Real Estate
How a Realtor can ADD value and $ in your Pocketbook
How we help our clients achieve the best results when selling their properties. Its not just luck, it requires know-how and experience.
Every once in a while you get an opportunity to make a market difference to the value of a property. In March of this year, we received a call from a potential seller to make a presentation to him and his wife. We were especially honored as we weren't the agents that helped them buyer the property about a year earlier.
As listing agents, MaryCeu (my business partner) and I then conducted our walk through of the home and the property. We knew that having the home professionally staged would help a great deal, but that wouldn't be enough in our opinions to help ensure that the sellers would make money after all of their selling costs were factored in. So, we viewed our focus on steps to provide "distance" from how the home appeared in its previous marketing. We also recommended work that would allow us to market the home as a legal 3 bedroom thereby making it much more desirable to prospective buyers.
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In the end, there were some small tweaks and two more significant changes we would recommend to our clients. First, we suggested that the first floor bathroom be re-glazed, turning a blue and maroon full bath into a more desirable white and grey. A new toilet was also installed. This cost around $5,500 in total, but gave the bathroom a look more in line with a $15,000-$20,000 renovation.
Here is the bath as featured in the 2020 purchase:
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Our remaining focus was on the fact that the first floor offered a newer and large kitchen space that was open to a good size dining room. There was also a very large living room at the front of the home. What was odd, is that there was a very large room that appeared to have been used as a multi-person office by the previous owners and our clients were using it as multi-purpose room. There was actually a large opening to this room, there were older kitchen cabinets on the walls and there was a counter that spanned an entire wall, as you can see in the below pictures.
Here is how the room looked from the 2020 Listing:
Our recommendations: remove the cabinets and the counter to start with. Then, add a closet and figure out the best option to provide a door for the entry to this room, as that is a requirement for a bedroom in Maplewood. Due to the size of the opening, we had to be creative and we recommended sliding barn door "hinges" and a double barn door to grace the entrance.
Here is how it looked after our recommendations were executed:
The key to selling a home for the MOST MONEY is knowing what today's buyers are looking for and providing them with the most "HGTV-looking" interiors with a combination of paint colors, fixtures and staging.
Nothing makes Mary and I happier than to see such wonderful results for our clients.
If you have any questions, or are interested in any advice, or would even like a copy of my book, please let me know.
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