Sellers: Four Ways to Hater Proof Your Home

 

What is a hater anyway? In an urban dictionary it is described as "a person that develops a strong dislike for another, solely basing their own opinion on personal judgment rather than objective merit." In home selling you can and will be judged by buyers and other agents and faced with "haters" on your home.

In our experience, there’s one fundamental truth about haters: you can never fully escape them. The only way to live a 100% hater-free life is to never stick your neck out, and never do anything because, as the saying goes, you simply cannot please all of the people all of the time.

And this is particularly true with real estate and putting your home on the market – because homes, locations, aesthetics and such are so much a matter of personal preference, some people will find something to criticize about even the most perfect properties on the market.

As a homeowner, your job is not to try to make your home be all things to all people – but you do want it to appeal to enough buyers that you get one great offer (and multiple offers never hurt anybody, either). That said, you don’t want your home to be the house that nearly every buyer and broker sees, rolls their eyes and utters the same few, predictable deal-killing criticisms.

Fortunately, what is predictable is avoidable. Unfortunately, many of the things that make a home susceptible to haters are issues on the seller’s side of the property preparation responsibilities. Let’s explore the most common things buyers hate about homes they see. In the process, you’ll get equipped with things you (and your agent) can do to help sidestep those issues and, in large part, hater-proof your own home.

House Hater Complaint #1: Odors.
 You might think I’m beating a dead horse, here, or even preaching to the choir. But as long as house hunters keep emailing us to ask why, in the name of all that is sacred, they keep seeing homes that smell like all sorts of madness and mayhem, I’m going to keep repeating this message to sellers.

Viewing a home sounds like it’s all about the visual of the experience. And visuals are critical – your home should be in its Sunday best, so to speak, when it’s being shown, in terms of being spruced, staged and clutter-free. But when a buyer comes to see your home, they don’t turn off the rest of their senses. And there is nothing that can turn a buyer off from a home they’d otherwise like more quickly than a powerfully bad odor.

In particular, cigarette and pet odors in a house that seems to have been well-cleaned create the concern that they might be permanent and that the buyer might not be able to get rid of them without dropping some serious cash on cleaning or even removing wall, window and floor coverings.

If you are home a home and you know that someone has been habitually smoking in it home or that the seller has had a “challenge,” let’s say, with pet accidents, do not ignore the problem. And do not think that because you had the carpet shampooed or the drapes cleaned, or because YOU can’t smell anything, that the problem is gone.  The human sense of smell very quickly gets used to smells that it lives with or is surrounded with on a regular basis.

It’s one of the tougher parts of your job as an homeowner to ferret out bad smells and odors, no matter how painful or familiar and make sure they are eradicated by any means necessary, before you place your home on the market.

House Hater Complaint #2: Glaringly extreme overpricing.
There’s the kind of overpricing that makes a buyer say, “Hmmm – seems a bit high. Let’s go see it, but we might have to offer a little less than the asking price if we like it.”  Then there’s the kind of overpricing that makes buyer say “I’ll wait until a price reduction” or worse, hold their sides from laughing.

When overpricing is glaring, many buyers and buyer’s brokers will comment on it or inquire about it. What they are less likely to do is actually come out and see the place – especially if they weed it out online after comparing its specs to all the other homes in the area and the price range.  Often, homes this severely overpriced simply don’t sell, or not until after they’ve had some serious price cuts or have been on the market so long buyers begin to feel confident about making lowball offers.

In fact, the goal is the opposite – you want your home to stand out as a property that is not dirt cheap, but does present a good value for the money – that’s what motivates buyers to get out of their chairs and into the property for a viewing. This is also why an agent who knows the market is important.

Obviously, you don’t set the price of your home alone. It’s also obvious that the seller-buyer conflict about overpricing is one of those battles that have been fought since Adam and Eve sought to list the Garden of Eden.

Here’s how to hater-proof your home against this issue: fixate on the comps (comparables). Try to deactivate your emotional attachment and very human tendency to overvalue your precious home by poring over the sales prices (not list prices) of similar, nearby homes that have recently sold with your agent. You will see the overpriced homes that are lagging on the market, and any value-priced homes that have sold for way more than asking.

