Sellers, do you want to sell your house? Really? Really really? Well, the Prime Directive for getting a buyer to take an interest in your house is it has to be clean. You would think that is obvious but it apparently isn't obvious enough. We aren't talking about tidy here, we are talking about clean. Clean the windows, clean the tub grout, get rid of the spider webs along the ceiling. Power wash the sidewalk. Make the entryway sparkle. And, please, please, please, empty the cat box at least once a day if not twice!
Watch some HGTV on how to sell a house or go to YouTube for some ideas. Selling a home is a marketing team effort. As the listing agent, I spread the word that your wonderful house can be bought. As the owner, you are responible for the care of the product being marketed!
I showed houses this weekend to two different buyer parties. We were in two different homes that these buyers might well have fallen in love with if they had just been clean and stages. Both houses had great floor plans. Both are in great locations and the price is reasonable in both cases. We are having a serious Seller's Market in Dallas and neither of these homes are selling and I can tell you why.
The first house was very tidy but it was deep-down dirty. The windows needed cleaning. The kitchen cabinets had these discolored circles of grime around the cabinet pulls. The master shower had this line of unidentified grunge along the sliders for the glass doors. There were no pictures on the walls and the walls hadn't been painted in at least 20 years. My client's comment was that the place was "depressing".
The other home is just too obviously lived in. It is "decorated" rather than "staged". You may personally love that novel wall treatment but it really needs to go. You want people to look at the house and not comment on your creative decorating ideas. The second house was also cluttered. Kid stuff was all over the place. If we had been able to see beyond the stuff, we might have gotten a chance to also see that this property needed Deep Cleaning just as the first place did. But we expended all our energy fending off "stuff".
I know this is a whole lot of work and I wish you didn't have to do it. The only way to avoid it is to put a deeply discounted price on your house. That is the sad reality. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Picture coutesy of Flikr Creative Commons.
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