Bridget Morrissey eXp Realty serves Southeast CT and Southern RI : best real estate agents in Pawcatuck

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Friday, December 6, 2019

Pawcatuck Real Estate Report November 2019 by Pawcatuck Real Estate Agent Bridget Morrissey

Pawcatuck Real Estate Market Report from Pawcatuck Real Estate Agent Bridget Morrissey

There are 54 homes for sale, ranging from $79K to $1.4M.

$299K Median Listing Home Price
$176 Median Listing Home Price/Sq Ft

There are 54 homes for sale in Pawcatuck, CT, 4 of which were newly listed within the last week. Additionally, there are 8 rentals, with a range of $950 to $2K per month.
Call or text Pawcatuck Realtor Bridget Morrissey about Pawcatuck homes for sale at 860-857-5165!

CLICK HERE FOR THE STONINGTON REAL ESTATE REPORT

Pawcatuck is a village in the town of Stonington which is located in New London County on the coast bordering Rhode Island. The population was 5,624 at the 2010 census. It is located across the Pawcatuck River from Westerly Rhode Island.

The Mechanic Street Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places includes sites of shipbuilding, mills, and worker housing in a 147-acre area.
Pawcatuck includes the neighborhoods listed below:

The Pawcatuck Real Estate Market Report is brought to you by Pawcatuck Realtor Bridget Morrissey.

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Pawcatuck Home for Sale

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

What Sellers Should Expect When Closing On a House

Ah, closing on a house. It’s the finish line! You’re almost home free (or free of your home in this case). You’ve accepted the buyer’s offer, the negotiations are finally winding down, and there is only one more little box to check: closing.

OK, so maybe it isn’t a little thing. And maybe you’re a little bit worried something is still going to go wrong when closing on a house. That’s why we’re here to help get you through closing without a hitch—or barely a hitch (hey, stuff happens).

So check the approved offer, make a note of any repairs you and the buyer agreed on, and get to it—and don’t forget to cover yourself. Save receipts from items purchased and invoices from contractors, and take before and after photos of any work completed. You will have proof that repairs were completed on the off chance that the buyers contest them during the walkthrough or at closing.

Before your closing —often 24 hours or right before—the buyers and the buyers’ agent will do one more walkthrough of the house (for which you should not be present).

If things are going smoothly, the closing for you might boil down to a blur of paperwork. Unless problems creep up—or the buyer wants to negotiate further—you only have two jobs: waiting and reading documents.

Once the negotiations are handled and the papers are signed, the buyers’ funds are transferred to your attorney, who will handle the payments to cover your loan and pay your real estate team. Thankfully, this part is handled by someone else.

And then comes the best part: You’ll get a check for the remainder! For more details about the closing process go to bmre.us/hint2

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Home buyers will, at times, be their own worst enemy when it comes to buying a home.

Stop Making Excuses! Busting the Most Common Reasons for Not Buying a Home

was written by Terri Williams for realtor.com on Sep 4, 2019.

Owning a home means you can build equity, take advantage of tax deductions, and partake in a little something called the American dream. For the past couple of years, the U.S. homeownership rate has hovered around 64%. But there’s also a considerably large pool of renters in the country who have plenty of reasons for not buying. And some of those explanations are totally legit: Financial, economic, or personal limitations can prove that now is not the right time to buy. But we know an excuse when we hear one.

We get it—investing in real estate is a huge commitment. It’s scary and exciting all at the same time. But what if buying actually is in the realm of possibility? Go to bmre.us/tip1 and learn more about owning your own home!

Monday, September 23, 2019

Color Trends From the 2019 Maison & Objet Design Show

Sellers should think about classic neutral colors that may be easy for the buyer to paint over for their own taste. Agnès Carpentier has a September 10, 2019 article.

Color Trends From the 2019 Maison & Objet Design Show

If you’re ready for a change from white, gray or a single bold hue, you’ll like this news out of the Paris trade fair.

Sweet Harmonies of Beige, Taupe, Greige, Honey and Fawn are back.

These colors are timeless classics rather than novelties. However, there’s no better way to spice them up than to combine shades of these colors. Taupe (and onward through the spectrum to brown) has made a big comeback, and there are also mustard yellow, fawn and sienna. These reassuring palettes inspire cuddling up under a blanket! bmre.us/hint1

Friday, June 14, 2019

Pawcatuck Real Estate Market Activity Summary for the month of May 2019

The Pawcatuck Real Estate Market Activity Summary for the month of May 2019 is brought to you by Pawcatuck Realtor Bridget Morrissey. It shows that there were 57 Pawcatuck homes for sale and 5 Pawcatuck homes for rent . The Median Listing Home Price in Pawcatuck was $267,500. On average, homes in Pawcatuck sell after 72 days on the market. For the entire Pawcatuck Real Estate Market Report from Pawcatuck Real Estate Agent Bridget Morrissey please click HERE.

