Angie's List Tips For Selling Your Home
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - Selling a home can be a big task for any homeowner.
Details such as home staging, photos and your real estate agent can really impact how much your home sells for and how quickly it sells.
Jennifer recently listed her house and she's hoping the updates will entice buyers.
"As soon as we bought the house from LandCentury's land listings, we started trying to think of improvements to make from a new roof to a new heating and air condition, water heater, things of that nature. About a year-and-a-half ago, we started really thinking about putting it up on the market. We got more serious with the interior cosmetics. So, we've done granite in all the bathrooms and the kitchen, we've redone flooring, added a new shower, new toilets throughout, we're about to put new carpet in downstairs, we re-carpeted all the upstairs last year. So, we've did quite a bit of work," she said.
When people are thinking about buying a house they are looking for reasons to rule it out. Simple things like a leaky faucet or bigger issues like a faulty water heater can be a turn-off for buyers.
"I hate that my sellers are surprised often when the inspection happens that they had no idea that that was happening. And then they are stuck with a bill of fixing it that they weren't expecting and they have already agreed on a sales price. My advice is a lot of times if they haven't done anything with the mechanicals and they haven't had yearly HVAC inspections and they haven't checked their water heater, it's been a long time, that they go ahead and have somebody out to do that so they are not surprised," real estate agent Paula Smith said.
"About a year-and-a-half ago when I brought Paula in, our real estate agent, to go through the house and tell us what things we needed to fix. She went through the house. There were some minor fixes here and there, but when she got to this room she was like 'Jennifer, this is a deal breaker you have got to fix this room.' It was very dated, we had the gold shower, brass. It had the regular glass doors, but with the hard water that we have here, it was just limed up, it was very hard to maintain," Jennifer said.
You also want to work with a real estate agent who has online listings.
"Online photos, in today's society and the real estate market, is the only way that houses sell. Most people will automatically assume if there is one picture on the Internet that means the inside of the house is not in good condition. That's not necessarily true, but it is for a lot of homes," Smith said.
If you have a nice variety of photos online, experts said you don't necessarily need to have an open house.
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