12 Tips to Sell Your Home, Part 4

*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

The following is a podcast from a qualified senior care provider, hurt, on the answers for elders radio show. And welcome back everyone to our final segment in this hour with Rebecca Bowman from Sash Services, and we’ve been talking about just the all the things that you need to know before you sell the house, and I have learned so much. I’m telling you this hour and I can hardly wait to close out because I have a feeling these last two are really, really important ones that you’re leaving with us. Thank you, Suzanne. And what we really want to do here is help this to feel doable for families. You don’t have to do a big renovation, you don’t have to spend Fiftyzeros. Everything I’ve described as very affordable. You can do it yourself or you can hire someone to do it for just a few hundred dollars, and it makes a huge difference to maximize those net proceeds when it comes time for the sale price. So number eleven is as an easy one, but sometimes it’s overlooked, and that is you know, we do want the home to have some really nice sense in it. Yeah, and when you live in a home for a long time you sort of get what they call nose blind and you know it feels normal, it feels like home, and so we bring in a few outside sense from, you know, from the store, to make it just fresh and inviting. Now a lot of folks think you should. You know, I’m talking about like the GLADE plugins. I’m really not talking about that because those have chemicals that can be really irritating to buyers or people with allergies. I’m talking about things that you can just unscrew and hide under a chair and they do their good work without being a fire hazard because they’ve been plugged in for three weeks. Apple cinnamon is a really good scent to have, you know, or raspberry, and even the ones from the dollar store that you just peel off the plastic and you unscrew it and pop it open and you hide it in the house in different places. I recommend to per floor, if it’s a three story home, okay, and it can be a bowl of Potpourri, lots of different things so that when somebody walks in, instead of there being no sense, there’s a really nice one, a pleasure. That’s why I realtors big chocolate chip cookies when you came, yes, yes, and that sounds lovely, but if you have, you know, Forty or fifty showings of a home in a single week, how in the world will you bake cookies every single exactly? But that is lovely. But having those sense really makes it. It’s refreshing and there’s some really easy and inexpensive ways to do that. Hm. The last tip, and this is important and I want to spend a little bit of time on this, is that you know, home is comfortable, home is familiar, home is where your pets have their beds and you have everything. Of course, people want to stay in their home even when their home goes on the market. But here’s the thing is that whenever a buyer wants to come and see the home, if you’re still living in it or your senior loved one is still in it, and then you have to make arrangements, you’re racing around getting the dishes done, making the bed, putting the laundry away, wondering if the house is show ready, keeping the buyer waiting, and if there’s eight showings in a single day, you’re doing this eight times. Oh so stressful. So my twelve tip, if there’s any way possible is to not be in the home or have your senior loved one out of the home during the first two weeks of the listing. Such good advice. That’s the most important part of the listing. That’s when the most people are looking at it. They’re looking at it on Zillo or Redfin or all the real estate APPS. They’re flipping through the photos on their phone, they’re calling their broker, they’re saying, get me into this home. I mentioned earlier on your podcast that we just put a home under contract last night and, Suzanne, we had eighty four showings in a calice. Eighty four showings. So imagine being that same number eighty four years old. How are you getting up and getting out of the home? You’re not being disrupted eighty four times. And a typical showing a tip book goal listing brokers are able to start booking a showing at eight in the morning all the way until nine at night, and if each one stays about half an hour, that’s twenty six possible showings a day. My goodness, when we start to tell buyers now you can’t come here, you can’t come then, can’t come in the morning, can’t come in the evening you can only come between three and five for essentially narrowing that buyer well, it’s taking you longer to sell the house to right and people are discouraged from seeing it because you’re not making it easy for them to come in. A few easy places that that you know, if I won’t say easy, a few ways that folks can get out of the home during those first two weeks. Number One, stay with family for a couple weeks. That that is an inexpensive way to do it, especially if you’re due for a visit to see the grandkids or anywhere, or sister out of state. Another idea is there’s respite stays in the senior living communities. HMM, so they don’t. If you’re senior loved one is kind of thinking about moving there anyway, you can just say, why don’t we just do a two weeks stay? It’s an affordable rate. You can try it out see what you think and it’s a safe place. Then it’s a clean place, it’s full of folks that are their age and they can maybe go oh, this isn’t so bad one and here’s the other thing that I know that there are some senior living communities that will let you move in and defer your moving fees. Pet on a pending sale of a home. Exactly what you can do is move in, you know early and more than likely your home will sell within the month, if not sooner. And so it depends on where you are, course, in the US, but I would say for the most part, and so in actuality, take what you want. That’s the other beauty of this. Take what you want where you think is just minimal right of what you need. You