Bridget Morrissey is an award winning Realtor serving southeastern Connecticut and southern Rhode Island.

Always on the move, and so are her clients!

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Thursday, February 28, 2019

Track Home-Related Expenses

Owning a home means having a place that’s safe and secure to come back to after a long day at work, every day, forever, until you decide it’s time to buy a different home. In exchange for all this homeiness, all you have to do is keep all the broken bits together, maintain the grass and track home-related expenses.

Oh yes. If you don’t do a little bookkeeping, the tax man gets his and more. Might as well keep that cash as not, right?

Why You Should Track Home-Related Expenses

Your primary residence isn’t an investment, this has been said time and again (especially since the market crashed entirely), but that doesn’t mean that when you go to sell you have to take a loss. Far from it.

In fact, as of the writing of this article, you’ll likely qualify for a tax exclusion (meaning you won’t pay taxes on this amount of profit from your home sale) of $250,000 if you file on your own or $500,000 if you and your spouse file your taxes together. But, if you sold and there was more than the applicable amount in gains, you’ll have to pay taxes only on the profit above the mark. When you have all your ducks in a row, it gets a lot easier to see what side of that line you stand on.

Reducing Your Tax Burden is the Goal

When your gain from your home sale exceeds your tax exclusion, there are two ways to help improve the situation with all those receipts you’ve been saving (you have been saving them, haven’t you?). First, you can deduct expenses related to selling your home, provided these are not expenses that affect the house physically. Think closing fees, brokerage commissions, and some seller-paid closing costs.

The other way to reduce your capital gains burden is to produce records that account for your extensive remodeling. These are the kinds of projects you definitely need a hand with. They include, but are not limited to:
Adding an additional room
Upgrading your kitchen
Replacing flooring
Having new landscaping installed
Putting on a new roof

The best part? These don’t have to be from the same tax year as when you sold. If you added that bedroom three years ago, pony up the receipts and reduce your tax burden. Unfortunately, regular home maintenance isn’t included on this list of ways to save a few dollars. Make sure you keep those receipts separate.

Get a Little Help From Your Friends

Keeping track of your personal finances, let alone the expenses related to your home, can be a daunting task. There are so many ways to pay these days and so many different kinds of things to pay for. This is the very reason, though, that you must be even more careful when tracking home-related spending.

Everybody has their own system, to be sure, but some are clearly superior to others. For example, if your plan is just to toss a bunch of receipts in a bucket until you get around to sorting them and manually recording each one, you may want to look into something a bit more efficient.

Even an Excel workbook is out-modeled these days, but there are several different types of apps you can use to help track your expenses, including:

Complete personal finance apps. Popular apps like Mint and Wally are essentially full personal finance packages that happen to store receipts. While you can give these apps permission to grab you bank information from a variety of banks all at once, you may end up with enough data that it’s a trick to find those old receipts down the road.

Dedicated receipt storage. Shoeboxed, Receipts by Wave and Expensify are far more focused on the receipt part of your financial picture. All allow you to photograph and upload the receipts in question, can export the data you collect as a variety of reports and have a cloud-storage option, so you don’t have to worry that you’ll lose your receipts if you change phones or need to reload your operating system. PS. BTW, Shoeboxed will actually take that bucket of receipts and process them for you if you mail them in.

Receipt storage designed for homeowners.

Not to toot our own horns, but toot toot. HomeKeepr allows you to scan your receipts in and helps you track home-related expenses automatically. All you need to do is snap a picture of your receipt and the software does the rest. You can then sort your receipts by the service type or business so you can see at a glance how much you’re spending on your project. Unlike other receipt trackers, HomeKeepr can track and maintain records for related items like appliance manuals and maintenance tasks that are due for your home.

Are You Ready to Invest in Your Home This Year?

Thursday, October 25, 2018

5 Things to Keep in Mind for your Vacation Home Purchase

Just imagine it! Waking up to the sound of sea and surf pounding the sand right outside your very own home. You don’t have to call ahead for reservations, you don’t need to ask anyone for a key or have a check-out time. It’s all yours to do with as you will, and you’re going take advantage of it constantly because now you own your very own vacation home.

Not to burst any vacation home-shaped bubbles, but before you get too lost in the fantasy, you need to consider some of the many pros and cons of owning a home away from home.
Vacation Homes Aren’t For Everybody

As the real estate market begins to respond to financial pressures from higher interest rates that are only set to increase further, as well as trade wars and tariffs with some of the country’s best trading partners, more people are just waiting for their favorite vacation spot to experience a market correction. If you’re one of them, don’t jump into the vacation home market without seriously considering what you’re doing.

