unwilling to keep the home in turnkey condition for showing purposes, consider vacating before putting the home on the market. In some situations, it’s almost essential to vacate the home during the selling period—especially if the sellers’ home is simply too messy to show while the sellers live there. Reasons for messy homes vary. Some sellers are pack rats, and their home reflects that behavior because boxes are piled everywhere, and rooms are stuffed with personal belongings. This is a considerable obstacle to getting a good offer. Other sellers have several children, which can make it challenging to maintain a home that’s always clean and show-ready. Potential buyers should be alerted that the seller has vacated the house to show it at its best. Otherwise, shoppers might interpret a vacant home as meaning a “motivated seller” who needs to sell quickly. One comment on a real estate online forum tells of making an offer of $30,000 less than the asking price, believing the owners might be getting desperate to sell. They were asking $300,000. The buyer was sold on it anyway and would have paid more, but “haggling” began well below what was expected because the buyer read the fact that the home was unlived in as a clue to a desperate-to-sell owner.
BUDGETING YOUR “BIG PRODUCTION”
When preparing for sale, think of your home as a movie or stage play set, arranged precisely for the intended purpose—to earn you more money on the sale of your home. Your home-staging expenditure might range from 1 percent to 3 percent of the listing price of a home. On the other hand, it may result in selling the house for 5 percent to 10 percent more. That would be a $6,000 investment on a $200,000 home sale, resulting perhaps in an increase of $20,000 in the sale price. A study by Homeagain.com was even more favorable and showed that sellers who spent $500 on staging recovered a whopping 343
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