You want to sell your home, you’ve signed with an agent, it’s time to put the house on the Multiple Listing Service and sit back and wait for magic, right?  Wrong… maybe three year ago, but not today!  The fact of the matter is, we’re in a different market, and thus you need to have a different strategy to sell.  That strategy starts with getting your home truly “home ready.”

It’s probably going to be a pain and it isn’t fun to get really home ready, but also believe us when we say, it’s worth it—really, really worth it!  Being home ready means that before we ever think about marketing your home, we make sure it’s ready to be marketed.

Because we’ve been through hundreds of walk-throughs with buyers we know most buyers can’t see past sellers’ counters cluttered with dishes caked in dried spaghetti noodles, even if there is granite underneath, albeit the spaghetti noodles are dried there too.  They have a hard time decorating homes that are already decked out with farm animal motif.   They feel tired when they see the weeding ahead of them if they buy your backyard.  They simply can’t see themselves happy in your mess, with your clutter, and your sense of décor that doesn’t fit their style at all.  The price may be right and the bones of the house great, but nine times out of ten they make an offer on your neighbors’ house that has a lot less upgrades, a higher price, and less square footage because your neighbor was home ready—when you weren’t.  Don’t you wish your agent, the professional who knew all of that, would have said something?  Being home ready doesn’t usually mean spending a lot of money, it’s usually just elbow grease time and the right knowledge of what to do!  We provide the knowledge, which leaves you with the time, lucky you!

On our part, being home ready means we do a very specific walk-through of the home and give you a detailed and personalized checklist of suggestions to do to get the home truly home ready.  We offer articles, You Tube movies, personal consultations, and all sorts of resources, tools, and time-saving suggestions so that you can spend your time where it counts to be home ready!  In addition, we have a network of great people that can help you do anything from painting and light remodel, to deep cleaning, to hauling away that sofa that should have gone to DI ten years ago.  (Checklists and network information are available to any seller, FSBO or those researching which agents to use—just give us a call and we are happy to share the information we have).

Some agents are easy agents, they take the listing, give you what you want—an MLS listing, a sign, and a keybox, but you pay for their ease when you lower your price five months later because nobody was interested in a home that wasn’t really home ready.  We won’t claim it’ll be easy to get home ready, but we will claim it will be worth it!

Just think of it this way: if you don’t have to drop your price $10k or you sell it 3 months’ worth of mortgage payments sooner, it was like you were making hundreds of dollars an hour in getting home ready.  If you’re currently making hundreds of dollars an hour at your job, hire a maid to do the blue collar work for you—if you aren’t, enjoy getting paid like the lawyers and doctors do and invest the time that will yield the financial results!