just as a whole.
And like most of you out there seeing our national news
or local news and I see reports about real estate,
I'm paying attention, I'm reading it,
but I've also learned from JR and you
and many others over the years
that there are a few industries that are more case-by-case
and local than real estate.
And what national numbers might be telling you
is not probably going to be telling you a local story.
It's good information.
I think it's interesting on some levels,
but I don't know that how much it would apply
to you on a local level.
It depends, it's a case-by-case thing.
Yeah, that's right.
And I do often have people say to me,
or I read in the No In Forbes magazine
that real estate prices are plummeting.
And I think, well, I better look at that and I look at it
and it's about house prices in Oregon.
Right.
And it's something that's completely dissociated
from what we do here in Central Wisconsin.
It's why it's such an important,
I think talking to your local realtor
and making sure that you're getting
that correct information of the local area
and where you are looking to buy or sell that home.
It's such a vital part of this.
And it's also why you generally should go to a local realtor.
Now, I'm not saying you can't do a good job in another town.
You know, I do help people sell houses
in different areas, but when I do that,
I have to put a lot of research into the market
to make sure I'm giving them accurate advice.
And so sometimes, you know, if you're thinking,
well, my brother's a realtor and he lives in Madison,
maybe he could help me sell my house.
Well, he could, but it's gonna be a lot harder for him
to do that than someone who's based in our area.
Mm-hmm.
David, why do some homes in Central Wisconsin
sit in the market while others sell quickly?
What are some of the reasons behind that?
Well, we've got a range of reasons
and I have heard it brought down to just two
by people and usually this is the simplified version,
either it's overpriced or there's something wrong with it.
But that's not the whole picture.
So looking at price,
the market is pretty price sensitive in our area
and buyers do now have access to market analysis
through the internet.
Now, it's not always gonna be accurate
because when you look at the zestimate on Zillow,
think to remember is that the bots
have not been inside the property
so they don't know that the homeowner
has added an extra bedroom.
They don't know that all the kitchen countertops
from the 1960s have been replaced by courts.
They don't know that all the carpets have been taken out
and beautiful new tile and laminate flooring
has been put in.
So you can't rely 100% on those online estimators,
but buyers do use them and if the price is way off
what an online estimator says,
they're going to be saying maybe this one is not worth
what they're asking.
I'm gonna wait for it to come down.
Pricing home is not an exact science.
Real to spend a lot of time doing market analysis
and what they'll do is they'll look at the prices
that comparable homes have sold for
over the past six months to a year
and then they'll look at what's currently on the market
so they look at what the competition is
and they will then give the homeowner
the advice of where they think the house should be priced.
Now, some sellers will use that information
but don't forget it's the seller
who prices the house, not the real to.
So the real to will give the seller their advice
and the seller might choose to do something different
and that's fine, that's their prerogative, it's their home
and sometimes they do try and go for a higher price
and that may mean that it will sit for a little bit longer.
So the second thing was condition.
Right.
And there are the obvious things like
if there's something that you can see
that is definitely a problem
like particularly if the roof is obviously in need of replacement.
That's something a lot of buyers will know straight away.
Same goes for siding in windows
but on the interior, it tends to be more cosmetic things
that people will object to and sometimes
it's not even things that would cost that much money to fix.
It'll be little things like they'll be,
say if you've got two bedrooms
and you've decorated them to match the tastes of your children,
say you've got one which is dark green
with silver glitter on the top
and then the other one is dark purple with a black ceiling.
Those things are going to put off buyers
even though the buyers could remedy them fairly easily.
So there's a lot of presentational tips
that will make a big difference.
So we're not just talking about the actual fabric
of the property and the things that might be wrong with it in that sense.
It's also the presentation.
When people are looking at these photos
and seeing some of that,
they really want to be able to envision,
okay, I could see my table lamp being over here.
I could see my family photos over here.
It's a little harder to do that when there's already stuff up.
So it feels like a good idea
to when you're taking these photos or doing this
to be able to try to give a little bit of a blank canvas in some ways.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And that's one of the things that I try and work with my cellars on.
