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Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #13-01: Top 10 Reasons to update your house

August 19, 2017


Announcer: 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. And now, real estate broker, Bryan Vogt.
Bryan Vogt: Welcome, everybody. Happy Saturday! This is Bryan Vogt, your host of Ready Set Sold where we talk about real estate. In particular, we talk about sellers trying to get top dollar and a fast sale for their homes. Thanks so much for joining us this day.
Just a little brief recap of what we talked about in past episodes, and I believe the last episode we were talking about how to choose a realtor, how critical that is, and that was in step 2. We’re at step three right now, and it’s based on a book, and the steps are … Let me finish what the step is, and that is, having an updated house can make you or break you. We’ll talk more about that. But understanding that where this comes from is a book I wrote this year. It became a number one Amazon best seller, and with that the radio station, 1260 The Answer, heard about it, they contacted me, and they said, “Hey, we would like you to talk about your book, to the steps that you have in getting houses sold,” and that’s how I got to this point right here.
So, that’s where we stand at with how the show got going, the book, everything kind of came together all at one time. And then book, just to kind of briefly talk about that, the title of the book is “Ready, Set, Sold!: 12 Proven Steps to Sell Your House Fast and for Top Dollar in St. Louis Metro East”.
The book is based on my 16 years of experience in real estate, of helping countless sellers sell their houses for top dollar in a fast sale, and I always say, “12 proven steps” because sometimes people think that it’s, maybe, theory or conjecture. “I sure hope this works.” It’s simply not that. These are things that, actually, if you put them in a step form and do this, and this, and this, and this, that you’re going to have some great success, and sellers have had some great success. We’ve been blessed to have quite a few sellers getting their homes sold for top dollar in a fast sale.
So, that’s what the basis of this radio program is. It’s really to talk about the book, and the questions, always, I get asked are, number one, “Do I have to use you?” Which you should, but you don’t have to. All kidding aside, it just basically is, “How do I get the book?” “How do I get my hands on the book?” And the answer is, all you need to do is go to readysetsold.org, not .com, readysetsold.org, not .com, and go get the book. You fill out some information, it’ll be sent directly to your house, wherever you’re living at, no questions, no strings, no nothing.
It’s that simple. Whether you use us, it doesn’t matter. We’ve had people that, yes, have used other agents and they have contacted us and used the books, and they read it, and they went on and used that information, and got their house sold with another agent, and that’s okay. It really is.
The purpose behind the book was to get the information out because we’ve seen so many people struggle with trying to get their house sold, not knowing what to do. And most people, once you know the information, you usually do it because selling your house is a big deal. There’s a lot of money on the line here. This is your biggest investment.
And you not only want to get top dollar, but you want it to be a fast sale. You don’t want it to drag out for months on end, or six months, or seven months, or however long that is. There’s a story coming up directly talking about that, about how a seller was on the market for an extended period of time only because of not doing the things that they probably knew they should have done but didn’t do them.
So that’s why the book was, really, written, and also there’s so much, so much information out there on the internet that usually involves the east coast or the west coast. Well, that’s not where we live, and most people know that real estate is all local, and so this book was designed for the O’Fallon, Shiloh, Swansea, Glen Carbon, Scott Air
Force Base. All these areas, Columbia, Waterloo, this is what this was designed for, that can give you that information. It’s just totally different markets out on the east coast and west coast. The other thing, too, is there’s so much on the internet. I said the internet, but also on TV, and again, most of those are based on if you had a house in Baltimore, it might be a fantastic thing, but that’s not where we’re living at, and that’s why this book was written, is to make sure that we get that information out so that you can have the same success wherever you’re at in the Metro East.
With that said, let’s talk about what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re on step three, and what we have for step three is, as I mentioned before, “Having an updated house can make you or break you,” and no truer words have ever been said. We’re going to talk more about that in the first segment, actually, the top 10 reasons why an updated house has so much success.
