One of my favorite things to do when listing a property is making the needed adjustments to make a house sell quickly and for top dollar. Sometimes the changes are minor and sometimes they are a bit more complicated.

This past summer I had a listing for a fantastic family. They found me from this blog. They had a great house in a great neighborhood but it was just really bland. When they showed it to me, the husband said he had tiled the laundry room floor. It looked good. Not all DIY tile jobs look good. The bathrooms and counter tops were original (about 15 years old.) I suggested we paint the master bath vanity white and tile the floor in a brick-like pattern. You can use very cheap tile and lay it in a cool pattern and everybody loves it. The kitchen was just super bland, so I asked if the seller would tile the backsplash. All in all, it was less than an $800 investment to add a lot of character. These people had a sandbox they removed in the backyard too. They asked what I thought we should do about it. I said to throw down some mulch, buy a firepit and two plastic lawn chairs. The house had 3 offers the first day on the market….and the one that got it asked that we leave the firepit and lawn chairs (about $65 worth of stuff from Wal-Mart!)

I recently remodeled a whole house. That was a lot of fun. I picked the cabinets, counter top, vanities, all the lighting and flooring. The place looks really awesome. One prospective tenant told me I should have been a designer. I did the house in gray. That is a color that is just now getting trendy around here. It really separates your house from the rest of the boring beiges around here. It is all about making your house stand out to a buyer (or tenant) more than the next one.

I have a new client whose house I will be listing soon. It had been on the market for quite some time before she called me. It is a great house with lots of awesome features, but it has a few things that needed some updating. The first thing I noticed was that the house was very dark. Buyers want to see the house, so I usually tell people to put as high a wattage bulb as they can safely do. The living room furniture was arranged in a way that discouraged buyers from coming into the room. I have noticed that if a room is like that, buyers just stand in the corner and look into the space rather than experiencing it….like a room in a museum with a velvet rope across the doorway. I guess the worst features that buyers would find with this house was that the kitchen cabinets were stained wood and the counter top was butcher block laminate. That is just a lot of wood grain to see. There was an island that had the same counter top. That would have been expensive to replace on the island since you can’t just pull that off the shelf at Lowe’s. So, I told her we should replace the counter top with something in stock at Lowe’s. She just told me it cost her $550 to do that. Since a lot of high end new homes are going for a two tone look, I suggested we keep the island with the butcher block laminate top and paint just those cabinets white. It will give it more of an HGTV feel……like the Property Brothers had been there!

All this is super fun for me. I like to try to come up with ways to turn a negative into a big selling point and doing it as cheaply as I can. It is all about making it easy for a buyer to say “Yes” to your house.

A lot of my clients will call me before they plan to do anything to their house. I often get texts with pictures while a client is at Lowe’s.

I only wish I could do this with my own house. I have never been happy with anything I have picked for my own house. I am starting to ask myself “What would I tell a client if this were their house?”

Today is kind of a sad day for me.  See, I am having my last closing with a repeat client/friend that is moving out of town.

I met Gerald at a listing I had several years ago.  I could tell he didn’t like Realtors that much.  He didn’t see much of a use for them.  I can’t say that I blame him.  He is a pretty sharp guy that kept me on my toes with every question he asked.  He stretched me a lot and made me a better agent as I worked hard to keep ahead of him to show him I had something he needed other than opening a door.

The first house he bought from me was a foreclosure.  He has always had this plan to buy something at a low price that he can fix up and make money on.  This first house was in a perfect location and was in awesome shape for a foreclosure.  We got the house in multiple offers.

Gerald and his wife fixed up that house and had me list it.  I was amazed at their skills in decorating and knowing where to spend their money.  In fact, they are much better at both of those than I am.  They are the type that can take a normal room and spend $500 to make it look like the dropped more like $5000.  Needless to say, that house sold quickly in the terrible market we were in back then.

After this, we looked at several other houses.  There was one in Nicholasville he liked.  He saw it at night and with snow on the roof.  We wrote an offer.  Come inspection time, the snow was gone and we could see the house better.  It did not inspect well.  I told him that the house needed way too much work and it didn’t really fit his model of finding a good house and adding value to it for a profit.

So, we ended up buying a house in southeast Lexington.  The process of that one was a nightmare.  A local investor group had bought it at the Master Commissioner sale and did not have title to the house yet.  They then realized they sold it to us for pretty cheap and thought they could force us into paying more or backing out of the contract.  One of the owners called me and gave me 3 choices of what we could do.  I told the dude that while I appreciated those options, we were just going to stick to the contract we all signed.  After the biggest professional battle of my career, Gerald and his family got the house according to the terms of the contract.

