Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #03-01: Dave Hohe & Deb Rust New American Funding

Speaker 1: Welcome to Ready, Set, Sold with your host Bryan Vogt. Are you wanting or even thinking about selling your house but don’t know where to start? Good thing you’ve found Ready, Set, Sold. Now, real estate broker Bryan Vogt.
Bryan Vogt: Welcome, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us at Ready, Set, Sold. I’m your host Bryan Vogt. I hope you’re having a fantastic weekend. I want to talk to you today about actually probably one of the most important things that a seller needs to know. The good news is is that most sellers know it already and it’s not a problem. That is the issue of updating.
In fact, we’re on step number three. Step number three is having an updated house can make you or break you. I can’t tell you how important those words are. Go back a little bit. I’ll go back a little history. A little last recap of last week about picking out the right realtor. That is so crucial, that is so important.
Some of the highlights we talked about is confidence, trust, experience, knowledge. It’s so crucial. This is your biggest asset for most sellers. You really got to get it right. Go back to that or going back to that, that is crucial but this part here, the updating, can be just as crucial and can have just as much of an effect.
For those of you who don’t know, and some of you that have been following me now for a couple of weeks do know already, but I wrote a book called Ready, Set, Sold: 12 Proven Steps to Sell Your House Fast and For Top Dollar in the St. Louis Metro East Market. It became a number one bestseller. I’m very pleased with that.
The reasons why I wrote the book there was many but one of the main reasons just to focus on is not having that information for sellers to be able to make the decisions. This updating becomes so much more crucial on that. Not having the updating is … Let me put it this way with the updating. Sellers who do the updating, who have been in their house for seven or 10 or 15 years or however long, will sell their house for top dollar and fast and they deserve to.
They just do. They’ve made the investment. They’ve not only made the investment but they’ve also enjoyed the time. Who doesn’t want a good kitchen? Who doesn’t want the flooring and the painting and all of those things to be working? Those who don’t and put their house on the market don’t sell their home. Let me say that again, they don’t sell their home. If they do get lucky enough to … Well, the amount of misery and the price that they get is really, really, really bad.
I’ll give you some quick stories about that. I had a situation where sellers had a $400,000 home. It was in the [inaudible 00:03:17] Illinois market. Great home, great location. Very, very nice home. Square footage. Everything worked. The kitchen and bathrooms was an issue. The sellers, and many times this is what sellers fall into that take this approach, they decided to take off the price of what the updates would have had for the kitchen and bathrooms.
We have a $400,000 home and they say, “Well, it’s going to cost $10,000.” They put it down to $390,000. Well, simple fact is that doesn’t work. Number one, it doesn’t go one for one. On average, it goes three times to five times the amount. That’s how significant it is. If you hear an agent even say twice the amount, it doesn’t work. Try three to five times.
What happened is they put their house on the market. Well, they eventually did sell it. That’s the good news. 10 months later. That was a total of, when you start talking about all the costs, everything that put into it, and that is the true cost of the monthly payments, the HOA, the taxes, insurance, which is about $3000 a month for them, it was $30,000 and they sold the home for $340,000.
That’s close to an $80,000 loss. That’s not counting the pain and the suffering they were going through. A married couple. It wasn’t going too well. I’ll just say that. They were having a lot of fun times. It’s that simple. $10,000 wind up costing them $80,000 on the investment.
Other situations, it doesn’t have to be on the premium home. It doesn’t have to be on a high end home. The other situation, this happened in [inaudible 00:05:13] actually. There’s a confusion of having a well-maintained home and having an updated home. This situation falls into that category. There’s a difference.
This home was extremely well-maintained. It was meticulously well-done. What happened? No updates. They lived there for the last 10 or 15 years. House would probably sell easily for $225,000 with the updates. Again, they chose to say, “Well, I’m not going to do the updates. Let’s drop the price.” Well, they dropped the price. Seven months later, they’re down to $180,000 and it’s still not having an offer on the table. Wound up, bit the bullet, as they said, put in the investment, within seven days, they sold their house. Seven days of making the updates, putting it back onto the market, they sold their house.
That’s why it’s so critical. We’ve had situations where it comes in with a $100,000 home. What needed to be done … The sellers even knew, even knew that they had a carpeting issue, that they knew that the painting wasn’t what it needed to be, but chose not to do it. The story ended, $15,000 loss. $3000 fix, $15,000 loss, when you add the true cost. Again, the time and the emotional toll, and the emotional toll.
Anybody who unfortunately has had their house on the market for a period of time it wears on you. There’s no end in sight or at least it appears no end in sight. Many times that’s because there’s an updating factor. Yes, it could be the pricing issue. It could be your location. Things could have changed. It is very important that actually if you’re on the market right now you need to start looking at that. That’s extremely crucial.
It brings me up to the book. One of the other reasons why I wrote the book is to try to keep that pain, that suffering away from sellers who are looking to sell their home. It doesn’t matter if you use me. I’m not worried about that. The book is easy to read, it is 12 steps. They are proven steps. It’s free. All you have to do is go to Ready, Set, Sold dot org. Not dot com. Ready, Set, Sold dot org, not dot com, and get the book.
It will be mailed to you wherever you live or whatever mailing address you have. Read the book, it’s a quick read. This is one of the things that really comes up too too often. That is quite frankly sellers sitting in purgatory not knowing what’s going on. Or starting off on the right foot, not having the right agent, like we talked about last week, of having the experience of knowing what you can do.
The last thing I’m talking about on this segment, at least right now, is the fact that updates win. Another story, same house. When I say same house it had the same square footage, it was in the same subdivision, it happened to be in Charlotte, Illinois. They put their house on the market …
Excuse me. Let me backtrack just a little bit. There were two houses eventually on the market but this house here had I don’t know. It was 2500 square feet. I’m not sure of all of the particulars. It was a very, very nice house. It had the updates. They put their house on the market. They felt really, really good about it.
A week later, another seller. This does happen. We talked about it I think the first step about how things can change in 30 days. Well, another seller in their neighborhood, actually on their street, had the same basically footprint. The house is of course in a different place but it had the same square footage, it had the bedrooms, it had the bathrooms. They had not done the updates. The house that was on the market had done the updates. It stayed current with things.
Again, the seller is thinking that they’ll lower the price, get those people in, they’ll take their buyers away from the house that has the updates. Guess what? It didn’t work. They were at a price point I think around $250,000. At least, the sellers that had the updates. They came in, the other ones that didn’t at $225,000.
What happened? A week to 10 days, even after they hit the market, the ones that had the updates, boom. At almost a full price offer for their home. Top dollar, fast sale. The ones that didn’t? Well, guess what? It didn’t sell. They hit price cut after price cut. After seven months they gave up. That’s how important it is.
What’s the answer? Well, it’s a one, two, three step solution. We’re going to talk about that after the break and after this messages. You’ve been listening to Ready, Set, Sold with your host Bryan Vogt. We will see you after a short break.