Selling your house -Part 3

I had the awkward experience of meeting someone whose house we had seriously considered purchasing but in the end we did not make an offer on that property. Of course they wanted to know why we had not selected their home.

No one is going to answer this question because there is no clear answer. Nothing is more personal that selecting your home. A strength to one buyer may be a weakness in the eyes of different buyer. Remember this process is not personal; they are looking at your house, not judging your taste or possessions. Some of the reasons an individual buyer may not be interested in your home are not in your control. If they want a pool and you don’t have one then that buyer is simply not going to consider your house. Everyone has a “wish list” that they are hoping to fill and it is a rare find that meets all the desired points on the first visit. It is more likely that your home will have some of the desired features and lack others. The buyer is going to decide what they must have, what can be changed and what they cannot live with.

Even though your home is not likely to be a perfect fit for every buyer, there are steps you can take to make sure that you do not remove your home from consideration that are independent of the factors that you cannot control.

In previous posts Selling your Home, Part 1 and Selling your Home, Part 2, I wrote about getting your home ready to sell by updating the paint and careful cleaning. A third point is to make sure that you are really interested in selling your home.

This seems like a ridiculous statement but many sellers do not seem that interested in actually selling their house. What are the symptoms?

• The house is cannot be shown on short notice. This eliminates many potential out of town buyers who will not be able to reschedule.
• The owner has not keep in touch with their real estate agent so the agent does not know if they are still in the house or not. The agent and/or the buyer do not want to walk in on the owner unannounced so it is easier to bypass the listing.
• The owners stay in house when the house is being viewed by a potential buyer. Most people are not comfortable viewing a home with the owner present and will rush through the house since it feels like an invasion of privacy.
• The owners forgot to give the agent the code for the alarm or to leave the alarm off.
• Pets are not confined.

That last point is really important. I have a wonderful dog that I love. He is an ancient pug and he has all the qualities of a pug. He is friendly, loves to warble at new people, breathes heavily when he is excited, and sheds like an Angora cat. Not everyone appreciates these fine qualities.

We decided to board our dog while the house was on the market. There were good reasons for this.

• It was not possible for me to return home to remove or confine my dog every time the house was to be shown; my work schedule did not allow for this..
• People say that they love pets. This is only partly true; they love their pets. Your pet is likely a potential cause of damage to the home in other people’s eyes. Even buyers who have dogs or cats are likely to wonder what repairs will be needed due to your beloved dog or cat. If your pet is not at home you can remove all the signs of the pet such as clouds of fur collecting under the furniture, feeding dishes and pet odors and know that these items will stay gone for a good period of time.
• Once a stranger enters your home and the dog is aware that they are there, they are likely to bark until the “intruder” leaves. This causes a potential buyer to rush through your home.

I can hear some of you thinking “But Fluffy is part of our family” and “Love me, love my dog”. That is exactly the issue. It is not about you; it is about your house, a structure that your family lives in. The buyer does not have to love you or your dog and will likely only meet you once. They have to love your house. Make the house the focus and make it easy for the buyer to view the features of your house. At this point is it a house not a home.

Boarding my dog meant our house could stay in spotless condition and could be viewed on very short notice. This made our house easy to show and it was shown a lot. One day our house was shown four times. This would not have been possible if I had to return home to tidy up before every showing.

So the point for this week is to make it easy for the buyer to view your house. If you are not ready to do this, think about how serious you are about selling your home. If it is too hard to view your house, buyers will simply move on to another house in the same market.