Soooo, Gerald has me come look at the house this spring.  Again, I am amazed at their talent.  The place looks awesome.  I mean, it is like something on HGTV where you take an old outdated kitchen or bath, keep the expensive to replace items and somehow add just the right new stuff to make a negative into a positive.  It would not surprise me to see them on HGTV one day.  Heck, they even made pink tile look cool??

Again, the house sells quickly because we price it right at market value and it looks so sweet.  We start looking for houses, and Gerald accepts a really good job about 80 miles away.

I will really miss Gerald and his family.  I’ll miss working with him.  I will miss the occasional email about a house he saw that he wants to flip.  I’ll miss going out to lunch with them.  But that is okay, because I know he will be happy with his new job and I know he has an awesome future ahead of him.

So, I may be a little glossy eyed tomorrow at 9 because I will miss a good friend who has been a pretty important part of growing me as a Realtor.  I won’t be able to say this tomorrow, but………

Gerald, thanks for your friendship.  Thanks for sending me everybody you’ve ever met who wants to buy or sell a house.  I know you have a great future in front of you, and I know it involves real estate.  You know too much to not either be a Realtor or an investor some day.  You are a good man and I will miss you and your family…….and I hope you read this tonight so I don’t have to say this in the morning!

Check this out:

“A new survey by the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing shows that about 60 percent of the millennial generation say they prefer a mix of housing choices and prefer to be near shops, restaurants, offices, and transit. Seventy-five percent of Millennials say they value walkability. Of the 63 percent of Millennials who say they plan to move within the next five years, about 40 percent say they expect to move to multifamily housing.”

Some people say that the suburban type McMansions may be out of style for the millennial generation.  I say this survey was a total waste of time.

Why?

 

1.  The main reason is because no generation has ever wanted the things their parents had when they were that young.  That is why you don’t see 22-32 years olds driving Buicks or 7 passenger SUV’s.  When these 22-32 year olds are 42-52, they will want a large house in a quiet, safe area for their kids to grow up in……and yeah, most will want that house to be on a cul-de-sac.

2.  I would think any group with a name like Urban Land Institute maaaaaaaaaay have a slight bias in how they designed the survey.

3.  I am NOT seeing this with the buyer’s I work with in this age group.  In Lexington, most of the time they want a newer house that doesn’t need a lot of work.   Due to their budget, most end up with a suburban type starter home just like every generation has mostly done for decades.  The ones that want an older house tend to land in Gardenside, Southland or Garden Springs.  The mid-century houses well inside New Circle is about as close to this as I am seeing…….and those neighborhoods were the suburban sprawl of the 50’s and 60’s that are now considered to be a central location.

4.  To be a little more specific to the Lexington Market, we don’t really have much that fits that description at a price point that is accessible to your average 22-32 year old.  Most cannot afford Chevy Chase or anything else in the 40502 zip code, and the affordable parts of downtown are still a bit scary to most buyers.

 

So……

In Lexington at least, the suburban style move-up homes and McMansions are safe.  Lexington is more of a large town than a small city.  While we have more options than ever for something like the millennials described, we still don’t have a lot.

I don’t do it.  Did it when I was a newbie.  Quit doing it and never will again.

Back before electronic access to lockboxes, about the only way for a listing agent to know a house got shown was for the buyer’s agent to leave a business card inside the house somewhere, usually the foyer or kitchen counter.  It is one of those practices that should have died long ago but hasn’t.

I don’t like it when agents leave their cards in my listings either.  See, nothing tells a buyer and their agent that a house isn’t selling like seeing a big stack of cards from showings that did not result in a sale.  Heck, sometimes I have seen so many business cards that it looks like some kind of drawing for a free gym membership by the register of a Pizza Hut.  As an agent, it makes me assume the house is overpriced or has some fatal flaw that nobody wants to own.

Besides the fact that I am the only Realtor that doesn’t carry 500 business cards with me everywhere I go, the main reason I never leave one is so no other buyer’s agent knows I was there.  See, I have been in multiple offer situations before and known who I was competing with because I made note of whose card/cards I saw while at the house.   I hit their recent sales activity on the MLS and look for patterns like what percentage of the list price do they normally get their clients to agree to, do most of their clients ask for seller concessions, what type of financing most of their clients do, etc.  Often, I know a little about the agent anyway since I have been around for a while.

BTW, I ordered a box of 1000 cards about 4 years ago and I think I still have about 983 left.  I’ll dust one off if you want one?