Sure, it can be cool to have a vacation home. It can be the very best thing. But if you never use it or you never go anywhere else, it might be the wrong call. Consider these five points when buying a vacation home today or tomorrow:

1. What can you afford on your own?

It’s no secret that many vacation homes will go for several times what your personal home may be worth. Because of this, buyers like to try to pool their assets to pull off a vacation home purchase with friends or family. Don’t let your vacation home become a cautionary tale: buying a vacation home with anyone that you’re not married to could become a long term problem.

What if you and the friend or relative don’t like the same beach? What if you can’t agree on the property to purchase? Will you be resentful the rest of your life? Most importantly, perhaps, is what to do if your co-borrower has poor credit, can’t come up with their part of the downpayment or is otherwise creating a giant problem for your mortgage?

After you’ve actually bought the property, who pays for what repairs? Don’t buy with friends or family, but if you do, get a lawyer to draw up a maintenance and payment agreement that you both sign to get everything on paper and make it official.

2. Even if you do buy a vacation home on your own, it will be complicated.

This isn’t your momma’s FHA loan. When you buy a vacation home, you’re almost always going to use a conventional mortgage. You’ll need stellar credit, an excellent debt to income ratio and, most importantly, a lot of cash. Unlike primary homes, which rarely require reserves, being the lender on a secondary home feels awfully risky to the bank.

They may still lend to you, but they’ll want to see that you have anywhere from two to 12 months of reserves on hand. If you’ve not heard the term before, “reserves” are funds already in an account somewhere that are equal to a certain number of months’ worth of payments for both of your homes. This also includes anything wrapped into your payment due to escrow, like homeowners’ insurance and taxes.

3. Do you have a plan for off-season care and maintenance?

If a friend or relative lives nearby, you probably are set for someone to look in on your place, but if not, you’ve got to get this part figured out before you sign on the line. Just like an occupied home, your vacation home will develop problems over time. Wear and tear happens even when you’re not home and pipes love to freeze and burst when no one’s looking. You have to have a plan.

You should hire a handyman, property manager or other real estate expert to keep an eye out and call in help when necessary. That’s a cost you’ll have all year, so make sure you figure it into your budget. Since your property is a vacation home, it will also require more expensive insurance coverage, as well as specialty insurance if it’s in an area where floods, hurricanes or earthquakes are common.

4. Renting it out when you’re not using it makes your vacation home a rental, not a vacation home.

You absolutely can rent your vacation home from day one, provided that you purchased it as an investment home. Some buyers think this will save them a bunch of money, since someone else will take care of it part of the year, at least. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between a glorious rental partnership and a home that’s been burned to the ground. If your neighborhood, for example, won’t allow AirBnBs and their ilk, or has strict rules about maintenance, you are responsible for the rebound from missteps there, no matter how good your renters.

You will have to find the guy to mow the lawn, you’re paying for clean up every time renters move out, you’re paying for repairs and so forth. Did you want to be a long-distance landlord? A property manager can help ease the pain, but it will still cost plenty. If you do decide to proceed with a rental situation for your vacation home, make sure the house you buy is in a location that’s really hot, otherwise you may not be able to get enough rent to cover all the expenses.

5. Oh, hey, and selling can be difficult and costly.

For every one of the real estate experts who claim that buying a vacation home is a great way to make money, there are experts who realize that the market is unpredictable and you may find that you don’t love that vacation home as much as you thought in a few years.

After spending two years dealing with short term renters, you may decide it’s easier for you to go back to renting a nice hotel for your vacation stay, rather than owning a headache of a property. That’s all fine and good, until you find out that not only has the market bottomed out, you can’t even get enough money out of the place to cover the mortgage and your closing costs.

Remember, when you sell, you may also be on the hook for capital gains taxes, and you can’t take a capital loss if the property in question is classified as a second home.

If you still have the stomach for a second home after running through this list of things to consider, then proceed with caution. Don’t buy a project house unless you have someone else to do the work and even then, make sure that the only thing you do at that vacation home is relax. Going on vacation just to stress out about the lawn isn’t a fun kind of vacation, you know?
Your Vacation Home Support Team

Wondering where you’ll find all the people you need to help keep your vacation home in good shape, whether you’re renting it out or just visiting on the weekends? Ask your HomeKeepr family! A quick click and the community can recommend home pros in the area, from the best handyman around to a property manager who can keep your renters in line.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Pawcatuck Real Estate

The Pawcatuck Real Estate Market Report is a monthly statement of the median sales price for homes, the number of sales, the average price per square foot for homes, the number of homes for sale, and the average listing price of Pawcatuck homes for sale.