www.top10.comINTERSTATE MOVERS
Moving and relocating home can be stressful, whether you are moving across the country or town. Between packing, buying and selling homes, making lists to keep track of everything, and kids who want to know all about the new place, life can become cluttered and feel out of hand. However, many great sites and apps can help keep you organized and informed while you move.
Zillow
Whether you are looking to buy, rent, or sell, Zillow is a great site with a lot of different features. If you’re looking to sell, you can list your house here through a real estate agent or as the owner. You can calculate mortgages, refinances, and debt-to-income. You can even look at different designs for rooms of homes to get decorating or remodeling ideas. Zillow also provides an agent finder service for real estate agents, home inspectors, home builders, even house photographers.
Area Vibes
Area Vibes is a great site to find out the livability of towns or neighborhoods. It gives each place a grade for different things such as amenities, crime, schools, employment, and cost of living before giving it an overall grade. It also has in-depth demographic information. This helps you get to know your city before you move and will point out any red flags.
Yelp
A great way to find new restaurants, local businesses, nightlife, even home services is to go on Yelp. It provides customer reviews and ratings so you can see the local hotspots. You can also easily find places you would be interested in visiting.
Magic Plan
Magic Plan lets you take pictures of your empty home or apartment and then place objects to decorate and furnish your home. Instead of spending half your day measuring and moving around furniture, just snap some pictures and let the app measure for you. You can plan out your ideal floor plan without all the heavy lifting.
Move Planner
Move Planner may cost $1.99, but it comes preloaded with a list of checks for before you move. With suggestions such as “make sure you have all medical and dental records” and “make sure you have children school records,” you’ll be happy to have the reminder instead of keeping track in your head.
Great Guys Long Distance Movers
Great Guys Long Distance Movers helps you locate licensed, interstate movers and compare rates on a single platform. Now, instead of spending days calling moving companies and reading reviews, you can submit one quote form and receive quotes from multiple movers who have already been vetted by Great Guys.
Sortly
With Sortly, you can create a visual inventory of all you are moving. By printing off a QR code, you attach it to the box and then can scan the code to find out what is in the box and which room it goes. This gives you easy organization for you, so you don’t have to open up boxes to remember what’s inside constantly.
HireAHelper
Hire a Helper is a site that allows you to search local moving companies to compare prices, hours, and reviews. The site lists the businesses credentials as well the equipment lists of what the company will bring and what costs extra. You can then reserve the help you want for the day you are moving. This makes moving much less stressful than having to do everything yourself.
Understanding relocation home sale programs:
There are obviously tremendous expenses involved when moving an employee to a new location. The largest of those expenses typically involves the sale of the employee’s current home. In most cases, the company will want the employee to be moved and settled into their new location within a fairly short period of time.
Depending on the real estate market, the employee’s home could sell right away for the optimal price, or it could have difficulty selling and result in a loss for the employee. Either way, the home sale process can be the cause of much stress and worry for the employee. Such stress can negatively impact the employee’s relocation, as well as his or her work productivity before, during and after the move.
That is why many companies have implemented relocation home sale programs as one of the most important benefits that they provide to their relocating employees who are homeowners.
And although there are a few different home sale programs available, some can be costlier to both the company and employee, while others offer more favorable tax implications.
So, if you are evaluating the different home sale programs for your company, you need to be able to effectively compare and contrast the available options. Here is an overview of the most common relocation home sale programs.
Direct Reimbursement
This is perhaps the easiest home sale program to explain, because it simply means that the employee is responsible for the sale of his or her home, and is then reimbursed for the costs associated with that sale. The benefit of this program is that the company stays completely out of the transaction, and has no risk of owning the property in the event that a sale doesn’t occur. The issue with this program, is that the reimbursed expenses are viewed as taxable income by the IRS. So, there is an added tax burden that can become quite expensive for the company and/or the employee.
Buyer-Value Option (BVO)
This program mitigates the tax liability of the direct reimbursement program. It allows the employee to list and market the home until an offer is received on the property. Then, the Relocation Management Company (RMC) purchases the property from the employee based on the sales contract amount, and in turn sells it to the ultimate buyer. So, with the BVO program there are actually two distinct sales that take place for the property. This removes the tax liability for the costs covered to pay for the real estate broker’s commission and the closing costs of the property. However, if the sale falls through for any reason, there is the risk of the home being taken into inventory, which can be costly.
Amended Value Option (AVO) / Guaranteed Buy-out
With the AVO program, the employee normally has a set timeframe in which to find a buyer for the property. This could be anywhere from about 60 to 120 days. If the employee is unsuccessful in selling the home, they have the option of taking a guaranteed buy-out offer, which is based on an appraised value of the property. Once the buyout happens, the property is taken into inventory, which again, can be costly. But, like the BVO program, the AVO program also removes the added income tax burden.
Which Relocation Home Sale Program is Best?
As you can see, relocation home sale programs can be very complex and complicated until you understand them. In short, the goal for any relocation home sale program should always be to reduce the financial risk and tax implications for both the employee and the company. While all programs have certain advantages and disadvantages, the BVO program has become the program of choice for many of the companies.
