Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Picture this: You have to sell your home. Perhaps your company asks you to move to another city. Quickly. The real estate market is a buyer’s market, but you hope to recoup the costs in the place you relocate to. But you still want to make a good sale. Thankfully, you have been judicious in the purchase and the sale will not be short. You have some cash on hand to spruce up the place you currently live in before you put it on the open market. What do you do? Hopefully, you don’t make these three biggest errors when remodeling for a sale!

Painting Everything White

This seems to be a favorite mistake because it appeals to everyone’s sense of cleanliness. If it’s white, you can spot a speck of dust, we think. And so, if it’s white, it must be clean. While that seems like a good idea, usually painting the entire place white has just the opposite effect. For one thing, it looks like an attempt at sanitation. Like a hospital. People don’t like living in a hospital - it appears cold and unappealing to comfort and warmth - two things home buyers will pay a premium for. Why cold? Because it dulls all the little details. It hides the crown molding and it covers up the window design. It makes all the features of the home disappear! Why would you want to do that?

The only time whitewashing a house is a good idea is when the house is a short-term rental and one that is painted every 3 months or so. The landlord has chosen the cheapest paint available and one that requires the least amount of work and attention to detail. You want to create the opposite effect. So pick your paint with care and pay attention to detail. Use paint to accentuate the trim, the molding and the wainscoating. These are features. Don’t hide them!

Making Changes Based on Personal Preferences

I don’t know why it is that moving (or potential moving) brings out the finish-it-all-now monster out in all of us. Suddenly, we feel the desire to set everything right, become more organized, clean up our act, so to speak. This nesting instinct is a good thing - especially once we get to the new home - or we wouldn’t unpack and would live in boxes all our lives! But in the home that is going on the market, the nesting instinct is completely misplaced. While finishing projects is necessary, getting them to fit your personal preferences is not! Sometimes, it’s hard to draw the line, but you must!

Most home owners have projects. They have ideas of how the home should look and what it should feel like. Unfortunately, only a few homeowners ever get their home to look like that picture in their mind. And it’s a worthy endeavor, just not one to engage in while the home is on the market. Sometimes, this involves abandoning projects and finishing them in a way different than one imagined, getting the home to appeal to a taste that is different from your own. But remember, you will not be living in the home any more! Save your efforts for the new place and save yourself some money, too.

Getting the Latest and Greatest

Many home sellers think that the more they remodel, the more money they will make in the sale of a home. That is simply not true. According to most research, kitchens, bathrooms and siding gets the most return on investment. So watch for what remodeling efforts you want to put into the home before you list it. All of them are not created equal. Just because granite countertops are fashionable does not mean they immediately increase the value of the home - just look at the all the REOs on the market today. Believe me, a lot of them have granite counter tops.

A better idea is to look at how much you’re willing to spend and then take a good look at your home. If you can afford an interior designer, get one. The most important thing for a home to sell is not that it has the coolest, newest brand-name appliances or fixtures. It’s conformity. You want to stay within the style of your home and the houses around it. It’s called the principle of comformity. This is not to say that you cannot upgrade a 1940s kitchen. By all means, go ahead and do it. Home buyers love upgraded kitchens but be sure you retain a sense of the original style of the home. Then, when the home is on the market you could also play up the charm by staging it.

While I’m not absolutely sure these are the three biggest errors home sellers make, I’m pretty sure they rank pretty high on the list. So try and avoid these and hopefully you will hold on to enough of your money to be able to get the next home just as you like it!