Berkshire Real Estate, Business Brokers, and Auction Services.

We offer a complete service for executors. Our goal is to make the process of Estate Settlement as easy and seamless for you as possible. We provide you with specific tangible information relative to your individual situation. It is very common for executors to feel overwhelmed by the size and complexity of their duties. Quite often, there is simply not enough time to devote to the task. Emotion can get in the way of objectivity. We can help with a Turnkey Process. We give every executor an easy and confident process to perform their duties whether they are a trust company, lawyer, or first time executor.

Settling an estate doesn't have to be unsettling! Let us help you with all the aspects of inheriting estate property - the organization, care, valuation, and ultimate sale of the estate’s physical assets. Property Events can save you both time and money.

Here’s why and how...

Estate planners, trust managers, and accountants typically focus on the liquid asset side of estate settlement. But at Property Events, we understand that coping with the house, the contents, the cleaning, and the moving can be even more stressful, and time consuming, than filing for probate or changing an investment strategy.

An Effective, Proven Method
Through nationwide award-winning marketing strategies and unparalleled networking, we prepare, or stage, the property and the contents to go to market at the highest possible prices. We hire leading experienced local area suppliers, taking the risk, and the work, out of auctions, appraisals, and real estate sales.

Our proven effective liquidation process helps you get the most out of your estate property, both real estate and contents. We work with your attorney, or trust officer, to make sure all the details are handled as efficiently as possible.

If you know a real estate professional, you might be inclined simply to call him or her to sell your estate property. But selling estate property, which may be some distance from your own home, requires more than a cookie-cutter solution, more than just a real estate sign in the yard.

Busy executors that are tired of waiting the months and years it can take for vacant estate homes to sell are turning to the auction method of marketing for faster and more efficient results. The traditional MLS listing system is designed to sell a conventional home or property for a Seller offering his/her property under normal circumstances.

The sale of an estate home is not a normal circumstance.

The traditional "list, wait and see" real estate model is an "inefficient" manner to offer upscale, unique and estate property into the marketplace. When an executor is confronted with managing and maintaining a vacant and often depreciating estate home over an extended, and typically unknown, period of time, the traditional real estate method becomes inefficient.

In times when an estate property is not selling, typically the sole option the listing agent offers is a substantial price reduction. It is painful to see a family home sit vacant for months, or perhaps years, waiting for the right buyer to come along and make an offer on the property. It is equally painful to remember how neat and tidy the home and property once was when the grass was cut and trimmed, the weeds were pulled, flowers were in the gardens, shrubs and hedges weren't overgrown, paint wasn't peeling and the house wasn't cold and musty smelling. Would you offer your principal residence for sale in a closed up and neglected state?

Not only does it cost the estate and its beneficiaries hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of dollars per month in loss on return of capital locked up in an idle asset, but there is the depreciation of the high maintenance asset to consider. Further, heat, hydro, taxes, insurance and maintenance costs continue to build and often a vacant home becomes less of a priority and may get neglected.

The options to maintaining an estate home are painful and simple.

1. Neglect it.
2. Do it yourself.
3. Oversee that it gets done properly by somebody else and be prepared to burden those extra expenditures upon the estate and its beneficiaries.

What if it takes 6, 12 or 18 months to sell? Will everybody be as interested in maintaining the property then as they are today? As time moves along, are you going to be more motivated to accept any offer and perhaps the first offer that comes along? Is this good fiscal responsibility?

In an auction situation, the home only needs to be kept up for 4 or 5 weeks. During this period, it is easy to stay motivated because you know for sure that the end is just around the corner. Regardless of if you do the work of maintaining the property yourself for this short period of time, or hire it done, the investment will be worthwhile. The property will show in perfect condition for the dozens, or often 100's, of people who will view it through the auction open house process. You will be at ease that the property was shown in its best condition and that the value achieved through the auction effort was the best value possible.

Estate properties are often very difficult to place a value upon.

Many times they have been in the family for generations. They typically require infrastructure and cosmetic updates and there are not normally close comparable properties to the property being valued. Any appraisal on a property like this is at best, a guess. This most often is the reason an estate property sits vacant for months, or perhaps years, before selling.

The first price was the wrong price.

This breeds neglect toward the property as time goes by and the home begins to look tired. How sure are you that the price you choose to put on the property is the right price? If you ask for four evaluations and the top evaluation is 25% different than the bottom evaluation, do you pick the middle and hope that it is right? List low and hope to sell quickly is often the route Executors will take with winter approaching. What if the home was worth more? What if it was on the market for less than 2 weeks, had not made it onto the MLS system yet and you had an offer. Maybe you couldn't afford not to take the offer, in serious fear that winter was coming and there would be no others. Or maybe you take a chance and turn down the offer because you feel the property has not yet been exposed properly and could bring more if it were on the market, and the MLS system, for a few more weeks.

Having marketed the property as broadly as our auction marketing program will propose, having it kept up during the short viewing period and by gathering substantial and important data from the market place through the buyer qualification process, we will ensure the property brings all it can bring. Further, the provenance behind many estate properties assists to ensure maximum bidder interest.

Market shifts are another strong consideration when selling an estate home.

The auction method of marketing employs strengths in an accelerating market as well as in a deteriorating market. In an accelerating market, the auction method ensures that the property is not sold before it is exposed properly and fairly into the marketplace. It is often in an accelerating market that you hear of properties selling in one or two days before ever hitting the MLS system for higher than the asking price. Imagine if you had properly exposed the property and then given all interested parties an opportunity to bid against each other for the property. In a deteriorating market, auction will allow you to get out of the property quickly at today's price. In a deteriorating market, competition in the housing market gets stiffer every day as the market shifts from a Seller's to a Buyer's market. I am sure that you know of people yourself that still talk today about getting out of a property by the skin of his/her teeth in between 1988 and 1990 before the market totally destabilized. Can you predict where the market is going in the next 3 to 6 months?

Part of our continued success as a company rests on our abilities to forecast and prepare for shifts in the housing market. By being prepared for a change in the cycle, our company has proven to have thrived equally as well in a strong market as a poor market.

Our property specific auction marketing campaign will commonly capture the attention of literally thousands of people in the marketplace and we typically experience dozens and often 100's of potential bidders viewing the property during the 21 days prior to the auction. The price information and comment streams that we gather from these people will give the Executor the confidence that they need to sell the property at what will indisputably prove to be a fair market price. In addition to the confidence the process will give you to sell the property for a fair price, you will save thousands of dollars in unnecessary maintenance costs, carrying costs and loss on return of investment. And, the worry about selling the home will last 5 short weeks, rather than potentially 6 long months or more.

If you're an Executor in charge of selling real estate, have us prepare a thorough and detailed real estate marketing plan. We'll make the sale of your estate home an easy success, and our auction marketing system will provide you with the confidence you require to know that you've done the right thing!

If the estate that you are dealing with includes personal property assets in addition to real estate, like: household contents, antiques, jewelry, art, vehicles, commercial equipment and other assets, we can handle that also.