You’re talking about what people SHOULD be looking at - the rest of us are talking about what they actually ARE looking at. In case you haven’t noticed, people are kinda stupid. 
There is such a thing as a spider infestation? I mean, aren’t spiders, by definition, lone individuals which can be picked up in a jar and put outside, their webs brushed away, and no trace of them left?
The flat I’m renting now isn’t and has never been clean… matter of fact, it’s got an uncleanable window (the blinds are set up in such a way that you can’t open the floor-to-ceiling window without removing the blinds) and gasp carpet. Yeah, I know, Americans are used to carpet and put shag beige carpet in Florida houses, but I’m not American and to me carpet=dirty.
Things I looked at: I opened the closets (clean, organized), opened the fridge (clean), minifridge (clean) and freezer (it needed defrosting and minor cleaning), checked out the bathroom’s and kitchen’s cleanliness (the kitchen was clean, the bathroom was as clean as the owner knew how to make it but she wasn’t using the right products for calcium buildup). I liked that it wasn’t as decorator-neutral as other places I saw; yes, there were a lot of neutral colors, but also many “highlight” items in bright colors. Beige couches… with purple and green pillows. White bathroom… with purple and green shampoos, purple and green toothbrushes.
The flat I own, I bought directly from the owners, no agency. I saw their ad outside the post office of a nearby town, called them, saw, bought. The notary public was laughing because it’s unusual to ask about the price and who pays which part of taxes and so forth and get the answer in stereo. The hallway needed (and still does) a hand of paint; there’s some holes in the bathroom wall from when a few items got moved to place them in better reach. Everything was clean but as you can imagine, in a house with a baby there were small toys pretty much in every room (the kid was at that stage when they have found out how to make the parental units play fetch). They kept a tablecloth over the low table in the living room, there were magazines and DIY books (the husband is one of those guys who always have some project going on, he’s a carpenter by training and had redone the floors, replaced the original doors and also the windows). The wife and me have similar taste in books, we launched into “have this one, don’t have this one” over her Pterrys.
I’ll echo what Chimera said. I’m looking at houses now (and placing an offer on one tomorrow).
The first thing I look at is the outside. If the siding and roof look like they haven’t been kept up - and this isn’t a “fixer-upper” - I don’t care what the inside looks like. I’d rather clean or replace the carpets/flooring than rebuild the roof due to rot.
When I’m looking at a used house I fully understand someone lives there. I’ve seen my share of ugly couches, pictures (one house had a family picture of twin girls that looked like the Grady Girls from The Shining) and paint. In fact, the house we’re wanting to buy has their girls room painted Pepto-Bismol pink - I kid you not! A house that is “move in ready” is great, but rare to find.
Here are the basic things I’m looking at and like to see:
-
A clean outside. Siding in good order. Roof in good order. Nothing up against the outside of the house. Gutters look good and drain properly.
-
Clear out the area under your sinks. I want to see the plumbing and if there are signs of leaks/problems.
-
I want to see duct work taped up.
-
I’m looking behind and under your appliances. I care less about a chunk of cat hair on the carpet and more about a pile of old food behind the stove (it can attract bugs and critters) or a slowly dripping dishwasher gone unnoticed for a year.
-
Make property lines clear if they aren’t. I’m not looking for a full survey, but some indication of where the back yard ends.
-
Electrical. I don’t want to guess how many wall plugs are in the bedrooms. If you are covering one up with a dresser, pull the dresser away from the wall a tiny bit so I can peek back and see it.
-
More on electrical - if you have an older house and your electrical panel is a mess (lots of different wires going to the panel and things not tied down, lots of junction boxes, etc) and not well labeled I’ll assume the entire house is a wiring nightmare behind the walls.
-
If you have a detached garage and there is an electrical panel in there, put a sticky on the panel of how many amps can go from the main panel to the garage panel. That said, even if it doesn’t have its own panel it’s nice to know how many amps are in a garage without doing detective and guess work. Lots of people use their garage for more than parking cars. Knowing garage power can be a real selling point to people like me.
-
Like I said I don’t need clean, but get rid of the black mould and mildew around sinks and tubs.
-
Smells don’t really bother me (unless it smells like dead things). Smells bother my wife. She looked at a house today which she said “smelled like old lady and top raman”. That said, I also don’t want to smell powerful coverup aromas. It makes me think you’re hiding something. Clean what is causing the pet smells, get the dead rat out from behind the wall, open the windows and bake something before the showing.
-
Don’t try to hide any problems. One house I looked at had a bookcase in front of a hole in the wall. It was just drywall and simple to fix. I’d rather see an unpainted repair out in the open. If I find a hidden problem, it will make me wonder what other issues are lurking around.
