The time has come for the Hudson YMCA Holiday Hoopla event! We’re here in Hudson, Wisconsin so Chris Kost, director of the YMCA, can tell you all about it.

The Hudson YMCA has been here for 21 years and has 9,000 members. Although we do a lot of good things for our branch, it’s important to reach out to the community as well.

One of the ways we do this is by hosting the Hoopla event. It’s free for the community and is a fantastic way to meet and partner with other organizations. Along with the annual gingerbread making event hosted by the McNamee Real Estate Team, people can look forward to all sorts of fun activities.

Santa will be here with real reindeer!

And the best part? Santa will be here with real reindeer! He and his flight companions will be set up in the gym, so make sure to stop in and say hi.

Here’s all the information you’ll need to make it down to this year’s Hoopla event!

More questions? No problem. Give Chris at the Hudson YMCA a call at 612-230-9622 or visit the website www.ymcamn.org. You are also more than welcome to stop in to find out how the YMCA can work with you on a membership. Walk-ins are always welcome.

Happy holidays and hope to see you there!

Taking out a homeowners insurance policy an important step for homeowners, but there are a few things that you should know about homeowners insurance rates before doing so. Today I’m joined by Jeremy Werner from Apex Insurance Group to discuss the top three factors that will help determine your rate:

Your rate may be affected by your credit score.

Jeremy suggests keeping these three components in mind before taking out a homeowners insurance policy so that you know what to expect from your rate. If you have any other questions about homeowners, auto, home, life, business, or farm insurance for Jeremy, give him a call at 715-377-4774. In the meantime, if you have questions about anything else related to real estate in the St. Croix area, give us a call or send me an email and we’d be happy to help you!

A lot of home sellers who have had their home on the market the last few months will get it in their heads that they should take it off the market during the holiday season for one reason or another. A lot of people think homes don’t sell during this time of year, but that is not the case.

There are six different reasons why you should keep your home on the market during the holidays:

1. Inventory is much lower. Since a lot of people do think it’s a bad time to sell, they take their homes off the market. This lowers the inventory, which means less competition for your home if you do decide to list.

2. Serious buyers. If a buyer is out there trudging in 30-below weather just to see a home, you know they are serious about purchasing a home.

3. The supply will increase in the new year. Every year, our inventory shoots up at the beginning of the new year. That is when you will have the most competition for your home. That level of competition is much lower right now.

Homes show better when decorated for the holidays.

5. Buyers tend to be more emotional during the holidays. This draws their attention to the home more than it would during the summer.

6. Buyers have more time to look at homes during the holidays. Why not be on the market if those buyers have the time?

If you have any questions for us, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll make it our next video. If you have any questions for us, don’t hesitate to give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you.

We have a great opportunity for you to win a new Yeti cooler!

First of all, we want to say thank you to all of our past clients and our referral partners who so graciously spread our name to all of your friends. We really appreciate it—those referrals help our business grow and improve every year.

As a way of saying thank you to all of our wonderful clients and friends, we are having a raffle for a free Yeti cooler.

We will announce the winner on Halloween!

All you have to do is go to our Zillow, Realtor.com, Facebook, Trulia, LinkedIn or Twitter page and leave a review.

If you really want that cooler, you can write multiple reviews to increase your chances of winning! We will announce the winner on Halloween.

Good luck to all of you—we can’t wait to see the reviews!

If you’re shopping for a home, it’s important to leave yourself a buffer of cash in your max budget. The market is competitive!

When you’re in the market to buy a home, setting a realistic budget is very important.

Let’s say you set a budget of $225,000 and are looking for a home. If you look at homes that are priced for $225,000, you may find a home that has multiple offers. When there are multiple offers on a home that’s already priced at your max budget, you’ve got no chance. You don’t have the buying power to go any higher.

In this market, you need a bit of wiggle room.

We recommend giving yourself some buffer room. If your max budget is $225,000, cut off the home prices you are looking at to homes priced $220,000 and below. If you’re in a multiple offer situation, extra cash is always beneficial. When homes are selling in our market, they are selling for $5,000 to $10,000 over asking price.

If you find the home you love, you should go after it and not wait for someone else to get their hands on it. Give yourself that little buffer so you can feel confident when competing against multiple offers.

If you have any questions for us, don’t hesitate to reach out. We look forward to hearing from you.

