Real estate agents always tell you to fix up your house before putting it on the market but some people do more than others. Here's what Vickie Almond of Virginia Beach, Virginia, did:
- She cleaned the bricks on the front of her house. There was "kind of yucky looking algae on the front bricks so I got the bleach bottle out and cleaned up most of the bricks." The cleaner "ate that green gunk right up."
- She stripped wallpaper, a lot of wallpaper, or as she put it, "What would have been a small job just kind of exploded." A little piece of wallpaper was peeling behind the shower, but when she got that off, things deteriorated and soon enough she was "down to the studs." She thought she would replace the wallpaper with tile but when she found out the price of tile she ended up stripping the entire bathroom and painting it.
- She started to tackle the wallpaper in the utility room but "after the whole wall coming out in the bathroom I decided I didn't want to do that again." Instead, she hired someone to strip and paint the utility room.
- The Almonds had been in their house "for years and years." So their son-in-law rented a truck to haul stuff away, saying, "we're not done until we can get two cars in the garage." They made trips to the dump, trips to Goodwill and one trip to the son-in-law's house. After seven truckloads had been hauled away, "we did get two cars in the garage," Vickie Almond said.
- The Almonds hired contractors to hang new entry and garage doors and lay new carpet.
How long did all this take?
"For a couple of months, I really did not do anything but work on the house," Almond said in a phone interview, "It would have been considered a fixer-upper. There was a lot of work to do."
Was it worth it?
The house sold in 36 hours for $152,500. Before she did all the work, Almond said, she and her husband Myron had hoped to get $130,000.
Almond's hard work is featured by homegain.com, a Web site that offers tips for sellers on finding a real estate agent and making improvements that don't cost a lot but help sell the house. "We'd never sold a house before and didn't even know where to start," Vickie Almond said. "We were rookies so we were back to the Web site every day."
As it happened, she also was homegain's one millionth registered user. She followed the site's advice and hired a home inspector first to tell her what she needed to do.
Now that the house is sold, the exhausted Almonds aren't planning to buy another. Myron Almond is in the Navy and is being transferred to Florida, where the couple hopes to get into military housing. "We'll just simplify our lives a little bit," Vickie Almond said. "We'll call the housing people when there's a problem with the house."
Homegain asked real estate agents to identify the home improvements that pay off most at the least cost. The overwhelming two top picks were "lighten and brighten " and "clean and declutter."
Their top tips to lighten and brighten: Clean all windows, inside and out, keep curtains open, use natural light, use the brightest light bulbs possible, install dimmer switches and create lighting for different occasions.
To clean and declutter: Clean the entryway carefully; it creates the buyer's first impression; clean or buy new front door hardware; hire a professional to thoroughly clean the interior of your home; remove personal effects.
Another favorite with the agents was "staging," which "can be the secret to selling your home quickly. Your real estate agent can help you rearrange furniture or even rent more modern furniture to show your house in the best possible light."
You can find more details on the study at www.homegain.com/maxstats.
