Selling Your Home For Up To 18% More Part 1 – Preparation

Hey there Tom Olsewski with Coldwell banker and Team Olsewski and I want to welcome you back to the video blog and thanks for tuning in today. Our topic today is how to sell your home for up to 18 percent more money. Now I know that sounds like a bold claim. But we can back it up and I’m gonna walk you through the process over the next few videos in exactly how we do just that. So starting out there’s five real main areas that we focus on. This will be a 5 part series so check out the remaining 4 videos.

To let you know where this process came from it was an experience I had working with a client between 2011 and 2012. I had helped them by recommending changing out the tile counter tops for granite or a hard surface. They were retiring so weren’t in a big hurry so they took my recommendation and implemented the recommended changes.. The small items they updated would have a definite effect on the sale price of that home. We ultimately sold the home the next year for way more then before the updates.

We are back in a market where there is slightly more inventory for a buyer to choose from including new homes. It is important for you to get the most possible money when you sell that your home shows in the best light in the eyes of potential buyers.

OK this is it….. here’s the five areas where you will see the biggest return on your investment.

Number one is the preparation of the home. What we know from experience is that homes that are prepared well for market sell for more. We call them turnkey or move-in ready. Those homes are selling for a premium of 5 to 7 percent more than the rest of the prevailing homes on the market. In addition there’s more demand for those homes simply because the average buyer who’s purchasing a home in SW Riverside County at 400,000 to 800,000.  are using every last dollar they have to just get into the house for their down payment. They typically don’t have a lot of money left over to do remodeling.

So that’s why we get the increased competition on these homes.  But when it comes to preparing the home. The first thing we want to do is what’s called an upgrade analysis.  This is taking a strategic look at your house and figuring out where can we put a thousand or two thousand or five thousand dollars into the home on improvements and get ten or fifteen or twenty thousand dollars back out. And what I can tell you is….. we are getting anywhere from a 200 to 400 percent return from putting money into that home strategically. So with the analysis we want to make sure that there is room in the sales range to make sure there is a return on your investment.

Second thing we’re gonna want to do when preparing the home, is we’re gonna want to get it inspected.

This is the reason why that’s important. Because once you receive an offer on a property eighty percent of the negotiating power flipped to the buyer. They now have the opportunity to get their own inspections and poke holes in the property and determine the what’s wrong with the property and get their own contractor to give estimates which you might not like. So by inspecting the home upfront we can find out what little things need to be done and have one of our contractors or handyman repair potential problems. Its typically one quarter or one third of the cost repairing upfront versus in the middle of escrow.

If you’d like to know what particular cosmetic updates or improvements we typically focus on. Be sure to check out one of our past video blogs about the five home improvements to boost your home’s value or the key updates that you can do to upgrade your curb appeal. But the preparation piece is critical and that’s what we’re here to help you do. So that’s part one and stay tuned in to our video blog for more videos.  Next time when we talk we will review the importance of presenting your home to market properly.

Until we talk again it’s Tom Olsewski saying Make it a great Day!