This month we've been talking about preparing your home for sale. And this week we're talking about carpet and paint.
Sometimes sellers come to me
to sell their house and they think because the market is so strong that they
don't have to do the very basic things like replace outdated carpet that's worn
because of the wear pattern in front of the couch or a little corner of the
carpet in the living room has some scratches on it from the cat.
And they don't think it's important to paint because they believe that the buyers are truly desperate and my response to that is, “Well, it doesn't necessarily work like that” so we need to talk about it because the buyers are paying premium prices for houses right now.
They typically are not allowed by the contract to ask for repairs. They're writing the contracts with as-is inspection clauses they're not asking for closing help and they're often going over list price sometimes by tens of thousands of dollars to be the successful bidder.
So you can imagine if you were to put on your buyer hat that you would at least want the house to be in. You know a pretty neutral move-in-ready condition and when you decide that you're not going to address your carpet or your other flooring issues or your paint what happens there is you get fewer offers and sometimes you only get one and if you only get one offer, you really can't compete to bid that offer up.
The best position for you as a
seller is to go ahead and fix those carpet issues. Replace your carpet with new
fresh carpet or if you have four or five different kinds of wood flooring on
your main level to try and bring that into a more consistent flow and to put a
fresh coat of neutral paint on the walls.
This will give you the absolute best opportunity to have multiple offers on your property and this is the way that we can bid up the price to the top dollar that the market will pay and honestly, the offers that you will get when you do that will far outweigh the money that you spend on that carpet and paint.
I hope you found this information helpful if you'd like to discuss it further or you need more information, please reach out to me.