and they said, “Well we’re not really in any rush but we’d like to put it on in the spring. I said “great” and they said, “You know it didn’t sell last time.” And I said, “Why do you think it didn’t sell?” They said, “We don’t know; we got a lot of traffic, people gave us really good feedback but no one made an offer.” I said “Okay”. So after they chose to work with me I walked through the home with them and I said, “I would really suggest, we can market this in here but you are going to make a lot more money if you move out, get it down to what you need to, get rid of the stuff you’re not going to need in your new home, put the stuff that you want in storage. We’ll have a vacant canvas to work with in the home, I’d like to bring in a staging team to stage the home. They had beautiful hardwood floors that were very worn and I said, “I would like to suggest refinishing the floors, absolutely painting. We ended up doing a sewer scope here which is a general part of the buyers’ inspections. And we actually ended up doing a sewer scope, they found out they had a couple of holes in their sewer line so we had their sewer line repaired. I got them bids for all of this work to be done and the bids came to $20,000 so I sat down to meet with them one evening because I was a little bit nervous. I said I got them bids for the work to be done, they said, “Yes we’re interested in getting all that accomplished if we can afford it.”
So I got them the bids, they were actually really excited because the bids that I brought them, I have really good service providers; painters, stagers, hardwood floor people that are much less expensive than a lot of the service providers you might find if you’re randomly checking. So that’s part of the value that I bring to the market. They were really happy with the pricing of a lot of the quotes because this is much less than we thought it was going to be. So they ended putting $20,000 just into preparing the home; we ended up painting the home, refinished the hardwood floors, re-landscaped the yard as far as just pulling out some old bushes, mulching fresh beds, putting in clumps of flowers and then staging the home. I work with a really great staging company in Seattle who is superb and her and her team ended up staging the home and we put it on the market.
Remember, last year it didn’t sell for $479,000 this year we put it on the market for $545,000. We ended up getting 24 offers, we waited a week before we reviewed offers so the home was on the market for the week. It looked perfect, we had all the lights on for the first week because when people walk in you want to spoon feed them this emotional experience, especially if it’s in the evening. We had 24 offers, it sold for $745,000 it sold for $200,000 over list price. And that would never have happened, it didn’t happen last year, because people weren’t emotionally enamored with the home. This year when it came on the market it was a gem and it was sparkling and it was ready to go. And really, the sellers spent $20,000, they made an extra $200,000, so it was a really good investment of their money. And so if people just believe, and they were nervous because they had such a negative experience the last time, I kept saying, “Trust me, this is going to work.” I didn’t even think it was going to go that high, I was pleasantly surprised. And this is another thing about pricing your home properly, if you price it properly and let the market take it where it’s supposed to go buyers may offer way more. If we’d put it on the market at $745,000 it would be sitting there, it wouldn’t sell, but we priced it properly and then the market took it up.
Now granted, again, Seattle is a seller’s makers but this is an extreme price even from my experience but the house showed so well. And the kitchen wasn’t remodeled, the kitchen was kind of like a seventies kitchen but it was a gem, it was a real gem and they were extremely thrilled with the outcome. So properly preparing your home could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in the right market and with the right product.
JULIE: So now we have the disclaimer, both of us have the disclaimer, “We can’t guarantee you these results.”
MICHAEL: Right, no, no, no, no this is not in every home. It always varies, each home has its own story but I just wanted to tell you that because I have a lot of stories that are like that but the point is preparing your home properly. And these people knew, the sellers knew, I said listen, “You’re going to make what you’re going to make.” We couldn’t have done anything more or anything better to prepare the home for market than we did except for remodeling the kitchen. But I said to them, “You don’t have to do that, if we do all these other things it’s going enough. The charm of the home is going to carry it over the threshold” and it absolutely did. So yes, we can’t guarantee that on every home but preparing any home for market is going to make you more money than you would get if you didn’t prepare it properly.
JULIE: So properly prepared homes sell for more money?
MICHAEL: Absolutely, and more quickly, yes.
JULIE: And so often I hear people being so reluctant to put money into the home because they are leaving. People are starting to come around to the fact, especially if the house hasn’t had upgrades for say fifteen years, that they need to do the work.
MICHAEL: Definitely. And that was the case with this Ballard home, the people had lived in there for twelve years and I said to them, “Think of it this way,” and he said, “we haven’t put any money on the whole time we’ve been here.” And I said, “Well now you’re putting all the money in at the very end as you probably would have or should have done all along so you’ve just kind of saved your money to the end” They said to me, “Our home has never looked this good.” I said, "That is how you want to your home to look when it’s on the market, it should never look better than what it does when you put it on the market." That’s the secret, you want it to look really, really good.
JULIE: My father and I had a real estate brokerage together a long time ago and he always told me, “The house will sell when it’s ready.” So if there’s one more thing and one more thing it’s not going to sell until those things are done.
MICHAEL: Yes. And I think part of the challenge is that we as agents need to do a better job of educating the public. And I will say to people, “I am not just trying to get you to spend your money flippantly. I don’t want you to spend a dollar on this home that is not going to make you five dollars back. So everything that I suggest is only to prepare the home so that you get a better emotional response and a lot more money. Like these people said, “Should we remodel our kitchen?” I said, “No you don’t need to; it’s clean, it’s fresh, all cabinets wiped.” It wasn’t sexy but it was simple and fresh and I said, “It’s good enough, let’s just doll up the rest of the home and then if anybody who wants to remodel the kitchen themselves and let them pick out how they want to remodel it.
I think that it’s our job and our position as agents to really help educate the public in a very sincere and honest way to say if you do these things the outcome is going to be a lot better for you. I have another story for you if you’d like me to tell you. There’s a neighborhood in Seattle called Denny-Blaine, it’s one of the upper end neighborhoods, the homes all start at like $1.5 million and go up. And there was a beautiful 1910 craftsman that had been on the market for a year and didn’t sell. People had bought it ten years ago and had it restored to its original condition. It was stunning; hardwood floors, beautiful woodwork everywhere, box beam ceilings in the dining room. And it had been on the market for a year and it didn’t sell and it was on the market for $1.2 million. It didn’t sell so they came to me in the fall, they said, “We’ve had our home on the market, we are taking it off the market and what should we do?” I said, “Number one, you should wait to the spring because everyone has seen it and it’s kind of shop worn and tired. So we need to give it a little bit of a fresh break and then we’ll come on in the spring.”
So during that time I went over to their home and I listened very carefully to what they said, they told me their agent didn’t use a lot of technology, they didn’t love the photos, she wasn’t tech savvy – so I told them I was going to have professional photos taken, have a professional video, build a website, really do a lot of marketing and have a lot of social media so they have my listing and so on and
