The HGTV effect

Fifteen years ago, a potential buyer might have walked into a house that had pink shag carpeting and knotty pine paneling in a spacious family room and thought, "This place has potential."

Nowadays, that house-seeker likely would take one look at the shag carpeting and the pine paneling and flee.

Today's buyers want hardwood floors and Berber carpet, neutral paint hues and 9-foot ceilings. They want granite countertops in the kitchen and marble backsplashes, stainless steel appliances and brushed nickel fixtures.

It's been dubbed "the HGTV effect."

People see the featured properties on HGTV shows such as "House Hunters," "Property Virgins," "Designed to Sell" and "Curb Appeal" — just to name a few — and they want what they see on TV.

Fixer-uppers are so yesteryear. Turnkey — a term heard all of the time on HGTV, meaning move-in ready — is what buyers desire. And they want to pay below-market value for it.

For sellers, this can spell frustration.

Pattie McKinsey and her husband decided they wanted to move to Lancaster city, so they put their three bedroom, 1 1/2 bath home in East Petersburg on the market in June. "Everybody kept saying, 'Oh my gosh, your house is gorgeous. It will sell without any problems.'"

McKinsey thought she was ahead of the game: Her home was built in the 1970s, but it has been updated with a gourmet kitchen, which is appointed with the now-requisite stainless steel appliances, a built-in wine cooler, granite countertops, custom-built birch cabinets and travertine floors. The house also has a vast deck, perfect for entertaining.

These are features that once would have been unheard of in a home selling for less than $220,000.

But the buyers who have seen the house thus far have passed on it. With fewer than 1,500 square feet, the house was too small for those buyers, McKinsey said. It doesn't have a basement (a fact that should not have come as a surprise, as it is plainly stated on the listing).

It has a master bedroom, of course, but not a master suite.

Master suites are a "very, very big thing" right now, said Jason Burkholder, sales manager, associate broker and real estate agent with Weichert, Realtors–Engle & Hambright in Lancaster.

But you're unlikely to find one in an older home, he said. "That's the kind of thing you could expect in a newer home."

"People are just looking for these great big rooms," McKinsey said. "I just think that people are very, very picky."

McKinsey, who is in her 60s, said her first house was a small townhouse. But younger buyers, she said, "want everything right away. They want to walk into a ready-made house, but they don't want to pay for it."

Chris Habecker, a real estate agent who has been based in Millersville since 1971, said, "It's definitely a buyer's market, and they're taking advantage of it in every way they possibly can."

Buyers now want homes to be "almost in perfect condition," he said. "The younger generation wants to start off where mom and dad left off."

Burkholder, of Weichert, agreed. There is an expectation nowadays that "every house on the market should be magazine-perfect," he said.

Buyer expectations, he believes, are heightened by the wealth of home-related information and entertainment available to them.

There are scores of TV shows about buying property and renovating homes, not just on HGTV, but on TLC and even PBS. And there are "50,000 magazines and websites," he said. (Or at least it seems that way.)

Burkholder said he loves it when buyers do their homework. But sometimes, they need a little help wading through the data available to them. "People are just swimming in information."

The modern-day homebuyer can view hundreds of properties online before deciding which houses to view in person.

And thanks to HGTV, buyers know what features to look for in a house (and which ones to spurn). Recessed lighting is good; popcorn ceilings are very, very bad. Wall-to-wall carpet is passé; everyone wants hardwood floors — wide-plank hardwoods, preferably. Shiny brass fixtures are out of vogue, and laminate countertops are a no-no.

Also, Burkholder said, "a majority of people unfairly dismiss homes like split-levels or bilevels." This is a shame, in his view. "You can get tremendous usable square footage" in those types of houses.

"Somewhere along the line, we developed this mind-set of 'Average homes aren't good enough,'" Burkholder said. "When did a not-high-enough ceiling become a problem? … What is the height of the average person?"

Consumers may not be able to afford homes in the $250,000-$350,000 range, "but they have the expectation that that's what they should be striving for," Burkholder said, "so they judge the $200,000 house with the same expectations."

