I’ve had my house on the market since October or so, but it hasn’t sold yet. I’m expecting that things will perk up as spring nears, Thanksgiving and Christmas is not a good time for people to go house shopping. It’s only been shown maybe 8 times.
My house is a small rancher. I cleaned up all I could and it looks good, but with a kid living here it’s a constant hassle to keep things neat, and I’m not the type to make beds every day and things like that, although I do of course try to do it now. The closets still have a lot of stuff in them, which I’ve heard many buyers don’t like to see.
Tired of having my house on the market, strangers walking through it, and keeping the house clean, I’ve started the process of buying another (quite expensive) house. For those of you that have moved out of your house before selling it, did it seem to get more action and sell faster after it was empty? Need some reassurance here because my new house mortgage is going to be killing me until the old one sells!
Well, empty of beds and furnature a house looks much bigger. That in itself would help seel the house. Though it is usual for display houses to have furniture. I think if the house looks lived in the buyers will be especially aware that they are essentially buying a pre-owned property, cleaned and empty they will feel more like they are buying a new property.
I’ve never sold a house that was empty, but I’ve toured and bought a house that was empty. For me, the order of appeal went : 1) Furnished, but neat 2) empty 3) furnished and dirty.
In empty houses, I tended to notice the little wear and tear signs. Light spots on the wall where the pictures hung, slightly tattered wallpaper, dingy carpet and paint. All stood out a lot more for me in an empty house.
In a neatly furnished house, a room with white walls, beige carpet and colorfull furnishings looked good. Empty, that same room looked sterile and boring. Bedrooms that, based on the dimensions should be plenty big for a child, looked tiny.
I’ve always heard that what’s best is for the house to have furniture in it, but there should be no clutter. Model homes, for instance, generally are furnished.
Full closets are not good. Potential buyers will see this as “not enough closet space.”
We sold our raised ranch two years ago, and bought a larger house primarily because we were running out of room. Before we placed our house on the market in early April, I rented a storage space, and removed all of the extraneous clutter, winter clothes, coats, etc. It made a huge difference.
When we were house shopping, we saw some empty homes as well. That’s not really desirable as well. Every flaw in the house is highlighted, and counter-intuitively, the house looks smaller, in my experience.
There’s a few shows on HGTV and TLC and Discovery about how to spruce up your home for selling (“Designed to Sell” is one of them).
The show has decorators come in and do stuff like move furniture around, move furniture out, paint, change bedding, hang stuff up, etc. All these shows are about how to make your home more attractive WITH your stuff in it (even if you have to spend more money to make your stuff look good!)
To me, this seems like a pain in the ass for the sellers, but usually has stunning results. Often I think “wow, if someone did that to my house I’d totally stay!”
That being said…I would imagine that the “experts” who help you “design to sell” would say that if you can’t make it look good while living in it, it’ll look better if you’re not living in it. They would also probably urge you to keep some pieces in the house like basic window treatments and perhaps a table (for sales literature). It helps the buyers imagine what it’d look like with stuff in it.
My friends had a horrible time selling their townhouse, with and without their stuff in it. And they are meticulously clean. They ended up leaving a table and a lamp there (with sales literature on the table)…and the final buyers said “we’ll buy if we can keep the table and lamp.” Yeesh!
My house was completely empty when I bought it, even appliances were gone. I bought it anyway, but I had really special circumstances.
IMHO the best way to sell a house is with a small amount of nice furniture in it. A very common thing for people to do in this area is to “stage” a house. If the house is empty, a designer will bring in rented furniture. If the house is not empty, much of the extra furniture will be moved out & designer “accent” pieces will be brought in.
It seems like I often hear on home shows and such that it is important to “stage” your home for selling. People selling an empty house will even go to the extent of renting furniture to place in the house. Furnished homes felt a lot more inviting to me during my house-hunting a couple years back.
Here are my suggestions. For now, rent a storage unit and empty out all your clutter and closet-stuffing junk in there. Storage space is important to a lot of buyers and you want it to look like you have excess, not that you are running out. Also move out any furniture that makes a room look crowded or otherwise drags down the appearance of a room. Personal photos and knick-knacks should be kept to a minimum as well to allow the buyer to picture it as their home.
If you do end up with an empty home for sale, that may be a good time to consider new carpeting and a fresh coat of paint on the walls if either is looking worn and/or dated.
I recall my wife (a real estate agent) talking about this once. The way she explained it: “An empty place looks like a house. A furnished place looks like a home”.
I agree with the gist of the answers. When we sold our house, ten years ago, I had spare time and we moved all our junk to storage, painted, and basically made the house look like a model home. We sold it in one day (actually we got an offer during the open house.) We were famous in our town, and it came in handly since when the buyers started being butts our agent could tell them it would sell again fast, with such a good reputation.
The only downside is that we wished we had done it sooner, so we could enjoy the non-clutter.
I agree with Tastes ordering. When we were looking for our house here, some of the ones we visited were disasters. Much better to be empty. I think a problem with an empty house is that the eye is drawn to any imperfection, while in a full house people look at the furniture.
We toured some new homes they were building a block from us, and since we weren’t interested in buying, we looked at the tricks the company used. They had taken all the doors off the bedrooms to make them look bigger, and the bed in the master bedroom was much smaller than anyone would want. My favorite was that the master bath had no curtains of frosting on the windows. It made it seem very sunny, but it also gave an excellent view of the liquor store around the corner.
Empty houses are harder to sell because many buyers just have no vision of how it will look with stuff in it. People looked at my empty condo and scratched their heads asking stupid questions like “Where would the bed go?”
