A few weeks ago we kicked off a new series: How-To: Sell Your Home in a Down Market with an overview of the important factors that home sellers must address if they want to succeed in selling their homes in today’s market:
- Pricing
- Marketing
- Cleaning
- Extras
Rather than tackling these in the above order of priority, we’re going to hit them in chronological order. Therefore, today we’re going to take a closer look at the first thing you should do when you decide you are serious about selling your house: cleaning.
If you really want to sell your house, you’re going to have to do a lot more than just vacuum the floors and dust the shelves. A proper pre-sale cleaning is a thorough deep-clean of the inside and outside.
Here’s a good starting checklist for your pre-sale cleaning:
- Steam-clean the carpets and/or buff/shine the hardwood floors.
- Take everything off the walls and wash them.
- If it’s been more than a few years since the interior has been painted or if you have any walls that are “bold” colors, put on a fresh coat of paint in a neutral color.
- Pressure-wash the roof (edit: use caution or another method if your roof is asphalt shingles).
- Put on a fresh coat of exterior paint or pressure-wash the siding.
- Manicure the landscaping: pull the weeds, mow the lawn, prune the bushes & trees, kill anything growing in your driveway or sidewalks, put down some fresh mulch around the bushes and flowers.
- Clean every window, inside and out.
- Clean out the gutters.
- Thoroughly clean inside and out any appliances that stay (oven, fridge, etc.)
- Take down and wash any light fixtures with dust / dead bug buildup.
- De-clutter and simplify every room.
You can do these things yourself, or hire a professional. Either way you will probably be spending between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars, but by presenting a high-quality product you will be reducing the buyer’s ability (and desire) to negotiate a lower price.
Pay special attention to maximizing your “curb appeal” through pre-sale cleaning. The first impression your house makes on the potential buyer will set the mood for their entire viewing. You want a house that says “you would be proud to live here” from the moment they drive up.
It is also impossible to over-stress the importance of de-cluttering. A lot has been made recently of “home staging” to improve a home’s chances of selling. Paying a professional home stager is the easiest way to de-clutter your home, but you can accomplish much of the same results by doing a few simple things on your own:
- Take down all personal decorations: family photos, etc.
- Eliminate any furniture that looks old or “eclectic”
- Sparsely furnish each room, making sure that all furniture and decor fits the overall “feel”
If you’re the DIY type, the best way to prepare the interior of your house may be to go through the house one room at a time and completely empty the room, clean the floors, paint the walls, then “stage” it per the suggestions above.
The end result of a thorough inside and out deep-cleaning will be a house that looks great in pictures, and makes potential buyers say “wow” when they see it in person. If you truly want to get the best price possible for your home, do not put it on the market until you have achieved the “wow factor.”
How-To: Sell Your Home in a Down Market
Categories: Features
Tags: advice, buyer's market, cleaning, how-to, sellers, staging
From an article on home staging in the Puget Sound Business Journal:
For [Seattle home stager Jan] Sewell, who is also a Realtor with Windermere Real Estate and owner of her staging business since 1997, today’s market is unlike anything she has ever experienced.
“I have been through a couple of slow markets in Seattle before, but this is a different animal,” she said.
Sewell says she is already starting to feel the market’s traditional August sales slowdown.
…
“Most of my listings, up until this year, have sold within a week,” she said. “I am having staged things sit longer than I ever have.”
Take it for what it’s worth as an anecdote, but I thought it was interesting that even staged new construction is taking an unusually long time to sell.
(Clay Holtzman, Puget Sound Business Journal, 07.18.2008)
Categories: News
Tags: anecdote, Business Journal, staging
By The Tim on October 16th, 2007 at 9:05 AM · 6 Comments
A pair of articles today from the Seattle P-I and King 5 News focus in on those poor, poor sellers that actually have to work to sell a home in today’s slow market. No longer are run-down shacks full of years of accumulated junk being bid up to ridiculous heights. Now, you actually have to clean out your crap, paint a few walls, steam-clean the carpets, take decent pictures, and—oh yeah—knock a few thousand (or a few tens of thousands) off the price.
A year ago, buyers regularly bid above asking prices, waived stipulations such as inspections and used escalator clauses, which raise offers over competitors’ bids up to a set ceiling. Now, good homes in nice neighborhoods with realistic asking prices still can get multiple offers, but many sellers put more time and money into fixing them up, offer more incentives and accept more conditions, including offers contingent on sale of another home.
These days, it would take twice as long to sell the current number of homes on the market in Seattle and King County as a whole at their current sales paces than it would have a year ago. Seattle had 50 percent more homes on the market in September than a year earlier, while the countywide increase was nearly as large. Pending sales, which can be the best indicator of recent market activity, declined by more than 25 percent in Seattle and 30 percent countywide.
Update: Matt Goyer over at Urbnlivn points out a Baghdad Bob-style denial of reality from a condo marketer quoted in the P-I article. “Prices have not been cut.” Wait, yes, they have.
How about trying some of those good ol’ incentives to lure in an unsuspecting victim buyer?
Selling a home in the Seattle area has become tricker. What used to sell in one week can now take months. Home sellers are going to more and more extremes, offering enticing incentives to hook a buyer.
Those boom days when homes in Seattle could be sold in a matter of hours are for the most part over. Residential homes can languish on the market for months, so sellers are relying on incentives to try and seal the deal.
I expect a lot of languishing to carry on through the winter, and probably throughout next year.
(Aubrey Cohen, Seattle P-I, 10.16.2007)
(Roberta Romero, King 5 News, 10.16.2007)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Cohen, incentives, King5, quickie, Seattle_PI, staging
By The Tim on August 2nd, 2007 at 10:29 AM · 32 Comments
The stories have been piling up in my inbox at a faster rate than I’ve been able to post them lately, so that means that it is time for another bubble link roundup. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this post, and I don’t want to totally clutter up the front page, so click below to read the entire post.
[Read more →]
Categories: News
Tags: Ballard, Boone, Conway, Crellin, DeSilver, government_meddling, HouseValues, link_roundup, Olympian, puff_piece, Seattle_PI, Seattle_Times, staging, Tacoma_Tribune, Wells