Martha Osborn, a real estate agent and certified residential specialist with Prudential Homesale Services Group, says that in decades past, buyers were willing to settle for whatever they could afford. "My parents' generation, when they moved into their house, they were happy to have four walls and a roof."

If a room wasn't painted in a color they liked, or a kitchen appliance wasn't quite what they hoped for, they figured they would make changes when time and their budgets allowed.

Things are different now.

Elizabeth Bowlin, a real estate agent with RE/MAX Associates of Lancaster, said that "unless something is truly a bargain-bargain," buyers don't feel they need to live with anything they don't like "because there's so much out there."

When they make an offer on a house, and when issues surface in the inspection report, "people are asking for a lot more to be done because they can," Bowlin said.

Osborn said it's a great time to buy a house because interest rates are so low, but often people are buying houses with not much money to spare. So they may not have the disposable income to make home improvements after buying a house. They expect — and need — repairs to be done before they buy the house.

A homeowner might be willing to live for years with a leaky faucet, Burkholder noted, but a buyer probably won't be.

Bowlin said, too, that many homebuyers are "worried they might overpay." They are not sure how much lower the market is going to go down, and they're looking to protect themselves against any future downturn.

She advises her home sellers not to be offended if buyers tender offers that are well under the asking prices of their homes. Chances are, the buyers are "not looking to be mean or disrespectful to the seller. They really do think they can negotiate that price down. … I do think the outside market does influence this. People think they can get bargains anywhere."

But while other regions saw the bottom drop out of the real estate market in recent years, home prices in Lancaster County have remained relatively stable.

"Real estate is local. Trends elsewhere do not apply here," Burkholder said. "You're not going to buy a house for significantly less than market value in Lancaster County unless it's in poor condition."

And even foreclosed properties might not be priced as low as buyers expect. "Banks are not selling foreclosed houses for just what's owed on them; they're selling them for what the market will bear," Burkholder said.

So viewers might see on "House Hunters" a nice house selling for half its value in Arizona or Florida. But finding that kind of bargain here just isn't likely.

What is likely is that a buyer here — as elsewhere — will be looking for every possible financial break. For many buyers, this means not only asking for repairs to be done on a house, but asking the home seller for help in covering closing costs.

This has been a significant change, local real estate agents say.

A decade or so ago, a buyer simply wouldn't have gotten away with wanting to negotiate on a house's asking price — and asking for seller assistance, too. In the past, "the buyers either bought the home or they didn't," Habecker said.

Indeed, Burkholder noted, about five years ago, when homeowners were fielding competing offers, they could flatly refuse a would-be buyer's request for a home inspection.

Those days are gone. Now, it's the sellers, not the buyers, who have to jump through hoops. Buyers are in the driver's seat, and sellers have to expect to offer concessions.

"[Buyers] are going to offer less and still ask for seller help," Habecker said. "It takes a little nerve to do that, and they have it. … The younger generation, they have some savvy, and they're going to use it to get all they can."

To attract buyers, sellers no longer can just plant a "for sale" sign on the front lawn and expect their homes to sell. Houses now need to be carefully staged.

If the seller can't afford expensive renovations, they're at least expected to paint a few walls, de-clutter the rooms and plant some flowers to increase their home's curb appeal (another term frequently bandied about on HGTV).

Pattie McKinsey said her house was already in excellent shape when she and her husband put it on the market. The house's furnace was serviced every year. Their gardens were meticulously kept.

But when they recently changed real estate agents, their new agent advised them to touch up some paint, flip-flop the family room with the dining room, remove some furniture and family photos and take down artwork. "We thought, 'Will this ever end?'!\p"

McKinsey has been bemused by some of the feedback she's gotten from would-be buyers. One person didn't like the furniture inside the home. "They're not buying the furniture. … We were like, 'You've got to be kidding me.'

"What do people want? That's what I don't know."

Contact Sunday News staff writer Suzanne Cassidy at scassidy@lnpnews.com.