6 concrete tips for crafting a cohesive content calendar for 2025

by Alyssa Stalker | Apr 23, 2025 | Industry, News Feed

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6 concrete tips for crafting a cohesive content calendar for 2025

by Alyssa Stalker | Apr 23, 2025 | Industry, News Feed

This post was originally published on this site

Tap into the growing numbers of buyers insisting on upgrades

by Carl Medford | Apr 23, 2025 | Industry, News Feed

Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the power of the Inman Community, and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!

Buyers want to buy beautiful turnkey homes that they can move into and start living. Agents who understand this and can successfully guide potential sellers through the process will not only help their sellers score big but also enhance their prospects.

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We have been preaching for some time now that the more a property is prepared for sale, the faster it will sell and the better the price and terms will be.

Historically, there have been three types of buyers: 

• Top-tier: Willing to pay a premium, this group seeks move-in-ready homes with all the desired amenities, including updated kitchens, bathrooms, windows, flooring and more. 
• Mid-tier: Looking for homes in their original condition, this group hopes to secure a decent price and then, by improving the property over time, build value through “sweat equity.” 
• Bottom-tier: This group includes contractors and flippers who seek distressed properties, typically paying cash and purchasing them “as-is.” The goal in this category has been to purchase at “wholesale” prices, typically not exceeding 60 percent to 70 percent of the retail value. 

Over the past few years, we have seen a steady decline in interest in mid-tier properties. There are several reasons for this trend, particularly in higher-end markets such as Alameda County, California, where the current average price is $1,141,855.  

• With San Francisco Bay Area homes selling at astronomically high prices, buyers are already stretched to the limit to scrape up enough money for a down payment. In many cases, they have no resources to do significant upgrades after occupancy. Consequently, most are looking for move-in-ready homes.
• Higher mortgage rates mean that many buyers have maxed out their monthly payments. There is simply no money left at the end of the month to fund upgrades.
• The ever-increasing costs of labor and materials are pushing improvement projects out of reach for many homeowners who might want to perform upgrades after the close of escrow.
• Today’s buyers have less knowledge about what it takes to upgrade a home. Whereas older generations might have been willing and able to put sweat equity into a home, on average, younger buyers are not the same.
• The demographic makeup of regions such as the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley has undergone significant changes over the past few years, resulting in a predominance of cultures that lack experience with American construction techniques or local issues, including termites, wood-boring beetles and similar pests. Many potential buyers are highly averse to purchasing a home with any outstanding issues, as they have no idea what is involved in remedying any perceived problems. 
• Today’s morphing lifestyles — especially in the case of dual-income families with kids — translate to less available time to work on a home once they move in. Evenings are spent helping the children with their homework, and weekends are filled with soccer games, baseball, karate and other activities. 
• For flippers, the margins have shrunk dramatically as higher purchase prices for distressed properties and soaring improvement costs require significantly more capital, resulting in diminished returns upon resale. 

As buyer patterns have changed, the mid-tier, which historically represented a significant percentage of buyers, has been steadily declining. Over the past few years, as buyers have been moving away from mid-tier “original condition” properties they perceive as needing upgrades, prices for these properties have been forced downward toward bottom-tier pricing.

As a result, potential sellers in the mid-tier category have been encouraged to upgrade their properties to push them into the top-tier. 

While some sellers are resistant to improving their homes for sale, no doubt upgrading their home dramatically increases their odds of getting top dollar. If they are not willing to upgrade, then their pricing needs to be more in line with bottom-tier pricing. 

Now, however, looking at Auction.com’s data, we see the bottom tier diminishing as well. 

Given this, as I stated back in June 2022, any seller hoping to get the maximum return on their property needs to understand how today’s buyers think. Quite frankly, I am tired of hearing classic seller dialogues, including “We want to give buyers the opportunity to upgrade the home the way they want to” or “If we replace the carpet, the buyer may not like it, and we’ll have wasted our money.”

These arguments are effectively dead. Today’s buyers, in large part, do not want to fix up homes. When sellers ask why they should spend money to upgrade when a buyer might change things once they move in, the question you ask in return is:

“If you can spend $1,000 to make $2,000 to $3,000, does it matter what buyers do when they move in?”

Sellers must understand that buyers are looking for homes that meet their criteria, not the sellers’. Homes that resonate with current buyers’ tastes will reap significant rewards, while homes that do not will languish on the market or sell for much less than a seller might have anticipated. We need to help sellers understand that buyers no longer want or are even capable of fixing up a home after purchase. 

Sellers also need to understand that they have between seven and 10 seconds to sell their home, and those seconds will not be in the property — it will be on the buyers’ devices. If they do not like what they see on their screens, they will never show up. 

