Bryan Vogt: Welcome back. This is Bryan Vogt, your host of Ready, Set, Sell, we are here to talk to everything real estate, and more specifically about the sellers and what it takes to get your house sold. I wrote a book called Ready, Set, Sell: Twelve Proven Steps to Get Your House Sold for Top Dollar fast in the St. Louis Metro-East, and this is how the radio program got started. A radio program heard about it and they contacted me.
I left you before by talking about the three things that you really, really need to focus on, and just those three things are really critical. Now let’s talk about, maybe people that chose not to take that direction. Some of these are in the book, and other of these are not, but just recently we heard of a story of a situation that a seller had done the painting, and had done the flooring, and everything was fine, but just wasn’t going to tackle that kitchen. Now the truth of the matter was, there was some wallpaper from probably 1989. They werea different color, I would just say be nice about it, countertops and the flooring and in the bathrooms, it was a similar situation.
All said and done it was a nice high-end home. Had about maybe $10,000 that needed to be done. That may seem like a lot, and I understand that. So they put it on the market, and they were on the market for nine months. When you take everything in, the period of time, insurance, taxes, principle and interest, utilities, and just the wear and the tear on their psyche. They were on the nine months, the total bill when a buyer finally agreed to buy was about three to five times what that $10,000 of investment was worth. They lost between $70 and $80,000 on their deal. And they were just done. They had the two, but they didn’t have the three.
On a similar situation, kitchens and bathrooms were fantastic. But the flooring, the flooring was not. The flooring was not very good at all, and yes the painting wasn’t very good either. But it was definitely better than the flooring. And their argument was, they said, “You know what? We redid the kitchens, we did the bathrooms, the kitchen bathrooms, they sell. That’s the name of the game.” And they’re right. They do sell. But unfortunately, there is the other elements and that is the flooring. And the flooring needed some serious help. And there again, the same scenario played out. Not quite as severe. It wasn’t a high as priced home, but at the end of the day, for not doing the carpeting and making some adjustments to the painting, again, a three to five ratio.
You hear this thing about two times what something can cost to replace? We don’t see that. We see it three to five times what a buyer’s going to take off, if they put an offer on it. And this one was on the market for four months. Cost of doing the updates was about $3,000. When it was all said and done, when you take all the expenses, also the pain of having to wait and going through all the negotiations which were kind of severe, they wound up basically losing $15,000. It was a five to one ratio.
So these are things that you have to be aware of that you really want to get yourself into. You want to be putting your house out there. You want to go for the many, not just the few.
Another situation that we know of is that they did no updating. They did absolutely no updating, and they never sold. There was no story about how much they didn’t make or didn’t make. They did not sell their home. How long was their house on the market? For over a year and a half. They had done, I believe, the agent was telling me they had done seven price drops, and they still couldn’t get the house sold. Don’t let that happen to you. Again, updates are so critical. And again, we’ve talked about this before. I think sellers understand that. I just want to kind of reinforce that situation.
On the same token, you’re going to hear a story about in the next segment that one story on the success side, in a situation where, again, the seller had their house on the market for six months. In this situation, the agent just kept saying drop your price, drop your price, drop your price, drop your price, and they did, and they still couldn’t get any activity. They took the house off the market. They got a new agent in there. The new agent said “First thing’s first. Look, all you got to do is put some carpeting in here and paint and you’re going to sell this house.” Cost was about $3,000. Boom. They put it on the market. In less than two weeks, they had close to a full price offer on this house.
Okay? They really do work. The sellers, the agent told me, were amazed by it. They couldn’t believe. They couldn’t believe what had transpired. I want you to have that same type of success, and so that’s why updating becomes so critical.
With that, in the next segment, we’re going to be talking about the tip of the week, and that’s going to have to do with pre-inspections. It’s a $5,000 tip of the week. You don’t want to miss that. So you’re listening to Ready, Set, Sold. Please, please, check out the book. Go to readysetsell.org, not .com, readysetsell.org, not .com. Get the book, it’s absolutely free. With that said,
Ready Set Sold with Bryan Vogt #13-03: The pain stories sellers have when they don’t do proper updating
August 19, 2017