For a few weeks I made the mistake of not having hangers or any type of closet works in the closet off the master bedroom. If I were buying a home I’d prefer to not have anything so I can configure it the way I like. That way you don’t have to rip something out to reconfigure the hangers. Bad idea. Buyers looked at the empty closet with confusion. Some seemed unable to fathom what they would do with this empty little room.
I was shocked at how buyers needed to be spoon fed information.
When selling a house buyers are generally lloking for a house for the “Life they want to have”. That means a few dishes, neatly in the cupboards, furniture moved to accommodate flow and conversation, instead of pointing at the TV and things like that.
If your realtor isn’t doing stuff like this for you, you may want to hire a staging company.
I can’t add to the good suggestions already made. How about asking a friend to do a walk-through?
One of the problems the Designed to Sell experts point out is that potential buyers can’t always tell what a space is supposed to be used for. Like if your dining room is being used as an office, or if half your living room is a playroom.
I’ve bought and sold houses empty and furnished. I liked furnished better, but the empty houses had stunning design features that made up for the emptiness.
That’s another reason why I’m moving before selling, so I can paint the walls that need it, maybe clean the carpets, and maybe do new linoleum in the kitchen.
If you’re dead set on buying another house before your old one sells, I would say your best bet is to clean out your old house, spruce it up with a facelift (coat of paint, fix any little problems), and try to stage it a little or just show it as spotlessly clean.
Is it too late to talk you out of buying a new one before the old one is sold, if it’s a very slow market where you are?
We had our house on the market twice in a three-year period. The first time, we kept it clean, and tried to keep the clutter down to a minimum, but didn’t go to any extraordinary lengths. No offers in six months on the market, and we decided to take it off the market as we had no particular time we had to move, and our third kid was due within two months.
The second time, we started in January moving extraneous stuff into storage. We decluttered and thinned out the furniture as much as we could bear, kept it meticulously clean, etc. We made multiple trips to the storage unit every weekend until March when we put it on the market again. Once again, we had it on the market for six months, with a couple of lowball offers but nothing we really considered accepting. After six months, we switched real estate agents. The new agent brought in a home staging expert, who was complimentary of everything we’d done so far, and left us an eight-page list of additional things to do (everything from repainting rooms in specific neutral colors to recommending arrangement of vases with particular varieties and sizes of plants to removing all personal photographs, etc). We implemented as many of her suggestions as possible and had an offer we could live with inside of a month.
I know that in our shopping for a new place, when looking at empty houses (which we did a lot of, as we needed to move quickly to vacate for our buyers), we really did notice every blemish, as others have pointed out. I also know that when we got our first house (the one we sold last year), we got a great deal on it because it was empty, and the existing decor (wallpaper, paint colors, etc.) was dated and not to most folks’ taste – my wife hated it the first time she looked at it. But there was nothing bad about it that we couldn’t (and didn’t) change in the first year or so.
Essentially, what you’re trying to do is give prospective buyers no reason to latch onto something in the decor as the reason they don’t like your house. Personal photos, knick-knacks, hobby items, etc. all are much more likely to harm than help, because buyers may find themselves reacting unfavorably toward those items without even realizing that’s what they’re reacting to – they just have a vague negative feeling about the place without being able to say why.
My husband and I always prefer looking at empty houses, because we can actually SEE the house, not someone else’s version of it, with all the flaws hidden. We love to imagine the potential of the empty rooms. We realize that we are in the minority for that, though.
It’s a huge pain to sell a house when your living in it.
They try to play it up on decorating shows that you should have furniture in the house but I don’t think it’s such a huge deal. Sometimes it works as a disadvantage. If you leave bedroom furniture in a room and the person sees it and has bigger furniture than you do they might think the room is too small.
If you’ve moved out I’d recommend the making sure the front of the house is neat and the grass cut.
Repaint in inside a neutral color even if it doesn’t need painting. Lots of people can be turned off just by color.
If you had pets or smoke, either get the house professionally cleaned or make sure it’s super clean. I’d even consider removing rugs and drapes. You might not smell anything but a non-smoker, or non-pet owner will.
We once went to look at a really nice house but we were halfway through the door when the smell of cat urine hit us and my husband wouldn’t even walk through the house.
I concur with this. I have an extremely sensitive nose, and can tell within seconds of walking into a house if someone smokes there or there is a pet. It’s extremely off-putting, especially the cigarette smell.
As for furnished/unfurnished, as a recent (well, last year) home buyer, I generally preferred seeing houses that were minimally furnished. The house we eventually bought had rented furniture in it, since the owner was already in the process of moving his own (not particularly high-quality) stuff out. Seeing a nice matching dining room table and chairs in the formal dining room was better than seeing a big empty space there – for me, anyway.
I would, however, caution against going too far with “staging” or whatever. We visited one home in which an upstairs bedroom had a little “reading nook” carefully set up next to a bay window, complete with lighted lamp, and a book left open to a bookmark. The owners didn’t live in the house anymore, so I know it was a staged setup. It just felt very silly.
I cannot stress the importance of having freshly painted walls and unstained carpeting. When I house hunted years ago, I could not believe the number of people who put their most expensive asset on the market without spending a dime to spruce it up. We even toured one home that had bird shit all over the floor.
Would you sell a car without vacuuming it out and washing it? Then don’t sell your house without cleaning it from top to bottom. And put a fresh coat of paint on the walls.
The house we eventually bought was empty. It didn’t present a problem to us. Other homes that had crap crammed into every nook and cranny did.