Since upgrading homes is critical for achieving top dollar, here are our recommendations:

Spend time helping sellers understand the importance of upgrades

While some sellers will dig in their heels and refuse to budge, others, once you explain the situation to them, will understand and allow you to lead them forward. I have found that a simple conversation can be helpful.

I ask if they are planning to find a replacement property once they sell their current home. If they say “yes,” I ask if they have been looking at homes online. In most cases, they have been busy scoping out potential properties.

I then ask, “If you see an ordinary home that needs upgrades, what do you do?” Virtually 100 percent of the time, they state, “We simply move on to the next home.” At which point I say, “It is the same for any buyers who might be looking at your home.” Many sellers have told us, “We never thought of that …”

Reasons for providing an upgraded turnkey home to potential buyers also include the following: 

• Known issues have been identified and dealt with. While some sellers attempt to conceal issues, if done correctly, upgrades can alleviate potential buyers’ concerns about the property’s condition. 
• Upgraded features and amenities resonate with buyers’ tastes and preferences, including energy-efficient appliances, smart home systems and more. 
• The overall aesthetic of a home can be transformed from ordinary to spectacular, especially when coupled with effective staging. 
• Upgrades to key areas, such as kitchens, bathrooms and flooring, can substantially increase a home’s value and appeal, resulting in higher offers. 

Hire a transformation specialist to assess needs and oversee the upgrades

There is a growing number of entities out there that specialize in preparing homes for the market. While some agents have connections with local contractors, others utilize national companies such as Curbio or Bosscat, or local or statewide entities like Freemodel, which covers Florida, California and Texas. In many cases, these companies will also carry the cost of any upgrades to the close of escrow. 

Some larger teams, including ours, have also had transformation specialists on staff and even owned in-house construction and staging companies. There is a problem with this approach, however, especially in highly litigious states such as California.

Since Realtors are licensed to sell homes, some states argue that they should not engage in activities that fall outside the scope of their licensing, such as acting as general contractors. While it is certainly convenient to have the ability to do everything in-house, we have been advised to outsource all upgrades and transformation processes to unrelated third parties. 

Finalize the scope of work

The key here is “less is more.” We assure our sellers that we will only request upgrades that will provide a return on their investment and, if implemented correctly, can easily yield $2 to $3 or more for every $1 invested.

The transformation specialist should do a thorough walkthrough and then produce a detailed outline of recommended work along with a budget for completion. Once there is an agreement on the scope of work, have the transformation company issue a contract for the seller to sign. 

Finalize payment plans

Some sellers can carry the costs themselves, but many need funding. Some contractors are willing to carry upgrade costs to escrow, while companies such as Curbio will bring the costs to close. We do not recommend that agents carry any costs — we have discovered over the years that this, while convenient, can have an unhappy ending for the agent (trust me on this). 

Pre-order inspections

There is no point in painting over dry rot or refacing cabinets that should be replaced. Inspections not only identify problems ahead of time, but they also provide a roadmap for upgrades. Once the work has been completed, we provide prospective buyers with copies of the reports, along with a comprehensive list of upgrades and repairs made to the items identified in the reports.

If a buyer chooses to go out and get their reports, we can find that in most cases, buyers will accept the reports we provide, along with the list of completed repairs. 

Monitor the work to make sure everything is on track

Most renovations to homes headed for the market need to be done as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. There is a tendency for some sellers to want to provide additional enhancements that they might prefer, but which will not make a significant difference in the return, and could slow the process.

It is crucial to stay on schedule so that staging and photography can happen on time. 

Encourage the sellers to live elsewhere during the renovations

The renovation process can get very stressful for all parties concerned and can be an ideal time for sellers to take a vacation. 

Sellers are often shocked when they return to see the finished product fully staged and ready for the market.

We have heard them say, “We had no idea it could look this amazing!” We have seen trustees selling a home after their parents’ demise say, “It’s a shame Mom never got to see this — she would have loved to have lived here.”

Done right, improvements make all the difference between a home that slowly sells and one that truly stands out in the market. 

Carl Medford is the CEO of The Medford Team.

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Zillow’s ‘new standards’ reveal a big problem. Take back our industry

by Darryl Davis | Apr 23, 2025 | Industry, News Feed

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Chris Kelly on taking the reins at HomeServices, Compass chatter

by Lillian Dickerson | Apr 23, 2025 | Industry, News Feed

Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!

HomeServices of America veteran Chris Kelly was appointed CEO of the real estate company last week as Gino Blefari stepped down into an advisory role.

Kelly brings a wealth of experience to the position, with 25 years in the industry now, 18 of which have been spent at HomeServices.

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Kelly has the credentials, but adopts the role of CEO at a challenging time. Industry groups and organizations have split into factions over how to market and sell homes while balancing the needs of consumers and agents alike. The market has been among the most tumultuous agents have dealt with in recent years, and uncertainty over tariffs is threatening to push consumers to the sidelines of the transaction yet again.

