Aug. 25, 2006: Make your rooms make sense when selling your home
You walk into the home and you know you're walking into a living room. Except there is a pingpong table standing there in the middle of the room. There's a dartboard on one wall. On the opposite wall is a dry bar with a beer tap.
You walk into what you know is a formal dining room, except there's a grand piano sitting in the middle of the floor with the dining room chandelier hanging down below the sounding board.
Past the kitchen is a charming solarium, except it's overstuffed with the dining room table and china cabinet.
The garage should be just beyond the laundry room, but all you can see is a vast warehouse stacked with junk.
By the time you get to a room you know is a bedroom, despite its giving every appearance of being an office, you're ready to give up. The house might have promise, but you can't see it. The sellers have unwittingly plotted to confuse you at every turn.
My best advice for sellers is this: Move out. Leave behind a few pieces of excellent furniture - even if you have to rent it - and a few tasteful decorator items. Get everything else out. Yourselves, the kids, the pets and their odors, and all that accumulated clutter.
Your response: "But we can't afford to move until we sell!"
Fine. Then get rid of everything you can. Yard sale. St. Vincent de Paul. The dump. And finally, a rental warehouse.
"But that costs money, too!"
Sure does. But think of it this way: If your house spends an extra three months on the market waiting for the buyer who can see through all the clutter, you will spend perhaps $5,000 in mortgage payments and opportunity costs. Worse, you may have to drop the list price by $5,000, $10,000 or more. Simple arithmetic argues that storing your stuff off-site is a lot cheaper than challenging potential buyers with the puzzle you have made of your home.
If you want your home to sell, and sell quickly, make the rooms make sense.
Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.
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