Brian Vogt : Welcome back. This is Brian Vogt your host of Ready Set Sold. I hope you’re having a fantastic Saturday.
What I’m going to talk about in this segment is tip of the week and it’s the $5,000 tip of the week and in this situation, it works the same way. That is “as-is” houses.Briefly what as-is houses means is that the house is literally what you see is what you get. Goodness sakes if the house falls down the day after the buyer moves in to it, so be it.
That could be a very, very good way to sell your home. There’s nothing wrong with that. We had a situation not too long ago, where there was a person retiring, they were going to a nursing home, they’d lived there for 40 years and they had not done the updates, and hadn’t done really anything to the home. They knew that and they priced it accordingly, got the house sold, makes perfect sense. Their money situation was in very good shape, so they were happy with that and the house was gone, all good.
However, sometimes and this is where the tip comes in, you want to make sure you’re talking to your agent that you understand exactly what an“as-is” house is. As-is house in the buyer’s perspective is as I mentioned before, it’s the house could fall down the next day after they bought it. So many times there is fear, trepidation, they’re concerned about it and this is where the problem really comes in. That sellers are doing as-is houses and they’re marketing it that way and they’re even pricing it that way, and they’re taking a hit when it really never had to go that direction in the first place.
Let me give you a perfect example, just happened not long ago and that was we know of a seller that their house was $150,000, they took considerable price drop, they were going to do an as-is house, they lived there for 25, 30 years, that was fine. They sold it for like 125 and they’re moving out, life is good. No inspections, nothing like that, that they did in advance.
The buyers came in and did an inspection to move in and they found out that the only thing that would have moved it from a normal sale from the as-is house was a CO2 detector and some smoke detectors, which was like 50 bucks. So they took a hit of $25,000, $25,000 because as-is houses usually do and that’s okay, it’s situational. But you want to have a conversation with the agent to make sure that an as-is house, that they’ve asked some questions about it.
For example, this house they had just rewired the house three years ago, they’d gotten rid of all the lead pipes, five years ago, new roof five years ago. So there was just some minor things that needed to be looked at and it was no big deal. Yet, they took the approach of that kind of cost, that kind of loss of $25,000. So again as-is houses are good, there’s nothing wrong with doing it but make sure you have that conversation that you know exactly what we’re talking about that you and your agent are on the same page. So you don’t have a situation where you lose $25,000 where $200 may have taken care of the problem to begin with.
Speaker 2: Hey you guys again don’t forget about the Hurricane victims, please donate as much as you can, it’s been great talking with you and we’ll talk to you next week. Have a great one. (singing)