Here are some tips on getting an older house ready to sell. This is from a flip we did, so everything is brand new. The same principles apply to any home before listing. This was a project in Dawsonville, GA. See a text version of all of our tips How to get your house ready to sell
Video Transcription
Speaker 1: Hey, guys. Today we’re talking about our free guide, 18 Tips for Selling Your Home, getting it listed on the MLS, and what can make it really pop, make it a lot better for cheap money.
A lot of realtors will try to get you to do all kinds of upgrades and repairs. Some of these things do help, the cheap things like paint and carpet, those are always your best return on your investment, but a lot of times, updating those bathrooms, updating those kitchens, those costs can get really out of whack really fast. Sometimes even though your house may sell for a higher number, you may not make quite as much in the end. They may be pushing you that way to get the commission higher or to make it look better for them to get a higher sale, but really what I want you to do is net the most profit possible.
Let’s go over a few things that’ll really help raise the value of your house. One of the first things on the list is staging. We staged this home, but you don’t have to go through that whole process of getting staging furniture and all that, but just a couple of little things. A little few things, pops of color, making it nice and clean, of course, taking up all the clutter, maybe a few things hung on a wall where it’s really bare. This is a really big room, as you can tell, but we really wanted to focus on the fireplace and bring attention to all that.
All right, so let’s take a look at number one and two on the list. Boosting curb appeal and sprucing up the porch a little bit. Again, this is not a massive porch or anything, but just splashing a little bit of color onto this house. I mean this is when we renovated, so it looks a little bit better, but you can just paint your front door a different color to give it a little bit of pop.
See these flowers up here, we just wanted to add a little bit of color to the neutral paints and everything that we used. I mean, you can even look on a color palette online. I think the paint color on this one is Ancient Marble for the brick. It’s a Sherwin Williams color.
Just take a look at this flower bed. We didn’t do a whole lot, we just added a little bit of color, a little bit of yellow, a little bit of purple, put these hanging plants here. Again, these are like $20 each. Just clean it up a little bit, color for format. All these things really helped with the curb appeal.
Another thing on our list is just making sure your house numbers are nice and visible, and we put some nice bronze colors on this and painted the mailbox just to make it stand out a little more.
All right, so let’s jump to an item number eight on our list, that’s getting a pre-listing home inspection. This applies more to older homes. Maybe we’re talking about anything built before 2000 where a lot of codes have changed. What we realized is since we renovate our own houses and do our own construction, is that a lot of these things are coming up on inspections now because they’re not up to code. Let’s talk about one that comes up a lot and we can get a little bit of a cheaper fix, if at all, if it needs attention.
This house had a two-wire system. Let’s see. This house had a two-wire system, which you would’ve seen before that it was only a two-prong outlet, meaning it wasn’t grounded. This is coming up a lot on inspections that everything has to be three-wire now and upgraded to at least a 150-Amp box, which we did here.
But rather than requiring a whole electrical system, which can take $8,000 sometimes, we put in these what are called arc-fault breakers. Okay? That means you can keep the old two-wire system. These just trip a lot easier without the third wire being grounded. Now they’re not super cheap, I think these breakers are each still $50 a piece and you’re going to need a licensed and insured electrician to install them obviously, but it’s a lot better than having to go through the whole system and redo the whole thing.
Okay, so now we’re going to talk about numbers nine and 13. Number nine, I think, is to pick neutral colors. I know it’s hard to tell from video, but this house was painted in the explosion of grays you see everything in now with white trim. This is actually Agreeable Gray by Sherwin Williams, kind of goes with everything. Ceilings are bright white and the trim is another type of off-white, which I can’t remember.
Again, it’s not very exciting, but it’s very neutral. It allows people to imagine what the house would look like with their stuff in it. I think it’s number 13, staging or making small rooms look better. This is the smallest bedroom, as you can tell, it’s not very big, but we just kind of staged it as an office to give it a little bit of depth to it without over-cramming it, like if you don’t want to put a king size bed or something in here, because then it’s really going to look small.