With these industry shifts in mind, Inman recently spoke with Kelly to get his take — and to set the record straight on recent reports floating around about Compass potentially having an interest in purchasing Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. Here’s what the CEO had to say, edited for brevity and clarity.

Inman: You’ve been with HomeServices for quite a while now. When you started at the company, did you ever dream that you would one day become CEO?

Chris Kelly: It’s funny. It’s not something that I personally started off [thinking]. My first role was in 2007 as general counsel of ReeceNichols, and I was really, really fortunate to work under the leadership of [then-CEO] Jerry Reece at the time. And I remember Jerry Reece at one point told [then-CEO of HomeServices] Ron Peltier, ‘Hey, Chris could run Reese Nichols for us someday. Heck, he could run all of HomeServices.’

It was the confidence he showed. And he said, ‘Gosh, if Jerry believes in you, then maybe that’s something you can work towards.’ And 18 years later, here we are. But I’ve just been really, really lucky to have some great mentors and some great leaders throughout HomeServices over my 18 years.

How rewarding. Do you have a particular vision in mind for the future of the company, and Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices specifically? 

On the broader scale of HomeServices, there’s two things that we really want to focus on. They obviously kind of go hand-in-hand, but one of those is, we really want to make sure that we work towards creating a unified backbone across HomeServices. Our past model, everyone knows has been more of a pure holding company. Buy companies, completely leave them alone. And what we want to do is retain the local branding, the local culture, everything that makes our companies very special in their unique markets.

But we also understand, real estate has shifted. We want to make sure our agents are able to compete at a national scale as well. So we want to make sure we build a backbone to where, across HomeServices, our agents and consumers are working from a unified set of tools and technologies that allows them to better connect with themselves across the country.

And this ties into the second point, which is really leaning into what has always been in our DNA, which is the full-service brokerage model of brokerage, mortgage, title and insurance. Physically, I think we do that better than anybody else because we wholly own those different operations. If you walk into one of our real estate offices, all of those services are under one roof. But we also know that real estate has been digitized and we want to make sure that experience that we physically have always provided can also be provided in that digital world as well.

So, when I’m working with a consumer as an agent, the ability to have all of those services together in one place, from a digital standpoint, also becomes part of the HomeServices model moving forward. So those are two of the really big things we want to focus on moving forward.

Very nice. I want to ask you about something that happened a couple weeks ago — there was some talk about a potential deal [between Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices] and Compass. Was there anything behind that? Were you all actually in discussions with them?

What happens is, when you work for a company the size of Berkshire and any big conglomerate like that, I’m sure people call all the time with questions, you know, ‘Are you interested in this? Are you interested in that?’ We do that at a brokerage level as well. We have conversations with folks all the time. So, where conversations turned into stories? I’m not sure.

But the good thing is, we can say there is no contemplated, no pending transaction with Compass or any third party at this point. And we’re hopeful that these management transitions that we’re making are kind of reflective of our parent entity’s complete, full faith in us moving forward.

I see. And Gino Blefari’s stepping down didn’t have anything to do with that?

Gino, to his credit, this is something that he had thought about and he wanted to make sure that he did it at the right time for the enterprise. We really went through a pretty challenging time over the last year-and-a-half — the whole industry did. Gino, to his credit, really did understand that. It was important to him to help shepherd us through those challenging moments. And as we’ve come out on the other side and we and the broader industry are kind of turning the page on that chapter of real estate and we’re moving forward under the new rules and everything else that are now put into place, he felt this was the right time to do it.

I see. And even so, the industry is continuing to experience turmoil, particularly with the private listings conversation going on now and Zillow’s new listing standards. What do you make of all this?

It’s interesting because a lot of these discussions on how a listing was entered or what the status was — and this is probably one of the biggest changes that’s happened in real estate — you’d have these MLS committees that would come up with it. But these were really interesting local discussions. You had it locally with your MLS and what you did in Dallas might look a little different than Minneapolis or New York. And these conversations have really turned national in scale. So we’re having these broad conversations on what to do with the listing, how the listing has to be labeled across the entire country around these really disparate, sometimes very different markets.

For HomeServices, our view is that the vast, vast, vast majority of sellers and listings benefit from the widest exposure possible and in most of those markets, that means putting the property into the MLS. We also know that we have some markets and some consumers that we work with in various markets where an office exclusive makes sense for them. And in our view, when we do an office exclusive, it’s because we think it’s the right thing to do. The agent and the seller have determined that is the correct way to market the property at that local level. It’s not part of a broader national push that every property should be marketed under some type of certain system.

So we understand the need for office exclusives. We believe the vast majority of properties should have the widest exposure.

