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Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #19-01: The one reason to make sure your house has curb appeal

September 30, 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 found Ready, Set, Sold. And now, real estate broker, Bryan Vogt.
Bryan Vogt: Good morning, everyone. Happy Saturday. You’re listening to Ready, Set, Sold and I’m your host, Bryan Vogt. I hope you’re having a great day. Hey it’s good to know that I know the Cardinals, and this is prerecorded a few days in advance. They’re hanging on. At least the games, as we speak right now, are meaningful, and you never know. I just want to give a shout-out to the Cards. I know it’s been an up and down season, but wishing the best and hoping that we at least get a wild card position. We’ll see what happens with that.
Anyway, I kind of maybe want to go a little bit into the show, as far as what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re at step eight. We’re talking about the book, it’s a bestselling book I wrote, Ready Set Sold, twelve proven steps to sell your house fast and for top dollar in St. Louis Metro East. Step eight is why catch them at the curb isn’t just a catchy phrase for sellers. It’s so true. The biggest reasons, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later in this segment. I’ll give you the number one reason why that is so important.
And then in segment two, we’re going to be talking about why less rather than more is a winning strategy when it comes to landscaping. The third segment, we’re going to be talking about why picking up after Fido is a must, a must. Some stories to relay to you on that, that didn’t turn out too well for the sellers. The fourth segment we’re going to be talking about is why maintaining rather than replacing decks and patios is, most of the time, the best way to go for sellers.
And then, of course, our tip of the week. I’m going to give you a little hint. It involves retaining walls. With that said, a little brief history about myself. That is I’ve been in real estate now for close to two decades. I absolutely love it. I think it’s a fantastic profession to be in. I’ve been in the Metro East area working real estate, that’s in O’Fallon, Edwardsville, Shiloh, Belleville, Waterloo, Columbia. We have a winning successful team of agents underneath me. We’ve been having some great success.
Our sellers have been having great success throughout the entire Metro East. We’ve been seeing not only our sellers but other agents, other sellers, having some fantastic success. We’ve had probably a year that has stayed, pricing has been moving in the right direction for the entire year. I can tell you in past years, when it involves most of the Metro East. There’s always going to be a pocket here and there. It just works that way. But by far, the most of the Metro East area, in your Scott Air Force Base, Mascoutah, all those places are having fantastic success getting your house sold.
So if you’re just thinking about pulling the trigger, right now we’re right at the point where most buyers are trying to get in before the holidays. We’re right at that Christmas, New Years. It’s a perfect time to get your house on the market. Call us, it’s fantastic.  And talk with them and get things going. Because we don’t know, and you’ve heard me talk about this before, but it’s so true.
We just don’t know where the market’s going to be at even in three months. Yes, it could go up. It also could go down. You have to understand that. 50/50 is on two months. 30 days, it’s not likely to happen. Markets can just change, in 30 days, too. And you want to make sure that if they go up, well that’s fantastic, but sometimes they go down for various reasons.
If you’re looking at selling your house, this has probably been the best time we’ve seen in years. I think it’d be a great time to pull the trigger, get things going, get your house on the market. I know we’re having a lot of sellers that are thinking the same way, that they not only want to get their house sold, but they want to be in their new house before the holidays, so the timing couldn’t be better.
Also I want to talk about how you can get ahold of us. How you can listen to more of the programs. One of the issues that we found is that we live busy lives. We get that. Even though everyone should be listening between 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM every Saturday. It’s so easy to do so with the app that 1260 has. You can get the app on your Droid or your iPhone.
It’s not a problem. But also, there’s other ways now that we’ve given people the opportunity to, if you can’t listen to it when it’s on the air, that you can listen to it later on, and that’s with podcasts. Podcasts are growing and growing in numbers. So we wanted to make sure that we had it available to our listeners. You can go to Google Play, you can go to iTunes, and you can listen to the entire show, you can listen to parts that maybe you missed.
I was just talking to somebody the other day, that they forgot, they got busy and missed half the show. And part of the things they wanted to catch up on was the first segment of the second segment, so it’s a great opportunity to be able to do that. And you can always like us on Facebook, also. There’s just different ways that you can reach out and listen to the shows if you don’t catch them on Saturday. Hopefully you can. Hopefully maybe you’re driving your car. You’re driving some place, or maybe at the house listening to it on the radio.
With that said, let’s go into what we talked about before, as far as catch them on the curb. The number one reason why you want to make sure that you do that as a seller is, if you don’t, the buyers won’t go into your house. I do mean they won’t go into your house. I can tell you time and time again that in past years, when I worked more with buyers, but my team talks about it also, and other agents talk about it. That situation of pulling up into the driveway to kind of give an overview.
They see the grass is a little bit longer. The bushes aren’t maintained. There’s no rock around it, as far as landscaping goes. And so you have all those things going against them and the door’s a little shabby. It’s a little gray. The front door doesn’t really pop out at you. And they just turn to the agent and they say, “Next.” I mean, it’s that simple. The perception, whether it’s true or not, perception from buyers is that if the house isn’t maintained on the outside, it can’t be maintained on the inside. And they’re going to go out and look at other houses.
As I mentioned, this sort of story the other day about that same situation where a buyer, their initial house, a house that they wanted to look at, was this particular house. They had three or five other houses they wanted to, but what drew their attention was this house. But when they got up to it and they found out that nothing seemed to have been done, it looked rough.
They decided against it and they went out and they found another house that day, and bought that house. Again, most people get that. I really do think most people get that, but unfortunately sometimes people … It’s important to focus on the inside of the house, that’s true, but you can’t neglect the outside of the home.
What we’re talking about actually is the basics for the most part. We’re going to go into a little bit more depth about some of the other things you can do, but basically think of it in the aspect of making sure that the grass is mowed. Get into the habit of a weekly mowing. Understand, weeds don’t understand droughts. They don’t understand when it doesn’t rain.
Many times, the grass maybe not be that long, but if you take a little look at it, good or bad, you may have some weeds popping up, so you want to make sure you get into the habit of mowing that lawn weekly or having someone done it. We’re seeing more and more of that from home sellers in all price ranges, of having a landscaper coming in and maintaining the yard while it’s on the market.
Trimming those shrubs. Again, it’s so important. It’s just a more cleaner appearance. You really want to make that you have those shrubs cut. And especially in front of bay windows. I’ll admit, I’m a little surprised sometimes from sellers. I guess it’s probably just because they’ve been there for a long time, but having bay windows and having the shrubs so big that you literally can’t hardly see out of them. The idea of having a bay window is kind of defeated when you can’t let natural light come in, or you can’t even see out.
I had a situation, I heard one time about some home buyers that, let’s just say were not tall. They were a little bit shorter. And they walked into a house and they looked out the bay window and they literally couldn’t see anything but the bushes that were about six inches away from the window. That wasn’t a house they thought was going to work for them. So getting those things basic done. Edging is another thing that can be really, really important to do. That’s a wow factor. Don’t forget about the mailbox. Buyers again are looking at your house as they’re walking up. They’re making determinations on how well you’re maintaining your house and what they can expect on the inside.
With that said, I did mention to you before, we’re going to give you the next segment where we’re talking about the strategies of having less versus more, why it’s a winning strategy for landscaping. With that said, I didn’t tell you how to get the book, because we’re offering the book for free with no cost whatsoever to you. All you have to do is go to ReadySetSold.org, not .com. ReadySetSold.org, not .com, and get the book free. If you’re just thinking about selling your home, please get it. You don’t have to use us, that’s okay. But just get the book. Hey, you’re listening to Ready, Set, Sold.

We’ll see you in a few.
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