Rexburg Real Estate Blog

What you know about Idaho agency disclosure law can really bring clarity to who’s who in a real estate transaction. Let’s face it, people don’t buy and sell real estate every day. And understanding all of the terms and lingo can take time. So the state of Idaho has put together an easy to understand brochure that helps explain the relationships in a real estate transaction. It also identifies the benefits that come with those relationships. As a buyer or seller of a home in Rexburg ID, understanding these relationships can create peace. It will also allow you to go forward with your real estate goals with confidence.

Am I a Real Estate Customer or Client?

Understanding agency begins with understanding who you are and who the real estate professionals are that you will be working with. In a nutshell, you are either a customer or a client, and the real estate professional who is responsible for your transaction is a broker. Brokers have licensed real estate salespersons working for them, and most of the time you will work with a salesperson, but they only work on behalf of the broker.

Real Estate Customer

You are a customer if you have not signed a agency agreement with a broker or with one of the brokers real estate agents. There are benefits to being a customer. You will have a real estate professional to help you in the process of buying or selling property. You will have someone with real estate skills that you can trust. And you will have a broker that can handle money in a trust account. And most important, you will have someone that can identify and disclose significant factors that could effect the your transaction. Real estate agents and brokers do not usually work for free, so they will most likely ask you to sign a compensation agreement for their services if you remain a customer. Even though there are a lot of benefits to being a customer, you will find that there are some down sides. The Idaho Agency Disclosure Brochure states:

“If you are a Customer, a real estate licensee (sales agent) is not required to promote your best interest or keep your bargaining information confidential. If you use the services of the licensee and brokerage without a written Representation Agreement, you will remain a customer throughout the transaction.”

In other words, the agent and broker you are working with as a customer are only there to facilitate the transaction and make sure that the basics are in place. They are not there to promote your best interest. For that, you want to be a client.

Idaho Agency Disclosure Client

You can choose to change the relationship you have with real estate professionals by becoming a client. To become a client, you list your property on the multiple listing service through your agent, or you sign a buyer / seller representation agreement. Once this happens, the real estate professionals that represent you promote your best interests, maintain confidentiality of your information, and assist you in negotiating an acceptable price and terms for your transaction. The real benefits of using a real estate agent begin when you establish a client relationship.

Types of Agency

There are different types of agency depending on what real estate professionals you are working with as a client. These relationships will be covered in the next Real Estate Insights.

Have you found yourself asking, “how can I sell my house fast?” You are not alone. Getting top dollar for your home is mostly determined by the market in your area, but these 5 steps will improve the odds of selling your house fast for a good price.

Improve Curb Appeal

Sell your house fast by putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes and take a good look at your home from their perspective. Get in the car, drive around the block, and look at your house as you drive by. Then ask yourself if you would buy your own home. Look at the landscape and exterior of the house and find ways to clean up, touch up, and upgrade where it makes sense. Cut the lawn, trim the shrubs and trees, and remove your garden Gnomes! If you have a door that is painted or stained, redo it. It is one of the first impressions your buyer will have as they enter the home. Take pictures on a sunny day and wet down everything but the house to make things look fresh and clean.

Remove Personal Items

Minimize to maximize. You want your potential buyers to walk in your home and feel like its their new home. One of the best ways to create this feeling is to remove your personal items and stow them away. Remove family photos, craft materials, newspapers, books, magazines and other clutter from counter tops and desks. Put jewelry away, and store mixers, blenders, and toasters, in a cabinet or pantry. Make sure your refrigerator is free of clutter and those cute little magnetic do-dads. When you are done, nobody should be able to tell who lives in the house or what their day to day life looks like.

Listen to Stewart Title's On The Air about how important staging your home can be.  Start listening at the 3:10 minute mark.

Replace Kitchen Appliances

Here’s a sell my house fast tip for marketing to prospective home buyers that are women. We’ve never met a woman that didn’t like a shiny new kitchen. You might not be able to remodel the whole kitchen, but consider this. New kitchen appliances are an investment that can produce big returns. If your appliances are considered vintage, worn out or out-dated you might want to think about replacing them.  A matching dish washer, refrigerator, stove, and microwave creates uniformity. Most Home buyers want a kitchen they can begin to use the day they move in. When a buyer walks into a kitchen and sees all new appliances, it’s easy for them to imagine the kitchen is theirs. Combined with new cabinet hardware, sparkling windows, and a good cleaning, new appliances absolutely increase the desirability of your home.

Minimize Furniture

Removing furniture will give every buyer what she wants, open space and a blank canvas to envision her own style. The picture to the right is designed by ND Interiors. It is a beautiful layout with just the right amount of furniture for a family to live comfortably in style. But when it comes to selling a house, it may be a good idea to remove one sofa, which will make it feel much more spacious. If you have a lot of extra furniture you might consider renting a storage unit for a few months until your house sells.