When a person’s home expires, they usually do one of three things:

Most choose to relist with the same agent. If you do this, however, that agent is just going to repeat what they did the first time, and your chances of the results being any different are slim. We recommend that you interview two or three new agents and hire one based on their marketing and pricing strategy.

We specialize in selling homes that didn’t sell the first time for one reason or another. More specifically, 30% of our business last year came from those people whose homes were on the market for hundreds of days. We were able to get those people moved into their new homes in a month or two, at most.

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Hire a new agent based on their marketing and pricing strategy.

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If your home does come off the market and you plan to relist it, do your due diligence by interviewing multiple new agents and make sure that have the right one, so that the same thing doesn’t happen again.

If you have any questions or you’re thinking about selling your home, feel free to give us a call. Have a great day!

I'm excited to be joined by Jeremy Tyler with Xcpetional - our neighbor across the parking lot. We rely a lot on Jeremy, who is extremely good at fixing IT issues we have.

Jeremy got an interesting start in what he's doing now - three years ago in his basement! They moved into the building about a year ago, which allows them to share in the energy of the area and help us with our IT problems.

Jeremy is a big thinker, making it fun to have a high-level conversation with him. He's not just into IT, nor is Xceptional. IT usually refers just to information technology in your mind, Jeremy said, but at Xceptional they focus on the brand development and marketing areas of technology, from websites to social media to logos. They aim to bring businesses into the digital age and help them achieve their goals by using digital platforms for sales and marketing, or getting new leads, for example.

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Jeremy's passion comes through in everything Xceptional does.

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Small and medium business owners are the kinds of companies that Xceptional really excels with. In today's business world, these types of business owners have that grand vision for tomorrow of their business being the next big brand. Jeremy and his team want to focus on creating the next big brands of this generation.

One of my favorite quotes is "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it," and looking at Jeremy's passion for what he does is such an important piece, and it comes through in everything he says and does.

If you're interested in hearing more about what Jeremy and Xceptional do, you can give him a call at (715) 629-1020 ext. 101. He'd love to talk with you and set up a consultation about how he can help you on your journey.

Today, Mark McNamee of Handyman Matters joins us today to describe what his business does to serve the St. Croix area.

They do a bit of everything. No job is too small -- they’ll come to hang a picture on the wall or they’ll redo your entire kitchen! The goal is to meet the homeowner and help with whatever home improvement or fix they might need.

What makes Handyman Matters different is that they have a team of craftsmen and a customer service manager who works with customers all day long. This system allows them to get out and make bids faster, and it means there is always someone to talk to once you hire them to take care of something in your home.

Handyman Matters services the entire valley in both Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s a pretty tight 30-mile range, but Mark and his team are willing to help people outside of that region if specifically requested.

Now that spring is here and the weather is getting nicer, it’s the perfect time to take a look at your deck to see if you need any upkeep. The folks at Handyman Matters have been getting lots of calls already, so get out and see if there is anything you need a hand with as soon as you can!

If you would like to learn more about them, you can reach them at HandymanMatters.com, (715) 861-4990, or on Facebook! Stay tuned for our next installment of The Local Dish, where we’ll learn more about My Happy Place Design Studio in Somerset. We look forward to talking to you soon!

Today we are going to discuss the importance of having a home inspection on your St. Croix home.

A home inspection is an opportunity to protect yourself as a buyer. When you add a contingency into your offer as a buyer for a home inspection, if something comes up during the inspection that would cause you to not want to buy the home, it’s your protection in being able to walk away from the deal.

After the inspection is complete, you’ll review the items on the report with your agent and if there are any defects, you can negotiate fixes. There are going to be some items on the report that you won’t want to ask the sellers to make repairs on. We’re talking about minor cosmetic issues here. If there is a problem with a major system in the home, the seller has the responsibility to cover at least some of the repair costs. Sometimes they may ask you to split them.

The cost of a home inspection depends on the size of the home but usually is in the range of $300-$400.

If you have any questions for us about home inspections, give us a call or send us an email. We would love to hear from you!

We want you all to know about an amazing program called Homes for Heroes. This program allows people of various professions to buy homes at a discount. Some of these professions include police officers, firefighters, teachers, doctors, nurses, veterans, and more.

On average, a hero will save $2,000 during a transaction, and if they’re buying and selling, they can save up to $4,000. This money saved can then be spent on updates or repairs to a new home, or you could invest money into your old home before selling. 

Please let people know about this program. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this rebate. If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us!