The weather finally got nice today and we had two balloons over Muirfield Village. Gotta love this weather!

I just saw this article on Lifehacker and thought what a cool idea. Available to order through U-Haul.

Color coded and labeled tape makes it easy to pack and tape and label your boxes all at once.

The picture shows the 2 bedroom kit, which gets you two rolls of bedroom and kitchen tape and one roll of living room and bathroom tape, the packing streamliners seem like a pretty good buy. If that still seems a little silly, you could always just go with color-coded tape of your own. Either way, it’s a simple but great idea.

The clearly marked and color-coded designations (Office, Bedroom, Bedroom #2, Kitchen, Storage, etc.) made unloading go quickly for our movers, and organizing our many cardboard moving boxes much easier for us later on. No doubt we could have accomplished something similar with a handful of colored Sharpies, but it would have taken a lot of consistently careful writing to even approach the same effect—at a time when we were looking to make less work, not more—and the colored tapes really help make sorting a breeze.

Thanks to Teresa Boardman, St Paul Real Estate for introducing me to Wordle. It’s a cool web tool that lets you input text, in this case my blog, and arranges them in a number of ways.

In the image above, I just input my blog address and it pulls the words to make the image. Try it out and have fun!

After I show a number of Edmond or Oklahoma City homes, I invariably start getting a number of calls from listing agents asking for feedback. And some are relentless! I know sellers and their agents like getting feedback. But buyers agents are reluctant to give it and for a good reason. They are not obligated to because they have no contractual relationship with the seller. Conversely, they do represent the buyer and do have a responsibility to protect their interests.

So if I’m representing a buyer, why would I tell them the home is priced right? That weakens my buyer’s negotiating position if the buyer makes a lower bid. This is why I don’t normally say much when asked for feedback.

My company’s listings compete with other company’s listings. Am I not helping our competitors by giving constructive feedback on their listings? Doesn’t that increase the competition for our sellers?

When I’m representing an Oklahoma City or Edmond seller, I feel confident I have enough experience to know if we’re priced right or not, or if we’re staged correctly, of if there’s anything else the seller could do to improve the marketability of their home. Occasionally a seller won’t believe only me that their home is priced too high and it may be helpful to get feedback from a number of agents all saying the price is too high. But generally the sellers know.

So, sellers, don’t be surprised when you don’t get much feedback from showings. This is normal. Trust your agent’s feedback. Please don’t beat us up too bad when we don’t receive feedback!

Photo courtesy of Flickr | cindy47452