Go Away – Take the Family And Play

When you know buyers are coming, gather the family and go away. Don’t forget Fido the dog or Coco the cat. Take the whole family to play in the snow, go to a movie, or out for ice cream. The key is to go away. The whole purpose of staging a home is to allow the buyer to imagine the space as theirs. When you are home, it is like you are invading their imagination. Its not that they don’t want to meet you and talk to you about the home. They do. But save that for a later, after your real estate agent has shown them the home and understands what the buyers’ wants and needs are.

One Last Word Of Caution

When you finally do meet your buyers, keep telling yourself these two things over and over:

If I want to sell my house fast, “I must remember that I am legally and morally required to disclose the “bad” stuff about the house like past flooded basements, leaky pipes, or the 7 dogs that live next door and bark all night long,” Don’t confuse marketing your house in the best light, with being honest. It will come back to haunt you in the end.

Also, keep in mind that the more you say, the less people remember. And it is usually the negative that they remember. Keep reminding yourself, “If I want to sell my house fast, I need to be careful not to criticize my home when I meet my buyers or their agent.” They don’t need to know the personal history of your family in the house. Let them create their own. You don’t need to talk about why you couldn’t stand how the kitchen cupboards opened into the refrigerator, or how Mrs Johnson could see into your bathroom from her living room until you put up curtains. You want the buyer to imagine living in the home, as theirs, without putting ideas or doubts into their mind.

We would love to hear your ideas about staging a home to sell and what has worked for you. Please leave us a comment below.

The state of Idaho has something called the Idaho property tax exemption. This exemption has to do with property taxes and how much you pay each year. In a nutshell, if you own your home and it is your primary residence, you can participate in the homeowners exemption program.  If you are not using the property as your primary residence, for example, as a rental unit, you will pay a more significant property tax. Here is how it works.

STEP 1: County Assessor Values Your Home

The law in Idaho states that each year the assessor in each county must determine the current market value of homes as if they were sold on January first. Essentially, they have to estimate what the average buyer would pay for your house and they have to do it every year. There are many factors that go into how they come up with these numbers, but some of them include recent sale prices, quality of the home, location, and age. This process basically puts all property owners on a level playing field, with some exceptions, for calculating their portion of property taxes, Once this is done, these numbers are handed over to the local tax districts where property taxes are calculated.

For the sake of simplicity, lets just say that your property is valued at $100,000 and your lot is valued at $15,000 by the county assessor. Now we have to determine how much it is going to cost to run the local tax districts so they can use this property valuation. So the next step is to determine the budgets for all of the tax districts (entities that get your tax dollars to operate, ie, fire department and school district) that your property is located in.

STEP 2: The Local Tax District Budgets

Once the county assessor determines the value of your home, the next step is for the taxing districts to decided what your share of their budget is for the year. To do this, each tax district comes up with a budget. One key point, that some people forget, is that there are usually multiple tax districts for your home. They can include schools, the city, fire districts and so on. Once the budgets are determined, the local tax districts divide their budget amounts by the total assessed value of all the properties in the district to determine the tax rate for their district. Here is an example for just the city tax district:

• Value of All Properties In Tax District: $2,546,531,100
• Part of city budget funded by property tax: $15,624,387
• City Tax Rate: $15,624,387 / $2,546,531,100 =  .00613

The same calculation for the city tax district is also performed for the school tax district, the fire tax district, and so on. When all the districts have been calculated, all the tax rates are added up to come up with the property tax rate for your home. For discussion sake, lets assume that all of the tax district rates add up to .0195 for your property. Now lets apply the tax.

STEP 3: Idaho property tax exemption Calculation

In step one the county assessor determined that you home has a taxable value of $100,000 and your lot has a value of $15,000. Therefore, your taxable value is $115,000. Now here is where the homeowner exemption comes into play. If you qualify for the exemption, you divide the assessed value of the home by a whopping fifty percent. $115,000 divided by 50% is $57,500. This means that instead of paying property taxes on $115,000, you will only pay taxes on $57,500. Based on these numbers, we can now apply the tax rate.

• Property Assessed Value: $115,000
• Idaho Property Tax Exemption Amount: $57,500
• Taxable Value: $57,500
• Tax Rate: .0195
• Property Tax This Year: $57,500 x .0195 = $1,121.25

There are clear tax advantages to living in your home as the primary residence. If this property did not qualify for the Idaho homeowners exemption, their property taxes would be closer to $2,242.50. That is a huge difference when you consider that the median household income in Madison County in 2013 was just a bit over $30,000 a year. That means you would save 1/30th of your income by taking advantage of the Idaho homeowner tax exemption.

This article is for informational purposes only. We’re not trying to give you advice on your finances.  We highly recommend that you check with a qualified financial adviser or tax consultant to discover tax benefits that you qualify for.