Projects to Tackle Before You Sell

Marysville Real Estate Podcast Sandy Eagon

If you are thinking about selling, here are a few things you need to think about. When I’m coming up to a home with a buyer, we use our buyer eyes to look for four main things: 1. What is broken? 2. What is dated? 3. What is dirty? 4. What is cluttered? As you’re walking through your home before you put it on the market, look at what buyers are going to want to deal with right now. You may say that in a seller’s market, everything is going to sell and you don’t have to lift a finger. That is true—to a point. You don’t have to lift a finger, but if you don’t, you’re going to take a hit in your pocketbook. If you really want the home to shine and sparkle, and if you want to hit the buyers right where their hearts are, you need to make sure that everything is ready to go. The first things to look at are your roof and siding. How does the roof look? Do you have a number of years left on the wear? Do you have some patches? Does it need some cleaning? How is your siding? Are the boards smooth? Are you going to need to get a paintbrush out to make it clean and ready to go? Roofs and siding are two big-ticket items that buyers want to hear about. When you go up to your entry, is it sparkling? Are the windows clean? Are the spiderwebs gone? And that’s just the beginning. As you’re walking through the house, I want you to look at each room not as the room that you’ve walked into every day for however long you’ve lived there, but rather as the room that people will be walking into for the first time. Look at the structure and not your belongings. Is this a place that really shows off what you have to sell? “If you are thinking of selling your house within the next few months, now is the time to take stock and see what you have.” If you’re looking for what to do next, look around for things that are broken and fix them. If the broken item in question is a big-ticket item, call me. Let’s talk about whether that’s something that you can handle, something that you need help with, or if it’s something that you need the buyer to take care of. If it’s dated, is it something like paint and carpet? If so, you can always get your money back by updating them. Light fixtures can also bring a good ROI, but granite countertops? Not so much. Next, assess whether your home is clean and sparkling. You could do most of the work yourself, but depending on the situation, you might want to hire a cleaning crew at the last minute to come in and do a deep clean of the property. If your home is cluttered, figure out if you have things that you need to donate or put away in a storage unit. Now is the time to take a look, especially because we have one more month of reliably good weather to get someone out there to see what they can do, like a contractor, before things may start to turn. If you are thinking of selling your house within the next few months, now is the time to take stock and see what you have. Give me a call! Let me walk through and share with you what I would do (or not do) if I were you, as well as how we could help you make the process smoother and simpler. Let me know how we can help! Have a super blessed day.