I’ve driven down Chinoe a zillion times since I moved here in 1985. Most of the time I am just trying to get somewhere or have my head in my to-do list. This is the time of year that I get to catch my breath a bit since sales always slow around Thanksgiving. As I drove down Chinoe this week, I remembered the first time I was on this street.

It was 1985. In the fall. A little earlier in the year than this. We had just moved to a house on Lincoln Avenue. Coming from Frankfort, Lexington seemed like a huge city to me and a very exciting place to be. I was really into riding my bike back then since I was only 15. I was anxious to explore the “Big City” so I biked over to an old family friend’s apartment on Lakeshore Drive. I didn’t know my way around Lexington then. I remember I rode my bike down Richmond Road all the way to Lakeshore then up the hill. I really should have gone up the first block of Chinoe and the turned on Fontaine. Much prettier and slower moving traffic.

After Daniel and I met up, we rode down Fontaine and hit Chinoe. The local people called this road Shin-O-Way. I thought for the longest time that the Shin-O was the street name and the “Way” was the street suffix. I later learned that Shin-O-Way was really how you pronounced Chinoe and that the street suffix is really Road. We have some street names that I hear people mispronounce all the time…..Like is Desha really Da-shay or Desh-ah? Most say Da-shay.

So, Daniel and I are riding up Chinoe. What I love about biking is that you really have time to notice things and catch the vibe of wherever you are. Having moved here from a 1000 square foot house in Frankfort to an old Bungalow in Kenwick, the houses on Chinoe seemed HUGE to me. Fancy too. What I remember most is just how beautiful this part of town is. The houses are wonderful. The trees are fantastic. It is the street Thomas Kincaid would paint if he wanted to do a Lexington scene. I was in awe.

We rode across Alumni Drive to the newer section of Chinoe. There is one big house there that is perpetually for sale. I remember thinking that house was the best one…..probably because it was brand new then. This is long before Castlegate was built behind it and all those late 80’s neighborhoods sprung up on Old Mount Tabor.

I’ve always been fascinated with this area. In high school, I had many friends who lived in this area. I always enjoyed checking out their houses. Once I got my driver’s license, I would wonder around every street in this part of 40502. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the stone house with the wavy glass in the windows on Barrow…..or the day I discovered the big modern red brick house on Warrenwood Wynd.

I’ve spent a lot of the past 28 years in Lexington neighborhoods. Little did I know this day was the beginning for me. I guess that is what makes it such a good memory.

I’ve been watching this particular house since a client of mine made a good offer on it that was rejected. Below is an interesting tale of ALL the things NOT to do if you are a seller:

This house was listed for $259,900 in February of this year. It was waaaaaay over priced. First mistake. Back then, the market was really gaining momentum and houses were selling quickly. It was slowly reduced to the point where my clients wanted to see it. I told them it was overpriced.

The house showed beautifully since the seller had high end furniture and an obvious skill for decorating. Upon closer examination, I could tell that it was really just your average 15 year old home with 15 years worth of wear and tear. The cabinets were in bad shape. Only the downstairs flooring and appliances had been updated…..but it looked pretty.

We made an offer of $232k that was countered for $244,500. All along the listing agent had been telling me how motivated the seller is since they were being relocated. I never buy that line from a listing agent since it usually means their seller is motivated to get top dollar. Motivated sellers price their house just below market value for a quick sale, not over it! My clients came up to $236k, which was right inline with the comparable sales at that time. The seller didn’t budge.

We move on, my people buy another house that was even better. My last email to the listing agent after arguing over comps in the neighborhood, the market and price was “I don’t see them getting more than that, especially once they move out and it is vacant. The house looks fancier than it is due to their furniture. If they don’t take our offer, I would suggest they leave a lot of their furniture to keep it staged.”

The house was reduced, reduced, reduced until it finally got a contract. The last list price was $235k. It closed for $230k……which is $6000 less than they could have had many months ago from my people. What happened????

Lots of mistakes here in addition to starting out too high. To begin with, they were not living in reality, and they paid for it. They thought we were ridiculous to offer a number so far off from their list price. They sat on this house through Spring 2013, which was the hottest seller’s market I have ever seen. That alone should have told them something was wrong if they could not sell then. Next, they moved out and took all their pretty furniture. Now it is late in the summer, the buyer frenzy is cooling off, and their house is vacant. To get it sold, the ended up selling for LESS than it was really worth. Somebody got a decent deal on that house.

Long story short…….a series of bad choices is a good way lose money on your house.

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?”