Also, consider using our first Open House as an additional hater-proof measure: if the buyers overwhelmingly comment that they think the home is significantly overpriced, we can communicate about this feedback.

House Hater Complaint #3: Dirt and messes.
Possibly the single largest source of House Hater Complaints I’ve ever heard are the dirt, messes, piles and personal belongings that buyers find so distracting, when they walk into a home for a viewing or Open House. Obviously, homes that are filthy from floor to ceiling are fertile fodder for haters, but often those homes are bank-owned or otherwise distressed so that the sellers aren’t likely to do much.  What is underestimated is how often even savvy home buyers are distracted (and disgusted) by relatively clean homes that just have a few outstanding messes, like piles of dirty dishes in the sink, piles of dog poo in the yard or even piles of papers, mail, books or clothes lying out in plain view.

Will one or two such items ruin the sale of your home? Perhaps not. But a few of them (or more) can certainly distract a buyer enough that they fixate on the home’s messes and, in the process, fail to see what is so great about your property.  As we see it, cleaning up, before every single showing is free – so it makes no sense to even run the risk of turning off a prospective buyer by letting messes get in the way of their ability to visualize themselves and their families flourishing in your home.
Think like a buyer and in detail on what the buyers would expect, in the way of cleanliness. 

House Hater Complaint #4: Lots of little malfunctions.
All of us tend to think our homes are in fantastic condition.  After all, your have had the furnace maintained regularly, installed granite and dual paned windows – maybe they even taken advice to have the floors refinished or the walls painted in preparation for putting the place on the market.

That’s all fantastic – all the non-cosmetic work that’s been done to maintain and improve your home should be trumpeted in your marketing materials, and the cosmetic items will (or should) speak for themselves. But here’s the thing: house hunters won’t be running the dishwasher or testing the furnace (at least not until inspections).

What they will do – almost unconsciously – is:
• flick light and fan switches
• open or close window coverings, closet, room and entry doors,
• open and close drawers, cupboards, gates and fences and
• hold the handrails as they walk up and down the stairs.

They will hear leaky faucets and point out water spots from long-ago repaired leaks, and they will notice (or potentially trip on) uneven exterior tiles, paths and walkways. And even though these items might be vastly less expensive to fix than the roof or sewer line you had replaced, they are much more visible and noticeable to a buyer.  In fact, buyers don’t always even know that the little malfunctions and repairs that need doing are little or inexpensive. And when they notice a bunch of these sorts of things in a single property, they can jump to the conclusion that the whole place is rickety.

Since these little fixes are inexpensive to make, try to have them completed before you list. We can refer you to great suppliers. You might even walk through your own property with us, together we can pinpoint all the necessary little fixes and happily we have a network of handyperson references for you.

Life, Lived Well.
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Any more tips you can think of? We would love to hear from you!


Copyright © 2013 Trulia.com. All Rights Reserved.

10 Great Home Staging Tips

Today’s homes don’t sell themselves. To win the battle for buyer attention and bring in the best offers, you have to play an active role in marketing your home. If you’re serious about selling for top-dollar and in record time, follow these sure-fire tips for staging successfully.

1. Check out the competition.
The first step to selling success is to find out what you’re up against. Before and during the selling process, visit other property open houses to see how your home measures up.
When you’re out, here are a few things to note:
• Property Condition
• Highlighted features
• Move-in readiness
• Staging tactics that will work for you

2. Create a staging plan.
Great staging requires that you cover your bases like a pro every time. Whether you hire a professional stager or work with your agent to do-it-yourself, put together a staging plan complete with a checklist and photos of what your home looks like when it’s ready to show. Follow the plan before every showing to make sure you put your best foot forward.

3. Get (and follow) professional advice.
If you’re serious about selling you need to enlist objective professional help. Ask your agent about his or her staging experience or if he or she has a professional stager or designer to recommend.
Data has shown that homes prepared by professional stagers sell for more. Getting an unbiased review from someone who sees your property “as a product” can be invaluable.

