12 Tips to Sell Your Home, Part 3

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The following is a podcast from a qualified senior care provider, hurt, on the answers for elders radio show. And Welcome back everyone to answers for elders radio network. And we are in segment number three with Rebecca bomming from Sash Services on the top twelve things you need to know to get your home ready for sale. And Rebecca loved what you’ve covered so far. So valuable tips and fill me in on what’s and we’re on number seven now. HMM, wow, so cool. So I can kind of talk a little bit about the outside of the home and you know, I’ve seen a lot of homes that people put all this work and care into the inside and then the outside doesn’t get the same love. So we’re going to talk about loving on the outside a little bit, but not in a way that’s expensive. So you know, you don’t necessarily have to do new paint. You can just pressure wash the outside of the home really lightly, not the hard way that gets the paint from off, but kind of give the house a light bath. A lot of houses have dust on them and cobwebs and the house just kind of gathers dirt over the period of years, and so pressure washing around the outside and then also driveways, walkways, stairs and things like that. The driveways you can get the moss off, some extra dirt if there’s rocks or weeds or things like that. A nice clean, shiny driveway, walk away and stairs and all around the home. It’s just a few hundred dollars for a good pressure wash and I highly recommend it. You don’t even have to paint, so that’s an even rent a pressure washer and can like could do it. You can. That’s what we did with our home with Home Depot. We would just went down there. It’s like you leave a credit card and and actually dirty and I think it costs US thirty six dollars for for hours. It wasn’t that at all. Yeah, we were able to just hook it up and go for it and that is the least expensive way, is just to rent your own and go ahead and do it. I A lot of folks think that they should pressure wash the roof, but I say don’t, because that can really take a lot of roof granules off on it with composition tiles and it actually takes years of life off of the roof to pressure wash it too hard. So so the body of the home. So that’s number seven. Number Eight, a nice fresh welcome. That so we want to you’re thinking about buyers walking up to your home and I’ve seen beautifully painted landscape homes that have the oldest, saddest welcome at in front of their front door. This is also like thing, isn’t it? Yeah, fifteen to thirty dollars at home depot or low’s or the nearby hardware store. Make It nice and big and professional. They’re going to look down and wipe their feet eat as they’re getting ready to go in the home when they view it. And so just a nice big welcome. E modern maps really easy to do. Now let’s talk about for number nine, that back deck or patio. So I want to list off a few things that I see in photos. I see big flower pots that have varying decaying flowers or plants in them, sometimes a couple dozen watering cans, the barbecue, six or seven deck chairs of all types, potting soil, drink stands, wind chimes, Garden gnomes. You just you just described my backyard patio almost I don’t have any nome, but PA your tables, umbrellas, not dog houses, all there. And so really it’s important for people to see their back patio or deck as an extension of the house. It’s like another living room, it’s the outside living room, and so dress that up just as you would the inside of the home. Get it all decluttered, give things away to neighbors or friends, take a load to the dump if things are not not able to be repaired or given away, and then go ahead and wash off the area. I say my favorite is just two chairs with maybe an outdoor pillow in one of the chairs and some nearby fresh flowers that spruce it up a little bit. M No barbecue, and you could have a barbecue. That’s okay. Wash it clean or have it covered, but really declutter that space because people might decide to make an offer on your home just based on that back deck or patio. So we want to show off of as much of it as we can. Write. So we blazed through three there. So we talked about pressure washing, the front door mat, the welcome at and then the back patio or deck. Going on to number ten, I’d love to talk a little bit about retro decor. So people have, you know, varying stages of older finishes in their home. They do. They have dark paneling on their walls, you know, the paneling that folks used in the s. They have avocado counters, Bright Pink or light blue tile in their bathrooms, green carpet, red carpet, blue carpet. Remember the day when, if you were somebody, you had a pick a different color carpet in every room, or cabinets, exactly all of these. And people look at all of these finishes in their home and they get this sinking feeling like, well, I can’t sell because I have to renovate all of this. I have to update all of this. And I’m here to tell you I have sold so many homes that were completely frozen in time from one thousand nine hundred and seventy two or that amazing to but we deep cleaned it. Yeah, we made it look great, we opened the curtains, we cleaned the windows, you know, we opened it up, we decluttered the back patio and still got bidding wars with everything dated. So an example is two years ago I sold a home for a gentleman who was a toddler when his parents bought the home. He was one and he’s now eighty two. So the goodness had been in his family for eighty one years and Suzanne, nothing had changed. It had such an old electrical panel that it was fuses. It was all the original proper goodness, all the original everything, and all we did was emptied out, do a deep clean, clean the windows, do some landscaping outside and we had a bidding war on that home and people fought over it. And so one of the things that that folks think you know, need