Also in the next segment we’re going to be talking about the three areas that you really need to focus on. There’s three areas of your house that you really want to focus on to get the top dollar. The third segment, we’re going to talk about, unfortunately maybe, some of the horror stories, the stories that didn’t work out, the people that didn’t do the things that they needed to do, and how by hearing those, then hopefully you can avoid having those problems. The fourth segment we’re going to be talking with Jason
Stauffer from Gershman Mortgage. He’s going to be talking, as I mentioned before, about some of the things he’s seen on the lending side about updating and give his expertise on that, and also talking about some lending tips that he has, too, about pre-approval versus pre-qual, and their company’s ability to get things done in a very quick and timely manner.
Well, with that said, let’s talk about the updates. One of the quotes I’ve heard and I have to agree with, basically, is, “If you don’t have your house updated, don’t worry about getting top dollar or even a fast sale. You should be worried about getting it sold.” And that’s as simple as that. That’s what you’re really talking about, and that’s how critical updates are. And I think most sellers that we deal with and that we talk with get that. They already know that, that their house might need some things, and that’s really important.
But there’s not only the reason of getting the top dollar, but let me give you the 10 reasons that we’ve found to be absolutely true, and that is, buyers will pay top dollar for your house, and they really will. They will pay for the updates, get it and love that. They want to be in a move-in-ready situation. Your house will sell faster, and it really does. It will sell in a much shorter period of time than houses that don’t get the updates, or don’t have quite all the updates that are needed.
There’s something else, too, that happens is, is that people, when you have the updated house, of course the pricing needs to be there for your location, that’s kind of a given, but once you have those updates, we’ve seen people move from living in O’Fallon, but now they’ll move to Shiloh, or from Shiloh to Swansea, or Belleville to Fairview Heights and vice versa, Edwardsville to Glen Carbon. They’ll literally go out of the area if they see a house that has those updates and the pricing, of course, is in line with the location. That’s the power of updates.
Many times buyers will actually increase, and we’ve just seen this, actually, just recently. A house that was just updated, they jumped up $20,000. Now they, of course, they were in a range they could afford it. But they saw the house they wanted, they kicked up their pricing, and they went out and got that house. So, again, having those updates becomes really critical.
Also, it alleviates a lot of times you’ll hear people that don’t have an open floor plan, or they don’t have this, or they don’t have that. They don’t have, maybe, the same layout that is more desirable than others. We’ve seen people having updated homes, it really doesn’t matter. You can bypass all those situations and have the opportunity to sell your house.
And then simple things, two-story, or a ranch … We’ve seen people that have ranches, that’s all they want to buy, and then they see a two-story that has all the updates. Boom. And vice versa. So you can get people to move off of those situations.
And also, understanding that square footage is only a factor when you’re selling it anyway, but that really can be eliminated. People will take less house for the updates. That’s how powerful these things are, and let’s face it, if you listened to the program a few weeks ago, the military just love updates. They just absolutely love it. That’s what they’re searching for. They wanted those updated house. And, long story short, you’re going to smash the competition. You just really do. I don’t think people, sometimes, understand. Most sellers, as I said, get it, but those that don’t, they don’t really realize how much of an impact that having the updates can do.
The last thing. Look, if you’d done it a year or two beforehand, you get to enjoy it. I mean, you just get the satisfaction of being able to have that nice updated kitchen, to have those bathrooms, to have that carpeting, that flooring, to have those paintings. You get time to enjoy it for maybe a couple years or whatever, so it’s a win/win/win.
Those are the reasons that there is to actually do the updating. In the next segment we’re going to get a little bit more detailed. We’re going to be talking about the three areas that you really want to focus on, and there’s only three. So, in the meantime, a lot of people have already ordered and gotten the book. Why don’t you do the same thing. It’s absolutely free. There’s no cost whatsoever. Go to readysetsold.org. That’s readysetsold.org, not .com, and get the book.

We’ll see you in a few.

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