Getting Ready to Sell
We live in the age of every millennial aged woman watching HGTV and other fixer upper channels pretty constantly. Desert Flippers, Nashville Flip or Flop, and of course, the big daddy of them all, Fixer Upper. Joanna has mastered the ability to stage homes to show maximum impact of the floor plan, upgrades in homes, and the overall look of how great a home can be with the right staging and presentation. As a Realtor, I see a lot of homes either on the MLS or in person. It almost always rings true that it is obvious when someone takes the time to stage their home. There are a few tips that are pretty easy to do before you have to think about completely staging your home with a professional that I want to go over.
Number one, de-clutter your main living space. With a lot of recently built or flipped homes, that is usually going to consist of your living room and kitchen. Obviously, those are usually very cluttered areas full of what you would normally be using daily-especially in the kitchen. Now that we have the two little rugrats rolling around all over the place, it honestly shocks me how much stuff is in our kitchen and living room just to either entertain and/or be able to feed them. If we were going to be selling soon, I would want to get as much of that as possible out of the house for photos or showings. Way too often do I get a notification of a new home on the market in a spot that I need one to be and I look at the photos and they’re just chock full of “stuff”. Someone will have their Keurig, coffee maker, coffee bean grinder, griddle, baby-Brezza, and KitchenAid all on their counters (may or may not be our kitchen’s situation at all times these days) for professional photos that are used solely for the purpose of showing off your home to potential buyers.
A lot of home shoppers will drive around prospective neighborhoods that they’re considering purchasing in before they even go and do walkthroughs of listings. Therefore, you need to make sure that your landscaping is taken care of and looking clean. If you have any HOA that takes care of your landscaping, make sure that you’re revolving listing your home around scheduled cut dates to make sure that it looks as clean as possible. If you cut your grass and tend plants yourself, make sure it’s all taken care of before putting on the market. Once it goes live, there will be attention paid to it and you don’t want to do anything to turn away potential buyers.
The last, and most important thing in my opinion, is making sure that you have professional photos taken of your home that are going to be shown on the MLS and other services that will be showing your listing. I’ve seen an epidemic lately in Nashville of homes that are listed by agents and it is completely obvious that someone took their iPhone 5c and went and took a bunch of poorly positioned and poor quality photos. That is unacceptable, and is most likely going to make you lose money unless an investor that doesn’t care about the state of home eventually buys your property. When I see a home pull up in a search demographic that I create that doesn’t have good photography done for it, I will not recommend it to a client unless they choose to go see it themselves, usually only for the location that the home might be in.
As I stated previously, when you are listing your home, everything that you are doing is in the hope of netting the most amount of money possible for the return of investment. And if you live in Middle Tennessee right now, that’s exactly what your property is- an investment. Everywhere around the mid-state right now is booming due to Nashville’s growth. History proves that being cheap usually doesn’t yield the most profit. You go to and pay for college to earn more money in the future. You buy stock because it is eventually going to grow and evolve in to something down the road. You have to spend money to make money. What sounds more appealing- using a friend that is going to give you a cut commission price but not put the work in to your listing resulting in you earning less ROI? Or finding the right agent (me, obviously) that will put in their own money on the front end to make your home as appealing as possible to potential buyers to make sure you get the price you’re asking for? And that is not to say that all agents that utilize a friendship to get listings would do this- in fact, most would not- but there are agents out there that don’t care enough to put in the deserved effort.
Long story short, hiring an agent is expensive. When figuring out your net profit on a sale, agent commissions are going to be the biggest chunk of that. Would you rather agree to pay someone 1.5% for your home to sit on the market for two months, not only delaying your purchase of a new home, but forcing you to reduce your listing price by $10,000 or so, or find a great agent to pay 2% or maybe even 3% that can utilize their abilities to get your home under contract quickly for the highest dollar possible? Anyways- off the soapbox. When getting prepared to sell, make sure that you take the time to de-clutter your space, especially main living areas. Maximize your curb appeal to make sure you’re making the home inviting to come in to. Lastly, make sure that you are having professional photos taken of your home. It’s worth the trouble to do so.