I think many sellers find the advice they get regarding preparing their home for sale confusing.  Some agents will tell you to just leave your home as it is, and some seem to tell you that you must put in a completely new kitchen if you have any hope at all of selling your home.  Well I hope that I am not here to add to the confusion.  My hope here is to give you as a seller a framework from which you can make your own decisions about how to improve the positive feedback on your showings. 

If you have read the first two articles in this series you might have some idea of what I am about to say. (Article 1, Article 2)  In the first article, I argued that the only reliable way to price your home is to compare it to other similar homes which have already closed, not to homes currently on the market.  In the second article I argued that location remained an important feature of your property in a buyer's market but that it may not allow you to demand the previous premium that your neighborhood commanded during the seller's market.  I encouraged sellers to consider location along with other factors as loss leaders which are used to make your home a better value than other similar homes on the market.  In a buyer's market issues of quality may also be considered loss leaders.

Let me start by defining my term.  When I am writing about issues of quality I am talking about your homes cleanliness, general maintenance and upkeep, as well as the value or perceived value of the finishes in the home.  Besides location these are probably the two most important factors in any showing which give the client either a good feeling or a bad feeling about your home.  While staging can make a difference and is another good tool to have in your toolkit, it is really the cleanness, the perceived care, and the value of the finishes for the price which give your home an edge when comparing it to the competition.

Let's take each of these three items one at a time.  The first, cleanliness is at once the most obvious and the most inconsistent of my three areas of quality.  I have three children.  My oldest is seven and my youngest is under a year.  I understand how difficult it can be for some of my clients to keep up on their homes and I work hard not to expect of them more than I expect of myself when it comes to cleanliness.  Yet, it is just a fact, that for most of my buyer clients a clean home makes them more comfortable.  Probably the most important thing you can do to sell your home is to thoroughly clean it.  Why does this matter so much?  To be honest I am not sure.  The cleanliness of a home has very little to do with its maintenance.  It can be perfectly clean but falling down and that is by far better for perceived value than if it is dirty and perfectly maintained.  I think that it has much to do with lifestyle.  The person who is perceived as messy is thought incapable of doing maintenance.  The person who is clean is perceived as doing a good job on home maintenance.  It also may have to do with the person coming into the home imagining what it will be like to live in the home.  That is harder when the home is dirty and overly cluttered.

The perceived lifestyle of the person who is selling the home also is a good guide to the maintenance projects which should be considered.  I once sold a home which continually got feedback as worn and "showing rough."  The home was owned by a single mom who needed to get out from under a huge mortgage that her husband had taken out weeks before he died on a fishing trip.  (It was a good reminder to me to make sure that I had enough life insurance to take care of my children.  Are you covered?)  I couldn't figure out why we kept getting the "rough showing" feedback.  Yes it was a home with four children, and it wasn't always picked up perfectly, but it was clean and the walls had been freshly painted thanks to some neighbors.  Yet I felt it too.  It looked like a worn home which had been freshly painted.  One day while standing in the kitchen I finally perceived what had been bothering me unconsciously.  The trim was beaten up and scuffed.   Four kids had taken their toll.  I gave the home owner my tape gun for painting and suggested that she take a brush and touch up the trim as she had time.  Wow!  I was surprised just how much of a difference a little touch up painting could make.  It was great!  The whole home sparkled and we didn't get any more feedback that the home looked worn.  So once you have taken care of the cleaning, it is time to move to the maintenance and, in particular, those perception issues which allow a buyer to feel comfortable about the quality of the home.  Remember, when a buyer walks through your home they are not only looking at how they will fit their furniture.  They are also looking at how much it will cost and how much time it will take to paint and put in new carpet.  The more you can do upfront to address these issues the more the potential buyer's will relax when they look at your home.

So far, did we really change actual real quality of the home?  Not significantly, but we can sure changed buyer's perceptions of a home and that can make thousands of dollars worth of difference.  I have argued that this is because buyers make inferences about themselves living in that home and about the quality of the home based on the perceived lifestyle of the current owner.  Now the question becomes whether or not it is worth the money to do major upgrades to a home just before you sell.  In most cases I would say no.  Many remodeling projects take time before you actually get back the full value of the project from the home.  On the other hand, there are two reasons I could think of which might make these upgrades worth it.  First, I have talked in other places about seeing some upgrades as loss leaders to make your home stand out in a flooded market.  The same goes here for upgrades.  You may choose to upgrade your choice of flooring because it will make your home stand out from the competition.  That is a great reason to do an upgrade or two in a buyer's market.  Just don't get carried away.  The second reason to do an upgrade might be that your home nearly reaches another tier of quality but is just missing that one upgrade which would take it over the top.  Maybe it might need that granite counter to go with the upgraded cabinets.  Or it might support a quality crown molding.  Again ever so careful here, most of the time you will spend too much money on these upgrades and end up dropping back to the loss leader idea for these finishes in a buyer's market.  That may not be a bad way to look at upgrades but it can sure be disappointing when you were hoping to either make money on the investment or at least make dollar for dollar on that new countertop.

So to sum up, when considering how to prepare your home for sale, your goal is to give the potential buyer the sense that your home has been properly maintained.  Cleaning is the most important thing you can do here.  Secondly, take care of those maintenance issues which directly affect the perceptions of the seller as they walk through a home, dirty carpets, walls and trim should be high on the list.  Finally, while upgrades right before selling do have their place they can often hurt you financially in the end becoming loss leaders used to make a home stand out from the crowd rather than dollar for dollar investments.

Any questions?

Feel free to email me at: erikwecks@windermere.com

http://erikwecks.com/