-
If your house is well cabled with Cat5, lots of telco, lots of electrical, etc. Use this as a selling point.
In fact, I would love to see a summary of things in the house outside of the regular Realtor text. If you were to sit down and make a list of features and leave a copy on the counter, that would be great. Roof was replaced/repaired when? Do you know the water pressure? The output of the forced air at the far register? Furnace/AC/hot water heater age and specs. When were the last time they were inspected? Is the electrical 15 or 20 amp wiring/circuits? What appliances go with the house? Carpet is how old? The cable guy ran new cables when? Are there telco and cable runs to each room? The plumbing was reworked in the kitchen how long ago? What have you personally done to improve the house since you bought it?
There is a list of specs on the side of my computer and television boxes. I can look on the side of a cereal box and know what it contains. Why not do this for a house? Granted, many of these things we can find out later.
Now that I think about it, I almost wonder if a letter from the owner is a great idea? Why not give buyers something that gives them more of a connection to the house? A little back history? Something like:
“Dear house hunter people. The house was built in 1943 (insert any known history here). We bought the house in 1992 from a older couple that lived here since 1950. The house needed a new roof so we hired Bobs Roof Dudes. They did this and that and added new venting. Two years later Bob came back and roofed the garage. We added sprinkler system in 1998 (we’ll leave a map of the pipe locations with the house). Joe’s House Services replaced the water heater in 2000. Jane lives next door to the north and she’s a very sweet woman (she feeds our cats when we’re on vacation). Bart and his wife Betty live to the south. Nice people. Etc.etc.”
I think something like that could really be a selling point to offer information first hand, give the buyer a connection to the house and peak interest. I always wish I could chat with the current owners instead of third hand through the Realtor.
Of course, what do I know?
(How is that for my first real post to the SDMB for a year or so?)
I was watching an HGTV show the other day and I saw something that really turned me off. After all the work they did, at the open house they set a table for two and put big glasses of wine out. Supposedly so people going through the house would see what a great place it was for entertaining. In my opinion, it made it look as if the potential buyers were intruding on somebody’s party. Wine glasses and food are not props, folks. Did you rumple up the bed to see how comfortable it was to have sex in, too?
Yeah, they’re stupid. Like what, they’re never going to leave their own cups in the sink? :rolleyes: Like they won’t buy a place because I do? Again, they can fuck off and buy new construction.
One of my hobbies is looking at properties on-line. The single biggest pet peeve I have about on-line listings is the damn pictures. You get idiot real estate agents posting pictures of the people’s stuff! I don’t give a shit if they have a really nice armoire or bedroom set! No one is buying that! I want to see room layouts, features and pictures that show me more of the actual house that I’m interested in!
I also have to giggle when the stagers set the dining room table with massive settings… then place AN apple or A lemon in the salad bowl of each setting. There’s also the tray with beverages on the bed thing. Who does that?
Chimera, I understand completely about online pics. I’m browsing at homes for sale around me and some have pictures obviously taken at least 5 months ago (winter). Update, maybe? Or like this? Nice hutch. This is a cute fixer-upper, until you get to page 3 of the pics and see the basement. I can’t tell if that’s all mold and water stains… or dirt and water.
(I also can’t believe how housing prices have come down in my 'hood over the past 6 months. A year ago that house would have been a steal at $130k.)
My god, you have no idea how bad a spider infestation can get. My brother is one of those who looked at fundamentals like structural integrity but completely ignored presentation and cleanliness. He got an awsome price but the previous owners were filthy pigs who wallowed in shit and piss. Literally. I’m not making this up. The cleanup was horrendous and nauseating and the spiders were pissed off and they were legion.
Here’s more detail about the cleanup job. That’s me looking all sexy in the bio-hazard suit.
Personally, I think he should have paid a bit more to get a house that wasn’t an outright health hazard.
Any signs that the place has not been maintained would put me off immediately. That means chipped paint, stains, odors, moss, overgrown yard. Excessive clutter to me means that the owners don’t give a shit whether or not the house sells: they’re still emotionally invested in the place. Clutter hides problems, and my radar would be pinging. I’d rather have an empty house to look at than a staged house: I’m not buying the furniture, I’m buying the space.
Oh gosh, The pictures. Fact is, some realtors (the one my parents just used, for example) are terrible photographers. The picture of their newly updated custom oak cabinetry miles of counterspace kitchen? A shot of the doorway.
All that was shown of the living room was a wall. With a single window in it. And three outlets. I lived there for almost 20yrs and I couldn’t figure out what room it was from the picture.