still have your home hold home back home, exactly, know her things in storage. So if you find that you get to senior living and you’re there a week and say, you know what I want that separate reading lamp. I should have brought it am I want to go grab it, you have the ability to do that, and that’s one of the nice things about having that. I mean, I guess has drive. Yeah, it’s like a test drive exactly, and you’re absolutely right. And also, moving into one of those communities you can see, oh, actually, it’s not that bad to be in a one bedroom because I’m spending so much time elsewhere in the building. Actually ITATER. I’m in the I’m in the beauty parlor, I’m in the dining room, I’m I’m playing cards and you know I’m out elsewhere. So when, well, how am I going to live in a one bedroom? It’s because you’re not going to spend all your time there. You know the sort of experience that to under exactly, it’s a total mindshift and actuality. You’re getting more living space than what you had. The differently is that this it just gives you a little private cocoon that you can stay in when you feel like you want to be alone and independent, but you have this whole community outside your door. Stuff which is so wonderful about senior living. And I know I like to say that it’s like a cruise ship on land. So I’m ship. You have this small little room. You know that we hold your bed in your and your suitcase because you’re out eating and dancing and watching shows and sitting up on the deck, and so of course you would never go on a cruise and stay in your room the whole time. And so it’s the same thing with using community. Another option for folks who don’t want any of the ones that I’ve mentioned is there’s Air Bnbes you can stay in for twos that are dog friendly, that are accessible, that don’t have stairs. You can just book a short term stay somewhere or in an extended stay. And here’s the question that I like to ask my clients when we’re talking about this is, if I were to offer you twentyzero dollars to stay out of your home for two weeks during the first part of the listing, would you do it? Well, of course you would. Yes, who would not take Twentyzeros for a two week stay elsewhere? Well, that can be exactly how much more you make for your home because you’re not there. Yeah, because you’ve allowed so many more buyers to see you, the home and your homestays show ready the whole time. It’s always perfect, there’s no dishes, there’s no dogs, it’s just ready to be shown the whole time. And you might not just make Twentyzero, you might make forty or fifty more because you weren’t there and you maximized your opportunity to let buyers really fall in love with it. Yeah, you know, I love that. I love that you know that philosophy, because a lot of us think, you know, that we need, need to stay close, or whatever that is. You can be closed, but just be away, and I think that’s really important that you’re not there and that you can have you know, the more people that see it, the more buyers there will be, which will drive up the cost, you know, the price. So that’s well and you can also you can have the the realtor should be stopping by and checking on it anyway while it’s being listed. The home is being seen every day by buyers, so it’s not going to sit abandoned and you can always have a neighbor check in on it just to make sure all the windows are locked and so forth. So for folks who don’t who worry about their home being empty, there’s a lot of ways to mitigate that as well. And what my goal is with every senior client that I take care of, and not just my senior clients of all ages, is I say, I want to make you as much as possible and I want to give you strategies that make you an extra five hundred and ten, twenty, Fiftyzero. You’re coinvested in the process. That’s how you get paid. So it’s two year your advantage to get as much dollar for the property as possible exactly. And if you are eighty five or sixty five and you’re selling something that is probably going to have a pretty important role in pain for your care in your older years. So yes, we want to fight for every nickel, we want to fight for every dollar. And if we can do some of these low cost strategies to get the house ready for market, make it clean, I call it putting the home in its Sunday best, and it makes you extra money. Well, an extra tenzero is how many more months of care, and so it matters. Yeah, yeah, you know, I love this philosophy for sure, and certainly a lot of this is is worth, you know, considering for so many of our families. So, in closing, Rebecca, just give us a brief summary of specifically, you know, what sash does and where you serve, and also how people can reach you. So we were founded in two thousand and five as a blend of real estate, senior care and social work, which were the three backgrounds that I brought into the business to found it. Providing seniors and their families with homesale options that are not typical, that are totally designed around their needs, and we provide specialized services that lift the burden of the sale off of the senior homeowner and their family and also help them maximize what they earned from the home. Very passionate about it, as you can tell, and we’ve been serving for seventeen years, almost MMM and proud to be a part of the elder care community and working alongside incredible professionals in elder care all this time. And people can me just at Sash Servicescom or triple e four hundred sash. That seven to seven four. Rebecca, I am still thrilled to have spent this hour with you. This is important information to each and every one of you and to all of our listeners. I hope you listen to all four segments of this this is powerful and it can certainly make a difference in what’s your home sells for and how you can make this process so much easier, either for you or for a loved one. And Rebecca, thank you so much. Thank you, Susan 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.