Working Together: Not Listing A House Before It Is Ready
December 24, 2007 | By Kelley Koehler | Filed Under Home Selling
I would post pictures, but I’m not allowed to single out offenders.
I received a call from my sign in the yard of my Fayette listing. A woman was looking in the area, and requested to see my listing. We looked at the Fayette house one day, and then at some other homes in the area a couple days later.
We were entering our third home of the day, when she stopped about 5 feet into the house, turned around looking perplexed, and asked, “Do you have to take a listing if someone asks you?”
Well, no, I explained. I can generally pick and choose.
“Then why,” she asked, “would someone put a house like this on the market?”
“Wouldn’t you be embarrassed to put your name in front of a house that looks this bad?”
Well, yeah.
That’s why my listings don’t look like that.
We had just walked through three filthy houses – vacant houses, mind you, so it’s not about a Seller having trouble putting things away before a showing. We’re talking about messy, dirty, nasty little homes that showed terribly, places you leave and long for hot water and soap to wash your hands because you accidentally touched a wall while inside. All three are the same floorplan as my listing, and are priced higher than mine.
Mine with the new carpet and paint and countertops and fixtures and clean as a whistle.
I understand her frustration. It was a waste of time, looking at homes in no condition to be seen. Her comments made me think about my past and present Sellers. I do have high expectations for the people that I represent, as I think they do of me. We’re working together to achieve their goal of selling, so I expect my Sellers to put in the work needed to make a home competitive. And hey, I’m happy to help. There’s many a Seller that I’ve helped manage clean-up, paint, flooring, or other odd jobs. I’ve opened doors for contractors, coordinated handymen, I’ve even been at a Seller’s house, tools in hand, making it ready to sell.
I’ve a past client who will be selling soon, and bless her heart, she is anything but plain and that is reflected in her home. She has personality to spare, which endears her to me to no end, but we’ve got to make her home vanilla before she sells it.
It’s not about changing her or her personality, it’s not me being embarrassed to list a home with a gigantic dragon out front. It’s about getting her to where she wants to be: getting her home sold and her moved to another state to be closer to family. It’s a mutual goal, one we have to work towards together.
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Sage advice Kelley. It is always annoying as a buyer agent to have to wade through a home that is cluelessly inept in the way it was staged for market. And whether or not you purposely stage, or simply choose to stage the “ahhh #%@&* it” way, you are staging nonetheless.
As a buyer’s agent I’d gladly look at a dump that was dirty and priced correctly than a spotless show home that was way overpriced. I onced showed a home that warned in the MLS that there was a strong cat urine smell. It was priced way below everything else in the neighborhood. It sold the first week. I couldn’t stay in it for more than a couple minutes. Sometimes you just can’t get your client to clean the place up. If you get them to price it right, then it’ll sell no matter the condition.