4. Eliminate the Excess.
Before you head out to buy new accessories to “spruce up your home” focus first on the items you can remove that will enhance a buyer’s experience.

The best signs of things you should eliminate are things that you aren’t using and those you’re planning to get rid of before you move.

5. Pre-pack personal items.
Depersonalizing and de-cluttering are the most critical steps of staging, but they can be a challenge, To make it easier, start by pre-packing and storing away the items you won’t need until after the move and anything personal (like family photos) that might prevent buyers from the envisioning the home as their own.

6. Clear off the counter space.
When it comes to the tops of your tables and counters, less is more. Clear off your counter spaces except for the occasional decorative or functional pieces (clocks or vases of flowers).

Remember, your gal is to help buyer see themselves in a home and they can’t do that with your stuff in the way.

7. Clean inside and out.
Everyone thinks they know what “clean” means when it comes to their own home. Here’s where an agent or professional stager can be super helpful. Invite them in to get an outsiders opinion on how to make the nooks and crannies you’ve forgotten about, glisten.

Also remember, the best selling homes tend to have garages, basements, side yards, and other outdoor spaces that are just as immaculate as their kitchens, bathrooms and master bedrooms.

8. Dive into the trim and details early.
It’s tempting, when staging, to do the big jobs – painting walls, polishing floors, moving futniture – and to run out of steam and cash before the little details get handled. Some of the least expensive home staging projects can carry the most powerful buyer-impressing payload. Here are a few details to make your listing standout.

• Clean or paint baseboards and other trim
• Ensure locks, doors and drawers work properly
• Paint or replace outdoor access like house numbers or mailboxes.

9. Shoot sample photos.
The first contact most house hunters have with your property is from a computer or mobile phone. Making sure your property presents well there is a big step toward sold.

Before you show off your home to the public, take a look at it from their view. Use your camera or Smartphone to take sample photos and view them on your computer.

10. Be brutally honest with yourself.
When you think you are done preparing your home, think again. It’s not overkill to go out on a Sunday afternoon, walk through a few Open Houses, get back in the car and drive home to walk through it like a buyer would. Ask yourself: What can you edit or de-clutter/ What is distracting? What stops a buyer from seeing the possibilities for their own family here? 

If all else fails, take your agent with you. Arm him or her with a packet of post-it notes and give them free reign to stick one on anything that should be removed before showing your home. Then get that stuff out of there.

Los Angeles Homeowner Plumbing Tips

Prevention is often the best medicine. This is a great and short video on some plumbing tips for homeowners.

Please feel free to comment and share some of your tips with us. We want to hear from you!

10 Things To Do With $10K

10 Things to do with $10K

Spring is coming!

For all the focus we put on transactions – buying and selling – the truth is that for most of your life as a real estate consumer, you’ll be a homeowner. And because your home is so much more than just a transactional asset, a widget to be traded and tweaked only for financial reasons, it makes sense to spend some portion of your time, energy and money making it really work for you.

Unfortunately, what too many of us do is wait until we can save up or pull out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a major move: build on an addition, gut and remodel the kitchen, turn the basement into a media room extraordinaire. And many times, that means we never do the project, or we only do it when it’s time to sell and move.

The fact is, there are numerous remodeling projects that can crank up your enjoyment factor at home, for the much more accessible sum of $10,000. Here’s a hit list of the top 10 things you can do for 10K, if you’re in your home and planning to stay put for a while:

1. Crank up the curb appeal. We usually talk about curb appeal in the context of sprucing your home up to prep it for sale, but I say that it’s also one of the most cost-effective home improvement projects for homeowners who are staying put in terms of life-improving bang for the home improvement buck. There’s just something about loving the way your home looks when you drive up to it day after day, or when you have people over, that dramatically increases your enjoyment of home.