I will offer to pay for a staging consultation with a home stager.
And that expert will come in
and will give advice on things that the seller can do
to make their home more neutral.
So you're not talking about it being empty
because that can be very un-home like.
So that what they'll try and do is to advise you
on the most neutral day core to use.
So somebody might have a wall of their house
and they've got a couple of bits of neutral day core
and then they've got a hunting trophy,
picture of a politician and a religious thing
and maybe a wall of photos of their family.
And all those things really
we advise people to take down
because we don't want people to be distracted by those things.
We want them to just glance at the neutral day core think,
oh, okay, I can put my baseball hall of fame autographs here
or whatever they may want
and then move on to the next section
to see what the bathroom's like.
Okay, I like the idea of a wall of baseball.
I like that I got it in my head.
One of the things that I was referencing
before the way you see things in think of stuff
that I don't always think of
or I think, you know, just in general
we don't have any chance to talk about in this show.
There is right here with the
could limited showing times hold back potential by it.
I wouldn't have thought of that
but that's, yeah, I could see that that could be an issue.
Yes, I have had that in one or two cases.
Sometimes the hardest situation to deal with
is if a home is tentative
because it may be outside of the cellar's control,
the sort of access that the tenants can give
and sometimes it's more outside their control
how they place their possessions in the house
so it might not present it exactly as the cellar wants.
So that can be tricky when you've got tenants
you're dealing with but sometimes I've had situations
where people work nights
and they're gonna be sleeping during the day
and that can actually cause problems with showing.
So what we try and do is work with people
and say, well, you know, maybe we could have a
maybe there's a couple of days of the week
when they're not working nights
and we could mark those days down
that daytime showings are allowed
and we would really just try and tweak it to optimize
but the more that you block out,
almost all of our showings are booked online
and when you look at that calendar
and you see a lot of spaces blocked out,
it can be very difficult
because you're usually dealing with buyers
who also have limited time, they've got jobs,
sometimes they're coming from out of town
and you just want to try and make it
as available to them as possible.
Definitely one of those situations
and I think the more we can introduce this
more and more in reality, the better giving,
both parties giving each other some grace
and some understanding when it comes to that scheduling
and all that, it goes a lot farther
and I imagine makes the process that much smoother.
Speaking with David Farmer,
we're all part of Reality Radio,
one of our favorite segments around here
and getting into some of these quick marketing tips
and some tools of the trade, if you will
and about minor repairs and cosmetic issues,
how much can that hold back people, David?
You've touched on this a little bit.
Well, it's actually quite surprising how this,
how much difference the little things make.
So for example, one of the things that I've seen
that is the most off-putting but costs the least
to rectify is scratch plates on power outlets
and light switches.
If you go around a house that looks perfectly good
and you just remove all those scratch plates,
maybe because you're going to be painting
and then you don't put them back,
people come in and subconsciously
the house looks more like a project than a home.
Now those scratch plates cost 50 cents,
maybe a bit more if you want the high quality ones,
but those little things can make a big difference
because it's a question of subconscious perception.
Like I said before, things like painting
can make a huge difference.
So you might have a nice color on your walls
but you might have a huge patch
where you've taken down some shelves.
Well, really you need to go over that
and just touch up and those things
don't cost a great deal of money
nor very much effort.
But putting in a week of work,
maybe a few hundred dollars in materials
can make a huge difference.
Could lead to a much better sale for you
and selling it.
It seems like such a smart investment.
It also coming back to what you said about time
and some of these things understandable
that some of this stuff doesn't always get done
but all the more reason why.
Because one thing that I think a theme
and a lot of what we've been talking about here
is doing everything you can
to kind of take care of any questions
that might subconsciously come up in people's minds.
I think approaching this, if you're selling a home,
I think it's a good idea to approach this
like you are buying a home
and what is a buyer looking for,
what does a buyer want and some of that
and really looking at it from that lens, that view.
Right, and that's where your realtor can help you
because nine times out of 10,
your realtor doesn't just work with sellers,
they also work with buyers.