Her other listings had similar photos.
The problem with finding the right way to present a house for selling appears to be the fact that there are as many ways to present it as there are opinions of prospective buyers. We sold a small house last year. We got the advice to leave furniture in so buyers would know how furnishings fit. Leave furniture out - it makes the rooms look bigger. Put some furniture in, leave some furniture out. Do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about.
This worked for me. I got mad one day because someone said our house looked like we were trying to flip it (after having lived there seven years - we’d be terrible flippers were that the case). I wrote a whole story about the house and our gradual improvements over the years and put it on Craigslist. The story attracted our buyer (who happened to be an English teacher, which may have helped).
Oh lordie, the pictures. I remember looking at one listing online. Of the 10 pictures allowed, 2 were of the hallway, 3 were of bathrooms (showcasing the toilets), one of the breaker box, one of a recliner chair and 3 other random shots that at least showed the house.
To add to Seven’s list of what I would love to see. Include a floorplan in your online listing. Let me see right off the bat if the room layout has a snowball’s chance of meeting what I’m looking for.
Maybe watch a few episodes of Sell This House. I enjoy the staging parts of the show too, but I think that the hidden camara section might be the more useful part; it should give you an idea of what potential buyers are looking at.
In my old house, we saw lots and lots of spiders, so many that we hired a pest control service to come and spray every month.
That seemed to work. After a couple of months, no spiders!
When we moved the heavy stuff (bookcases, the piano) that never got moved for cleaning, there were hundreds and hundreds of dead spiders behind them. I thought the pest control stuff was supposed to PREVENT them, not kill them after the fact.
It very nearly made me decide to burn all my books (I have too many anyhow) and buy a Kindle. And maybe switch to an electronic piano that can be moved.
But they don’t have to fuck off to new construction; they just have to fuck off out of your house. That’s the seller’s loss, not the buyer’s; the seller will sell to anyone who can get financing, but the buyer is only buying the one house he or she really likes. When my house was for sale, if they’d told me to stripe the exteriot purple and pink and nail the chairs to the ceiling because that was what was moving houses, then by God that’s what I would have done.
IME, the first step in selling a house is to stop thinking of it as your home and start thinking of it as an asset you must market to attract top dollar. This makes it somewhat easier to do what you have to do to get it sold: Hopefully as you’re vacuuming for the 1000th time you’re not thinking “Sniff, it just doesn’t feel like home anymore,” you’re thinking “I want this asset to be as attractive as I can possibly make it so that I can get it sold; running the vaccum around again couldn’t hurt.”
When my house was on the market, for every showing I removed every single indicator that I owned a pet (I have two dogs) and every single indicator that the house was even occupied by someone specific (dirty dishes, grooming supplies). Personal items like most pictures had already been stored away. I have been told, and I believe, that you want the buyer to imagine themselves in the space, so you remove or hide everything that jolts the buyer out of that head-space, everything that says “This is not YOUR house, this is someone else’s house.” Further, the buyer wants to imagine his or her best self in that house, so it should be immaculately clean and in very good repair. The fact that none of us really live that way in real life is precisely the point: You are feeding into the buyer’s fantasy of “maybe I would live this way” – organized, neat, clean – “if I owned this house.” So it’s not that the buyer can’t tolerate the sight of a sink full of dishes, it’s that the buyer doesn’t have to. They have a sink full of dishes back home themselves; that’s the house they’re already in, not the one they are trying to move into.
So I’m afraid that, like featherlou, I feel your best option is to continue living in the museum that used to be your home, repeatedly doing all the cleaning and straightening that you are so completely sick of doing. It might be the 1000th time you’ve vacuumed that floor, but it’s the first time the buyer will see it.
As for what I look for as a buyer: I think I’m a reasonably sophisticated buyer so I consciously try to look past staging and effect. I look for maintenance issues and look at the condition of big-dollar items (roof, water heater). As far as the interior is concerned, I expect it to be in very good repair – ideally, I would be able to tell anything has been, or ever needed to be, repaired, and I look for thinks that I personally really like (crown molding, fireplaces) or really dislike (carpeted bathrooms) that would be expensive or a PITA to add/subtract. At the level of staging, I am comfortable with a certain level of “clutter” – magazines, computer, toiletries – but am turned off by dirt – dirty dishes, dirty floors, piles of laundry, unmade beds. Honestly, even though on an intellectual level I know “dirty” is a problem easily and cheaply fixed (most of the time), on an emotional level it’s hard for me to get past a dirty house.
Anyway, good luck to you. Selling a house is hard.