Depending on which projects you’d like to do and whether you’re interested in doing any of the work yourself, you can crank up your curb appeal for just a few hundred dollars or a few thousand. Here are a few vision-starting curb appeal-boosting projects to consider:

• Exterior paint or power wash
• Paint or install a new garage door
• Paint or install a new front door
• Paint or install new trims (shutters, eaves, etc.)
• New exterior hardware (door kickplate, mailbox, house numbers, etc.)
• Exterior or landscape lighting
• Front yard landscaping spruce-up or makeover

2. Get rid of a wall. You might be a homeowner now, but hearken back to your days as a house hunter. You might remember seeing homes and wishing for what is easily the #1 remodel fantasy of homeowners to be: knocking down a wall. In my experience the wall home buyers-cum-owners love to hate the most is the one between kitchen and dining room, far and away. Opening a kitchen and dining room into one larger, brighter space holds particular appeal for those who enjoy gathering family and friends to entertain at their homes, without isolating the cook/host.

The next most common wall people crave to eliminate is a wall between two small bedrooms.

Now, agents and appraisers will tell you that turning two small bedrooms into one poses the potential to decrease the resale value of a home – and that’s true. But if you’re not planning to sell anytime soon, it might be worthwhile doing it anyway, especially if it renders two barely usable rooms into one user-friendly space. And in fact, this wall is often relatively inexpensive to remove – and to replace, if you decide to do so.

In fact, removing walls, even structural walls, is highly feasible and much less expensive than many home owners assume. (If a load-bearing wall is removed, the structural component can often be preserved and finished, by simple leaving a beam at the ceiling.) What can jack the price up is the relocation of plumbing or wiring contained in the wall being removed. Reconnecting interruptions in flooring and adding in things like an island or the other remodeling line items that can go along with opening a kitchen up (e.g., adding an island, new cabinets and counters, etc.) can also add up. Check with a reputable local contractor to consult on how such a project can be planned and executed efficiently.

3. Swap out the old windows for dual-paned. This is one of those $10K-ish projects that actually can pay for itself over time. Switching out your old single paned windows for new dual-paned ones might make your home look better, but it will definitely make your home operate more efficiently – and more comfortably. Dual-paned windows minimize heat-loss in the winter and keep the cool air in, in the summer, so you’re not trying to heat up and cool down the whole outdoors through the leaks in your windows. They’re also a must if you have street noise or other noise challenges around your home; the extra insulation traps noise before it can get to you, inside your home.

As with everything, costs vary by location and by the quality of window you choose, but you can use $200-300/window, installed, as a rough rule of thumb. Some older homes can require wood repair of rotted out window frames, in the course of switching to dual-paned, which can increase the project cost significantly. Also, many cities and states offer rebates for installing dual paned windows (and making other energy-efficient upgrades, by the by), which can dramatically defray the costs of this particular remodeling project.

4. Extend your living areas outdoors. The National Outdoor Kitchen and Fireplace Association pegs the average cost of an outdoor kitchen at $12,000 to $15,000 on average – so, if you can cut costs, find appliances on sale or do some of the work yourself, you might just be able to get one in your own backyard for the $10,000 price point. Outdoor kitchens can be as simple as a table and grill, or as complex as having wood-burning ovens, refrigerators and big-screen televisions. Whatever route you go, the appliances are likely to be the single most expensive line-item of an outdoor kitchen. If you can tolerate the high-class problem of bringing your food from indoors, you can very cost-effectively create an outdoor living room complete with weather-proof furniture and lighting, in your backyard instead.

The major remodeling return-on-investment indices don’t track the return on outdoor living spaces, but experience tells me that well-executed outdoor kitchen and living rooms are both extremely fun to live with – and extremely desirable to the buyers to whom you will eventually be marketing your home.

5. New kitchen appliances. In terms of sheer functionality, new kitchen appliances can create an overwhelming upgrade to your family’s everyday life. A new fridge will run you anywhere from $350 to $2,000 on average (though French door, custom and commercial versions can cost upwards of $10,000 or more); a new stove/oven range can run anywhere from $300 to $6,000 (with the commercial, 40-inch ranges running from $9,000 to $20,000+) and an appliance store dishwasher will cost you somewhere around $250 to $1,600.

