Where to Spend When Preparing Your Home For Sale
I am not a fan of the websites that promise users various bits of information including a suggested value of their home and after you enter information, you get a page that says an agent will call you. They charge agents a monthly fee for these “referrals” and most of the users are not ready or don’t want to talk to a Realtor. I tried Home Values and Listings and was more than disappointed with the results.
Now having denigrated these providers, I did find a fun tool on HomeGain. They call it a Home Sale Maximizer and, by area code, it calculates where to spend money on preparing your home for sale. You respond to a series of yes no questions about your property and it returns the average cost of the improvements, the increase in selling price, the average return on investment and the percentage of agents who recommend each improvement.
I used it for Rocklin zip code 95677 and answered “no” to all questions regarding my home and the top three suggested improvements were Lighten and Brighten which has an average cost of $85, a return on investment of 770% and recommended by 72% of agents. Second was Clean/de-clutter with an average cost of $333 and yielding a 502% return with 90% of agents recommending (what agent would not suggest cleaning your house to sell?). The third most cost effective improvement was preparing your yard with a cost of $317, a yield of 251% and 74% of agents recommending. Improvements that failed to even return a dollar for every dollar spent included interior painting (60%), carpeting (45%), flooring (45%) and exterior painting (20%).
Remember, almost all Realtors will provide a comparative market analysis (CMA) on your home with no obligations and most of us are nice about it! These reports include information on similar homes that have sold, are pending and those that are actively on the market. I generally recommend including a personal visit to the home because you can learn so much more about a home when you actually see it, but will send them by email if that is what the client wants.
I am not a fan of the websites that promise users various bits of information including a suggested value of their home and after you enter information, you get a page that says an agent will call you. They charge agents a monthly fee for these “referrals” and most of the users are not ready or don’t want to talk to a Realtor. I tried Home Values and Listings and was more than disappointed with the results.
Now having denigrated these providers, I did find a fun tool on HomeGain. They call it a Home Sale Maximizer and, by area code, it calculates where to spend money on preparing your home for sale. You respond to a series of yes no questions about your property and it returns the average cost of the improvements, the increase in selling price, the average return on investment and the percentage of agents who recommend each improvement.
I used it for Rocklin zip code 95677 and answered “no” to all questions regarding my home and the top three suggested improvements were Lighten and Brighten which has an average cost of $85, a return on investment of 770% and recommended by 72% of agents. Second was Clean/de-clutter with an average cost of $333 and yielding a 502% return with 90% of agents recommending (what agent would not suggest cleaning your house to sell?). The third most cost effective improvement was preparing your yard with a cost of $317, a yield of 251% and 74% of agents recommending. Improvements that failed to even return a dollar for every dollar spent included interior painting (60%), carpeting (45%), flooring (45%) and exterior painting (20%).
Remember, almost all Realtors will provide a comparative market analysis (CMA) on your home with no obligations and most of us are nice about it! These reports include information on similar homes that have sold, are pending and those that are actively on the market. I generally recommend including a personal visit to the home because you can learn so much more about a home when you actually see it, but will send them by email if that is what the client wants.
posted by Julie Jalone @ 11:39 AM
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