So they know, I know when I go around a house with a buyer
that things that the buyer's gonna look at first
in many cases are the kitchen and then the bathroom.
And the thing they want to see is that those rooms are clean.
Now, if the bathroom and the kitchen need cleaning,
that's probably gonna take you a couple of hours to clean.
Now, if you do that yourself
before you put your house on the market,
it gives such a better impression
than if you leave it undone and the buyer then comes in
and they picture themselves having to scrub and scrub
for a couple of hours after they've bought the house.
Now, most of us will clean the kitchen anyway
once we've bought the house.
But people don't want to think that they've got to do some work.
And finally, David, talking a bit about the marketing plan
and if that's missing anything,
I think that this is a great way to wrap on this topic.
Yeah, there's actually two components to this.
The first is the photography.
It really behoves a decent home to have good photography
and preferably that would be professional photography
because people don't want to buy a house where you've got lopsided photos.
You've got photos that are obviously taken on a cheap cell phone.
I get my thumb in there sometimes.
I actually saw a listing where the realtor thumb was on.
Oh, no.
It's actually currently online.
Oh, no.
And I thought, how could you do that for 2022?
Yeah, that's right.
But it does happen.
You need to have good photos.
And then preferably, you'd also...
And one of the things that we offer at Rapid's Homes
is 3D virtual tours.
So that buyers, if they're not located locally,
can do a walkthrough of the house
and they can see how the rooms relate to one another.
And then related to that is floor plans.
Floor plans offer an additional perspective to a buyer.
And then finally, if the home warrants it.
So really, if you've got a large piece of land
or if it's next door to...
Oh, sorry, next to a lakefront or river,
then you would ideally have drone photography in there as well.
So the photography really makes a difference.
There are many homes which are actually quite beautiful
but they're just not photographed properly.
And they then won't get the exposure.
The other thing is making sure that the marketing gets
to where it's supposed to get to.
So 20 years ago, we would put ads in the Tribune
or in that Homes magazine that the Tribune used to put out once a month.
They used to even put them in storefronts of realtor offices.
The market moves totally differently from that now.
It moves faster and it is guided more by what people can see on their cell phone.
I'm not even going to say computer because people tend not to sit at their computer looking for properties.
They sit on their cell phone and they scroll.
So if your property is not reaching zillowredfinrealtor.com
and those online platforms, then you're not going to find your buyer potentially.
It also needs to get to the big franchises.
So, you know, I'm an independent real estate brokerage,
but I get my listings on all the big franchise web pages as well.
Also, you should be going to all of the social media.
Yeah.
So you should be getting your home seen on Facebook, Instagram, all those commonly used platforms.
You know, with an industry that one of the bigger fears is the unknown.
In this day and age, so much is out in the open.
And I think it makes for a more healthier and better industry, certainly.
Not, you know, outside of the, some of the factors we talked about earlier
and certainly inventory like we've talked about many times in that.
Just the industry itself and the buying, the selling, some of that.
I feel like a lot of the gray area has gotten cleared out.
And so much of that has become clear with the conversation we've been having.
Also, all these things are so fixable.
You know, if you are currently have a house on the market and you listen to this,
you're like, oh no, one of those things I'm guilty of or something.
You can go back, you can work on these things.
And I encourage you to reach out to your realtor or a realtor in general and to find out more.
And I happen to know a pretty good one.
I get to talk to him once a month and everything.
David, if people have follow up questions, we'd like to know more about some of what we talked about today.
How can you reach out to you?
Yeah, well, the easiest way is to text or call me on 715-323-8594.
But they can find me quite easily on Facebook.
Just look for David Farnborough realtor or they can go to www.rapidshomes.com.
Do we say the www?
Sometimes we do.
I think you're fighting the way.
It's a good question.
That's a very good question.
It's one of the most cumbersome things to say, isn't it?
It feels good sometimes, too.
You like to say it sometimes.
We'll dissect that the next time we get together.
Always appreciate hanging out with you.
Thank you so much for what you put into the community and hanging out with us.
You have a great day.
Thank you, too.
And thank you for joining the conversation here at WFHR's Rapids Report.