6. Swap out your carpet. Listen, you might LOVE carpet. And if you do, that’s fantastic. But many Americans are living with carpet they really, really dislike, whether because of its color, its condition or the upkeep and maintenance it requires. If you have $10K and you can’t stand your carpet, you can estimate that it’ll run you about $300-$500 per room to replace it with new carpet, or $1500-$2000 per room to replace it with hardwood, depending – obviously – on where you live, how large your rooms are and what specific materials you choose in terms of the replacement floors.

7. Bring a bathroom into this millennium. The average cost of a bathroom remodel in America is right around $16,000, according to Remodeling Magazine, but that lumps master bathrooms in with powder rooms and the like. I say there are dozens of things you can do to your hall or other bathrooms to bring them into the 21st century for well under the $10,000 mark. For example, my Jacuzzi tubs are probably the most-used “appliances” in my home – homewyse.com pegs the average cost of swapping your tub for a jetted one at somewhere between $1500 and $3500.

In fact, there are a number of thousand-dollar-or-less bathroom power-tweaks suggested by Consumer Reports – if you’re committed and smart, you can group a number of them into a bathroom that feels like new for well under $10,000:

• Replace the vanity with a new wood model that has a stone counter.
• Add a new mirror and faucet. Alternatively, keep your current vanity but replace your toilet and faucet and add a new vinyl floor.
• Improve lighting and ventilation with a new combination light and exhaust fan. One with a heat setting will keep you from getting chilled when you get out of the shower.
• Add a set of sconces on either side of the mirror or medicine cabinet.
• Update towel bars, hooks, toothbrush and toilet paper holders, and cabinet hardware. Add matching shelves for your towels and toiletries.
• Switch your standard showerhead to one with multiple settings, including a pulsating or massage setting.
• Keep your towels toasty with a heated towel bar, some of which cost $100 or less.

8. Build in organizing systems. Clutter is an energy vampire – there’s nothing like having a place for everything and everything in its place to create the sense that your life is in control. And one of the most significant advantages to owning your own home is that you can customize it to manage your stuff and your activities, rather than being forced to fit your things into someone else’s system. If you have $10K in hand to make your home more ‘you,’ consider having custom organizing systems built into your closet, office, pantry or garage, tailored to your family’s stuff and needs.

The range of pricing here is vast, depending on whether you buy an off-the-shelf closet organizer at the home improvement store and install it yourself or call California Closets out to measure your shoes and sporting goods and input them into a custom design, complete with hydraulics.

9. Paint. A few years back, there was a study on what home improvements actually could be linked to an increase in happiness and well-being. One of the most affordable was to simply paint the rooms of your home in colors that fostered the target emotions that map to the function of the room. For instance, painting a bedroom a soft blue or green fosters tranquility and rest, while painting a kitchen or dining room a warmer shade might promote the cozy fuzzy feelings of family togetherness. Painting can be very affordable, depending on your home’s size and details, and is a great starter do-it-yourself project, to boot.

Here’s a personal cost-cutting tip: pick your colors from the designer paint swatches, but have the paint department staff use more affordable paint when they custom-mix the colors to mix.

10. Connect your home. When so-called “smart home” systems first came out, they were the stuff of an MTV Cribs episode, costing tens of thousands of dollars to put various home systems on a remote control. But as with all technologies, costs of connecting your home have come down – a lot. For anywhere from $200 to $2,000, you might be able to have your home’s systems wired so that you can:

• Control lighting, heating and AC remotely
• Have your HVAC systems and window coverings, for example, work in sync
• Monitor your home via video and sensors for security and other home crises (e.g., flood, etc.), no matter where you are.

The best part? Even the least expensive of these systems now is able to be run via a smartphone app. Home security providers are increasingly offering these options, and even some home internet/telephone providers have also gotten into the business of affordably connecting your home.

If you’re considering making a modest investment in a home you plan to own for a while, you’re increasingly in the norm. Studies show that over 50% of homeowners are now focusing on smaller home improvement projects that increase their enjoyment of their homes - even if they don't increase its value.

Another tip toward -- Life. Lived Well.
Excerpt Trulia 2012 By Tara-Nicholle Nelson

All: Do you fall into this group? What $10,000-or-less projects have you done at home that boosted your enjoyment?