Maximizing The Selling Price Of Your Home

When I first step into most homes, I see your home from a different perspective than you do. You live there every day and I’m seeing your home for the first time. Think of me as a pair of “fresh eyes” if you want.

Time and again, I walk into potential Seller’s homes and begin the process of making notes on the things I believe will make a difference in price. Maybe it’s a fresh coat of a popular, neutral color of paint. Perhaps it is touching up the landscaping. Sometimes it’s more drastic, like refinishing the hardwoods. There are even times when little things, like hiring a stager, make a BIG difference.

Whatever it is, it is because I want potential buyers to be wowed the moment they walk in the door. It’s hard to put a price on the “wow factor” but I can tell you this, WOW means MORE MONEY!

Here is the hard part for me as a Real Estate Expert/Consultant. I have to explain to potential Sellers that their home may be in need of some TLC or the wall of pictures with 4 generations of family needs to be taken down. Sometimes, people take this personally and that’s not the way it’s meant to come across. I try to break this news to owners in a kind manner but these things must be done to maximize the selling price.

A Real Estate Expert/Consultant is worth every nickel they make if they can show you how to sell your home for more money! If an agent walks into your home, tells you everything is just fine the way it is, and tells you they can get the maximum amount of money for your home, RUN! You’ve got the wrong agent in your home. Go hire an Expert!

Let me give you a few examples of recent sales I was involved in. I had a client that was a referral that was single and had lived in the same home for more than 25 years. They had done foundation work but never fixed the sheetrock, the wood floors hadn’t ever been refinished during that time, some of the inside closet doors were falling apart, there were some false ceiling tiles glued to the ceiling in the den. This home was ripe for an HGTV makeover.

I asked the owner if they could give me a $6,000-$7,000 budget for a facelift. There was some hesitation on their part to spend that sort of cash without a guarantee of at least that much value being added to the home’s selling price. I couldn’t guarantee that but I truly believed it would bring more value to the selling price than they would spend on the facelift.

One of their neighbors had some friends that wanted to move into the area so they asked if they could see the home in its AS-IS condition. We agreed to show it AS-IS and the next thing I know, we got an offer from their agent for $350,000. That offer was rejected and even though we went back and forth, we never could get them up more than a few thousand dollars over their original offer.

So, it was off to the races to get the home’s facelift started. The idea behind a facelift is to give the home that WOW factor needed to drive traffic to the home. When the photographer shows up to take pictures for the listing, we want the best quality product so we can get the best possible images.

After the work was done, we staged the home and as a result, we got some fabulous images to put on the MLS! Don’t fool yourself, almost everyone shops for a home on the internet before they ever get in their car these days! Lousy images = lousy traffic! Great images = great traffic! The listing went live on a Wednesday at $395,000 and by Friday, we had almost a dozen showings and probably half of those submitted an offer!

Long story short, several of those offers were considerably over the list price and I had a very happy client! They were so happy they referred a friend to me that was in a similar situation. Let’s explore that case as well.

The referred Client called me and told me they were ready to move but they had become very frustrated with the repair process. They were trying to manage the process on their own and wanted to give up and sell the home as a “tear down”. Not the best way to maximize your selling price! Especially when they spent significant money replacing major components like roof, foundation, plumbing and A/C. This home is in a much older neighborhood where a lot of older homes are being torn down and replaced with newer ones.

In the end, same sort of story, I connected them with some of my trusted contractors that gave them much better prices than they were being quoted. It took about 4 weeks to complete the needed repairs. The stagers came in and rearranged the home. We got gorgeous images to put on the MLS and the home went on the market this week at $70,000 above “tear down” price. We had an Open House on Saturday and it was my busiest Open House ever!

I haven’t received an offer yet but I expect to receive several early this week from people that visited the Open House. If I was a betting man, I would bet we get at or very near the asking price on this one!

As a Real Estate Expert/Consultant, it is my duty to maximize the amount of money YOU sell your home for! After all, it benefits both of us! For you, it puts more money in your pocket. For me, I come away from the deal with another raving fan I can count on to refer me to their friends and family and that means more to me than anything else.

The moral of this story is that you deserve the best so be sure you hire the best!

#RealEstateRoss #Realtor #SugarLand #Houston