The one thing we want to make certain is that, sometimes saying the property is on-market gets conflated with being on the MLS. And the MLS is a really big, important part of the market and in some of our cities, it’s the biggest part of the market. But what we don’t want to have happen and what I think the DOJ is most interested in is, it’s not whether a property is listed exclusively or on the MLS, it’s do the rules create an artificial moat or barrier to competition?

What we want to make sure is that Clear Cooperation does not create a moat around the MLS that keeps them from innovating, keeps them from competition. We as brokerages have to compete every day with a new model that comes out and you either sharpen your tools or you fall by the wayside. MLSs are really, really good at what they do. They’re excellent data aggregators. They’re a great open marketplace. But there are other vendors out there who are trying to get in that space and might have some new way of doing something that would be really great for consumers and agents. We just want to make sure that these rules, Clear Cooperation or otherwise, don’t create these moats that prevent innovation and competition within different segments of our industry. I think that’s what the DOJ is most interested in and what they’re still looking at.

I wanted to ask too — there have been so many policy changes in the industry lately. Do you think NAR is handling all this in a helpful way?

I’ve had the opportunity to be in several meetings with Nykia Wright and her team. Three years ago, one of our agents was the president of NAR, Leslie Rouda Smith, and I was a liaison so I had a chance to be a little more intimately involved than I have typically been in the past. I do believe the association is always trying to do what’s in the best interest of its members, what’s in the best interest of consumers out there.

I know what Nykia walked into was a big task, right? I mean, there was obviously cultural reforms that had to happen while also trying to manage through litigation and then what were going to be the business changes out of that.

So having gone through that herself as a business, I admire anyone who comes out on the other side of that and she’s been very forthright and honest, I think she’s trying to do what’s best. I know she’s making changes within the association. So I think she deserves the leniency that I think we’ve given to her to get through these changes and best position NAR as a leaner association that is more focused on driving what is right for its members and for the consumer.

Any thoughts on the spring market?

We just got some data yesterday, at least within HomeServices, and we’ve noticed that our pending [sale]s are finally above what they were in 2024, so that’s an encouraging sign that we’re seeing for the first time — that kind of pending numbers eclipse.

We’re tracking closings to see if they follow that same trend line. So, the spring market certainly is in effect at this point, and it looks to be — again, it’s all relative to what we’re comparing it to — but it does seem to be, within our companies, to be a little bit stronger spring market than what we had last year.

Email Lillian Dickerson

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Homebuyer demand falls for 2nd consecutive week as rates climb

by Matt Carter | Apr 23, 2025 | Industry, News Feed

In April, we’ll go deep on money and finance for a special theme month, by talking to leaders about where the mortgage market is heading and how technology and business strategies are evolving to suit the needs of buyers now. Inman’s Best of Finance returns for 2025, celebrating the leaders in this space. And subscribe to Mortgage Brief for weekly updates all year long.

Economic uncertainty and rate volatility continue to put a damper on the spring homebuying season, with demand for purchase mortgages dropping by a seasonally adjusted 7 percent last week compared to the week before, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported Wednesday.

The MBA’s Weekly Applications Survey showed requests to refinance were down 20 percent last week when compared to the week before, but up 43 percent from a year ago.

Joel Kan

“Overall mortgage application activity declined last week, as rates increased to their highest level in two months,” MBA Deputy Chief Economist Joel Kan said in a statement. “The 30-year fixed rate rose for the second straight week to 6.9 percent, an almost 30-basis-point increase over two weeks.”

It was the second consecutive weekly decline in purchase loan applications, which dropped by a seasonally adjusted 5 percent during the week ending April 11.

Mortgage rates on the rebound

At 6.83 percent on Tuesday, rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages were 35 basis points higher than a 2025 low of 6.48 percent registered on April 8, according to rate lock data tracked by Optimal Blue. But mortgage rates have a ways to go before retracing the 2025 high of 7.05 percent seen Jan. 14.

Mortgage rates sank to historic lows during the pandemic, with borrowers locking in rates under 3 percent during much of 2020 and 2021.

After soaring to a post-pandemic high of 7.83 percent in October 2023, rates for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages gradually descended to a 2024 low of 6.03 percent on Sept. 17 as investors anticipated the Fed would start cutting rates.

Forecasters at Pantheon Macroeconomics say tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are lifting manufacturers’ costs, but disinflation in the service sector is likely to prompt the Federal Reserve to resume cutting short-term interest rates in June.

“The bond market sell-off since April 2 has pushed up typical yields on mortgage-backed securities by about 35 basis points, which is already feeding through to rates offered to prospective homebuyers,” Pantheon economists said Wednesday in their latest U.S. Economic Monitor. “Meanwhile, mounting worries about the labor market, evident in the recent consumer surveys, will reduce the pool of potential homebuyers further, especially if the jobs market weakens over the next few months.”

Pantheon forecasters expect the Fed to cut rates three times this year, by a total of 75 basis points.

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Email Matt Carter

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