It’s a matter of degree. If the house looks too much like you’re living there, I can’t see how I could live there. On the other hand, if the house is empty, I can’t see how I would live there either. It needs to be a happy medium.
Dirt is bad. Too much clutter, and I assume that there’s no storage in which to put my own clutter.
Those are for people like me. I look at an empty room and ask “how big is it?” and get an answer. And then I wonder “no, really, how big is it?” then I go home and measure my stuff. And I have to think - "well, in an ideal world, I’d want 4’ of space between this bed and the wall, and another 3’ of space on the other side, and I’m going to buy a dresser, so there’s another 2’ " and end up thinking that there’s no possible way I can live in a bedroom that’s under 20’x20’.
If I look at a room with a king size bed & an armoire, I know that the room is big enough for a king size bed and an armoire and all the space I really want.
Of course, some people still do take horrible pictures.
That isn’t always the case. I wouldn’t sell our house to just anyone just because they want to pony up the asking price. We have spent 7 years perfectly restoring a circa 1760 home. We are caretakers to it just like any new owners wold have to be. There are an infinite number of factors that would violate this unspoken respect to the property. I doubt that we would ever have to sell it that quickly. Saying offensive things about changes including coloring would forbid the whole deal. It is still my property after all. I take great pride in historical houses and someone that doesn’t belong here isn’t going to buy it.
I have been house hunting for about 3 months! At first, it was semi-serious because my lease wasn’t up for awhile. I made an offer yesterday…
When I go to a showing, I look at the way they took care of the house/property. If it looks well cared for then that is very positive for me. One of the houses that I looked at was renovated in the inside, with new hardwood, and the bathroom was redone with gorgeous tile on all of the walls and floor. But on the outside, they decided to take down the aluminum siding from the front of the house, and stucco it (improperly at that) and proceed to piece together the aluminum siding with pop rivets in the back of the house to cover some places where there wasn’t any siding because they put smaller windows in. It really turned me off because if they did something that stupid that was that noticeable, then what else did they do that was stupid?
That said, I do like to look at houses when they are not vacant. It is perfectly fine to me to see their stuff around, it doesn’t have to be pristine or perfect. However, at one of the showings, the sellers left before the viewing in a hurry. The 2 upstairs bedrooms had clothes strewn about everywhere, as in take the contents of the closet and throw them every where… Needless to say, I almost got attacked by their dog that they left in the house. I crossed that one off of the list.
I guess I’m saying to just not do stupid things right before you are going to have viewings.
Nothing is “always the case.” But surely you realize that as the owner of a 250+ year old historical home you are in a microscopic minority. The vast majority of sellers are looking to sell to the first qualified buyer, and you maximize your pool of interested prospects when you maximize the attractiveness of your home.
ETA: Good luck with your offer, Erin!
Worst Oversight
Back in 1991 when I was looking for a house (and ended up looking at nearly 100 before finding the one I bought), I went to an Open House at a house about two blocks from where I ultimately moved.
Nice house. Would have considered it. Lots of people walking up, down and through the place. Nice realtor sitting in the dining room with his brochures and stuff. Place was immaculate.
Guess I was the first person to walk down to the basement. It was very clean, well cared for, open and very very nice…
With the exception of the very large piles of dog turds quite literally every two feet over the entire floor of the basement. Dozens or even scores of them. You couldn’t have neatly arranged them better than that.
I walked upstairs, smiled at the realtor and asked if he’d been down in the basement recently. When he said no, I asked him to go take a look. He went down, came back up frowning. Said the Open was now closed and went out to yank down the signs.
Clean, clean, clean, clean, and as depersonalized as reasonably possible.
If you’re selling something you’re trying to impress the buyer. Car dealerships try to keep their cars clean even though any fool knows you can wash the car in two minutes. Doesn’t matter; clean cars sell, dirty ones don’t.
Having just gone through this process, I can tell you that my eye was drawn to things that would cost me money. Some clutter is one thing, but dirty walls and carpet say “Money and effort needed.” They also made me nervous, and much more inquisitive, about the underlying and systemic aspects of the house; if it looks shabby at a glance, what’s wrong underneath? If you can’t be bothered to spend a few hundred bucks on paint, what else are you leaving? Aluminum wiring? A shitty water heater? Old roof? Rotting floorboards? If you can’t be bothered to fix stuff right in front of you what else is being neglected?
In this regard I found first impressions were a remarkably accurate thing. The houses that looked nice generally held up to my more detailed inspections, and the ones that didn’t had glaring systemic flaws. Pretty soon we just stopped looking at the shabby ones because we knew the underlying problems would be too great to deal with.