My dad is a classic narcissist. He doesn’t think like normal people do.
Yeah, I’m certain my dad thinks his house is going to go for $130,000. But then, he also put all their savings in tech stocks at the top of the bubble, so not the best financial mind.
[quote=“Musicat, post:38, topic:486628”]
On balance, I advise my clients to consider upgrading if:[ul][li]they can afford to pay for the work before a sale, and[*]if it would make a useless property into something that someone might want to live in.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I’d meant to mention this before: My SIL had a very similar issue with her house. Like me, she and her husband couldn’t afford any updates except for paint (both she and my BIL are still working; their kids are both in high school and college).
Their realtor told them not to update anything because they would probably not get their money back, given the state of the market.
Their house sat on the market for over a year. Their realtor marketed it as an “antique” because the house had retained most of its post-WWI features, down to the cabinet handles. Luckily for them, they found a buyer who not only fell in love with it 
They now live in an apartment and never want to be homeowners again. Can’t say I blame them.
Ah, I see.
moejoe, that does actually sound like an asset to me - even an un-renovated house in a desirable neighbourhood would sell for the land and location if nothing else. I really enjoyed fixing up our other house, though, and I’d look at inheriting a house like that as a long-term project.
Sorry about that. All I can offer is my empathy.
We’ve got an ongoing problem with my mother and her moving to be close to my sister. Family disfunctionalities are a bitch. The only good thing is that my father is long dead, otherwise I have no idea what we would do.
I’m a prospective buyer, and I would vote to do some minor cosmetic fixes and remove excess (if not all) furniture to make the rooms look larger (and keep buyers from being distracted). No personal photos or items if you can avoid it. Also, the house should be IMMACULATELY CLEAN. Can’t tell you how many houses I’ve walked into that had filthy, moldy bathrooms caked with toothpaste and soap, piles of junk in bedrooms, and dirt imbedded in the kitchen corners. SUCH a turn-off.
Even simple things like replacing drawer pulls in the kitchen, or neutral paint in some rooms to tone down things you can’t change (like ugly tile or flooring) can help buyers visualize themselves there.
I’m considering a house that is going for $185k in a market where $200k gets you a decent family home. This house has a LOT of potential but needs between $30k-$50k in repairs and remodeling to make it livable. If it was $150k, I would snap it up; but I can’t see laying out a total of $235k and living in the Money Pit for two years while we fix it up, when I could buy a house for $200k in perfect shape.
I think sometimes sellers have an unrealistic concept of what their homes are worth, particularly in the current market. Sellers should think about the cost of pricing unrealistically, and having the house sit on the market for a year or two while they’re paying the mortgage AND property taxes, when they could have priced it well and moved it off their hands faster.
You could do what we did and let the house sit on the market for months, getting reduced in price at intervals because not everyone can see the potential in a good house that looks bad, then put in a lower offer in the hopes that the seller wants it to move and will take the offer. (I don’t recommend this method if you want or need to buy soon - we were in a good rental, and didn’t have to buy any time soon.)
I agree with all the rest of your advice - “clean and uncluttered” takes you A LOT of the way to selling your house - “dirty and cluttered” is a recipe for it to sit on the market.
My brother and I have just sold hour mother’s house and we decided that we’d do absolutely nothing more than making it a bit more presentable (weeding the garden, some paint here and there) on the grounds that the buyer will most certainly want to put his personal touch to it, new kitchen, new bathroom etc.
You need to fix the water issue. Even with that, you’ll have to disclose, and document what’s been done to remedy that. Water in the basement is a huge issue, and you’ll get a lot of conflicting opinions as to how to fix it as well :(.
Ditto on the plumbing issue. Beyond that, I wouldn’t go to a huge amount of effort to fix it up unless it looks absolutely awful and it can be updated without spending a fortune. For example we did repaint and recarpet, but one coat of paint only, and inexpensive carpet - our walls had mostly not been repainted in 13 years and the formerly-white carpet was a similar age, so it really needed to be done. Total, less than 5,000 of cosmetic stuff (plus miscellaneous small repairs).
Cautionary tale on water remediation below, feel free to read if you are struggling with insomnia:
When we were selling our townhouse 9+ years ago, we found out, a week after the contract was signed, that there was dampness in one room in the basement. Oddly, along the wall adjoining the neighbor’s place, not the front wall, but you never know with underground water. We had found dampness there once before, believed that it was a downspout problem, fixed the downspout, and never noticed water there again. So finding it there was, needless to say, a shock and a half - and it very very nearly cost us the sale.
We had 4 different wet-basement people come out and give estimates and opinions. Two said it was a drainage issue where the ground met the front of the house (half the basement was above ground there) and the soil needed to be regraded and sloped away from the house. The other two said it was a groundwater issue, french drains inside the foundation, replace the existing sump pump.
Each camp insisted the other was wrong.
The buyer was willing to go through with the purchase if we paid for all the remediation.
When, a few days before closing, they checked - and on a sunny day when it hadn’t rained in several days, water was still very obviously seeping in. The next day, we were waiting for a remediation contractor to come by for a second look, the buyers were there waiting for him, he called and said he was not going to make it because his car had been in an accident… at a rest stop on I-66, it was hit by a BOAT of all things (no kidding, someone towing a boat on a trailer didn’t secure it and it hit two cars - one of them a police car, can you imagine THAT end-of-shift report???).
The buyers were walking out the door, understandably fed up and ready to break the contract - when the neighbor dropped by and asked if we’d seen water that morning. We said “uh no”. He said “I think I found the problem”.
See, the inside portion of the air conditioner (the condenser?) which removes moisture from the air, and is supposed to drain it away someplace safe… worked via a PVC pipe along the floor, to a drain set in the floor. Some years before, the previous owner must have dislodged this. So instead of draining properly, it was trickling to the nearest low spot… which happened to be against our wall. The neighbor moved the pipe, and the dampness stopped cold (haha).
The times we checked the floor in the past, we must have done so when it was cool or non-humid. The summer we were selling, it was brutal and the AC was running all the time.
Anyway, the buyers went through with the purchase with the understanding that we would replace the drywall and carpet in that room, do the outside soil grading, and put some money in escrow in case of future problems (there were none).
So the cautionary tale is: you’ll hear different stories from different contractors, sometimes completely conflicting, and it’s tough to know who’s right (in our case, NONE of them were).