Selling Your Home When You Have Pets

Pets are part of your family.  Chances are that when you look back at the home you are selling, your pets are a big part of the memories you have made there.  As much as we love our pets, they can pose several problems when you want to sell your home.  Planning ahead can save you a lot of time and stress.  Here are some of our tips.  Feel free to share your own at the bottom of the page.

Take a Look Around

Take a look at your yard and your house for signs of wear and tear caused by your pets.  It could be bare spots in the yard to stained carpet, but you need to spruce it up.  Get the carpet cleaned, lay down some sod, fix the fence, or whatever it is you need to do to minimize the pet effect on your house.  (I like to recommend this, if you have them, in conjunction with cleaning up after the kid effect, especially the little kid effect).  The second part to this equation is keeping the pets from recreating the same damage between the fix and the sale.  That will be the tough part, but it is vital to the success of your listing.

Take a Sniff (or, better yet, get someone else to)

I know, your pet doesn’t smell.  You had her/him for 10 years and no one has said a word.  Even when you’ve been gone a few days and come back to the house it doesn’t smell.  Trust me, you can have all the Scentsy warmers in the world and your house still has an odor.  It is the number one feedback we get from other agents on our clients with pets.  It doesn’t even have to be a strong or necessarily unpleasant odor.  I can’t emhasize this point more strongly to a seller: deodorize your house.  Get the carpets cleaned, change the air filters more regularly, and vacuum your upholstered furniture.  Then, get a friend who will be honest (or your agent if they will be honest) to come over and walk around the house sniffing.  If you have a friend that is sensitive to pet smells, be sure that they are screening for you.

Pick Up After Them

Just like kids, pets leave little tell-tale signs that they have been there.  Pick up after them during the sale just like you would a kid.  Chews and toys, food and bones, and anything they leave around the house should be put away each day.  There are two more important things to pick up, however, hair and poop.  Hair around the house, if your pet is a shedder, will increase the likelihood of odor and looks like you don’t clean your house.  Also consider that your prospective buyer might have allergies or just doesn’t want animal hair on them.  Worse than that, is poop.  Pick it up.  Daily.  Treat your yard like you were at the park.  Picture your buyer checking out your manicured back yard and falling in love with..SQUISH!  Now they have poop all over their shoe.  Maybe they do the best they can to clean it off, maybe they don’t know it’s there.  Either way, that poo is coming inside your house.

Should They Stay or Should They Go?

Last, but certainly not least, is the question of whether your animals should be at the house during showings.  In an ideal world, no, they, like you, shouldn’t be there.  Last I checked, though, none of us live in a perfect world.  So, when it is possible (considering your pet is portable), take your pets with you when you leave for a showing.  If the showing is while you are at work, crate them and place the crate in a room that is out of the way.  If you live in a climate that allows it, you might even put them in the garage if it is conducive to pets and safe.  Try your best, as painful as it might be, not to leave them out.  This goes for the back yard especially.

The people that are coming to view your home have likely selected it out of a much larger pool of prospective homes to buy.  They took the time to set an appointment, take time from their day, potentially travel a long way to get to your home.  They are there to focus on your home because it might soon be their home.  Your job as the seller is to make that 15-30 minutes that spend in your home as easy on them as possible.  That means pleasent odors, no loud barking or animal jumping on them, no stepping in poop, or any other distractions that can take them away from falling in love with your home.