Stripping for Resale

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No! Keep your clothes on, Please! But make your house that you want to sell look clean and uncluttered. An appraiser once told me that the houses he most dreaded having to appraise were houses that had been “professionally decorated”. What that phrase usually means is that a homeowner has paid a lot of money for a lot of stuff like custom paint and doodads that don’t work at all at resale.

The truth is that decorators don’t help you when you need to resale your house. Their ideas (that cost you all those dollars) may actually hurt resale! Just ask any of the relocation companies. They go with the basics. They buy lots of ivory paint. Painting is the first thing they do after they get you out of your house. And they will not pay top dollar for your house! You may not even get a market price. They plan to make money even if you don’t.

They are approaching the problem of packaging a house for resale from a business perspective, not an emotional one. Why? Potential buyers are looking for clean uncluttered spaces that they don’t have to work on after the sale. Your custom paint job probably doesn’t match their things. That’s why you want to be able to show them a neutral interior. It’s like resale insurance.

What buyers ALL want to do is to move in and do exactly nothing! If you aren’t a transferee who is lucky enough to have a “relo” company to back you up, it’s especially vital for you to know this. Potential buyers do not want to fix your decorating errors. They do not even want to paint, the easiest and cheapest of DIY jobs.

Relocation companies rarely do anything beyond painting. They never put in $50,000 kitchens or remodel baths. Occasionally they might replace carpet, but even that is very rare. If you really want to sell your house for as much $$$ as you can, you have to make choices that will serve your interests while you live there and when you need to resale.

Keep in mind that you may need to stage it for resale. It has to be clean, uncluttered and neutral colored. Another way to say this is that your house has to match every buyer’s stuff. Of course you don’t know what their stuff looks like. That’s why the colors have to be beautiful!

Your décor has to be neutral, too. Forget matching furniture sets, country flower sofas and borders and your collection of action figures. If you are a collector, pack that stuff up and store it off site. Count on someone touching your most expensive item while looking at your house…or pocketing it.

Instead, make your house look like an expensive hotel suite. You even need to take down examples of art that might offend anyone. Go clean neutral and uncluttered for faster resale. Skip the really expensive remodeling and keep more cash. You’ll be glad you did.