to know is that by not renovating, you’re doing a couple things for your buyer pool. Number One, you’re appealing to people who want to do their own updates. They want to decide what kind of kitchen, what kind of finishes, what kind of paint they want to do that. Number two is if the home is not renovated, then it’s actually going to cost a little bit less, which means more buyers can afford it, and so you get a bigger buyer pool sure, and more people come in because they’re so excited. The home is four hundred and eighty thousand and they can only go up to five hundred and and if you had renovated, you would be selling at six hundred and so you’re acting it’s you’re probably making pretty so much the same out of your home too, because the amount of money that you would have put into the house is really not that difference than you know, margin different ways. Is exactly you finding that to be the case? In fact, homes are selling for so say the renovation would be eightyzero between not renovating and renovating and Eightyzero job. We’re selling home so close to each other in price. It doesn’t pencil to renovate. It just doesn’t make ass and so I say just clean it. In December I sold a home in a very nice area that had a hole in the window the size of a football and it had broken when the moving was was going on and we discovered it later and Suzanne, we didn’t have the ability to replace the window because we were putting the House on the market in the following week and windows are backlog. The supply chain is really hurt the availability of windows, and I just tape a piece of paper over it. That sounds terrible. And we had twenty seven offers on that home. My goodness, you can sell a home that is not updated. Clean it, declutter it, make it presentable, fill it with light, open the drapes. But you don’t have to if you’re going to spend money on the things that you want to do in the home make it financeable. You see the bank that the borrower is getting money from. They don’t care what color the countertops are, hmm. They don’t care what color the paint is or what the you know, bathroom the tile looks like. They care that the roof has some life left on it, they care that the furnace is in working order, that there’s no electrical hazard. So if you only have two thousand dollars or four thousand, spend it on the things that help a buyer qualify to buy it, as far as it’ll inspectable, pass inspection and it’ll appraise and so it just a little soap box on selling the home without renovating. Don’t be paralyzed by that myth. It’s not true. You know, I love that and I love that. You know, what you said is a lot of people want to imagine their own kitchen. They everybody has. Somebody might want a pizza oven and it if it’s not in there, it might they might walk out because or they might not even come to look at the house because it. Does it say that it has a pizza oven? I mean, I’m sure that that’s the case. And so, you know, everybody wants something different. It’s just a fact of you know how you know there’s a different type of buyer that you’re going to appeal to, which is a good thing. It’s a good niche that you can create exactly. And and so, you know, lat just last night, Susanne, I was here in the office and we sold a home for eighty eight thousand over the asking and this home has he heach countertops and original cupboards in the kitchen. And I know the market is hot right now, but and I want to say that this is still relevant no matter what kind of real estate market it is, because it was clean and move in ready. So we’re letting the buyers decide what they want to do with that decor. So what we focus on are the things that could be a deal breaker for a buyer, like the furnace, the water heater, the roof, the electrical the plumbing. Make it financeable, but not necessarily. I mean, HDTV would love for you to believe that you need to go, you know, make everything new and by all the magazines and spend months looking at finishes and things like that. You can’t. I’m so glad you brought that up because with WHO’s the premote audience for HTV? Bright Baby boomer women. Yes, Oh God, that’s who’s taking care of their parents. So, as say, all they all think that’s so. That’s really, really good, good information. One more tip on the on the renovation and then we’ll we’ll wrap this up. Is that it’s already stressful for your senior loved one to be leaving their home after thirty, forty, fifty years. It’s already hard, it’s already a lot of work. Why add to that the stress of a renovation with contractors and dust in the home and people coming and going and all the stress and noise? We do a lot of renovations at sash because we’re a general contractor, but we always have our client move out first. So not only does the renovation not make sense financially, but doing it while someone still living horrible. It’s very stressful and it’s being added onto the most stressful event of their life already, which is leaving their home after that many years. Right, right, Rebecca. This has been so helpful and we’re going to close out with two more very important tips from Rebecca and and segment number four. But in the meantime, how do we reach to Servicescom Sash, servicescom and we have a toll free number from anyone around the country. TRIPLEATE, four hundred S at seven to seven four. All right, well, Rebecca and I are coming back and segment four right after this. Seven one answers for elders radio show with Suzanne Newman hopes you found this podcast useful in your journey of navigating senior care. Check out more podcasts like this to help you find qualified senior care experts and areas of financial, legal, health and wellness and living options. Learn about our radio show, receive promotional discounts and meet our experts by clicking on the banner to join the Senior Advocate Network at answers for elders RADIOCOM. Now there is one place to find the answers for elders