People are more motivated by avoiding pain than they are to gain pleasure according to science. It’s a factor of x2. So I want you to imagine for a moment as a home seller, if we were sitting across the kitchen table from each other and I said mister or misses home seller… If you don’t spend $2,000 on X, Y, and Z, when you get the offer on your house, they’re going to take $10,000 out of the offer. Or mister and misses home seller, when you get to the settlement table, they’re going to take $10,000 out of your profit sheet!!!
Now imagine the same conversation like this: mister and misses home seller, if you spend $2,000 fixing up your house while getting ready to sell doing X, Y, and Z, when it comes time to sell it, your offer is going to be $10,000 higher!
What I found is that most people are more motivated by not losing money than they are by gaining money. But really guys, it’s the same $10,000 and what people don’t understand is that houses sell in a, in a range. There’s a price swing effect. Some houses sell at the top of the market, some at the bottom of the market, and according to the National Association of Realtors, a national statistic is 46.5% of houses actually fail to sell.
We feel like we have an obligation to tell you all of the things you could and should do to sell your house for the most money or avoid losing the most money. We hire a home staging consultant or a professional decorator. Their job is to come to your home and go through every room and tell you all of the things that you could and should do. A lot of those things don’t cost any money…
Things like- get a storage unit and put all this stuff in there, move all this furniture from one side of the room to the other, maybe do some painting, some decluttering.
Using the above metric, we have found on average that it cost our home sellers about $2,000 using a contractor that we found to put granite countertops in a house. According to my appraiser, (BTW we pay for an appraisal in all of our listings), if you get granite countertops in your house in the average house in Calvert County, your net profit will be about $10,000. Using that analogy, if you have dated countertops you’re going to either lose $10,000 or gain $10,000 depending on how you look at it.
When a buyer is previewing a house, all of the things that they think that they need to do to either fix up your house or to fix it. If there’s something wrong with it in order to get it the way that they want it, according to statistics, they multiply that by a factor of six. So the $2,000 countertops in their mind, you know, according to science is $12,000 countertops.
