Preparing Your Home For Listing: How to Maximize Your Profit
Happy sellers follow our advice when it comes to prepping their home for the market. These listings sell faster, and for more money, than the competition. In this video, the Pettitt Group’s Andrea Pettitt and Alice Schramm guide sellers through the listing process. It doesn’t just mean cleaning your house and making sure it smells good.
Andrea Pettitt: Hi, I’m Andrea Pettitt with the Pettitt Group.
Alice Schramm: And I am Alice Schramm the Pettitt Group and I am the listing coordinator.
Andrea Pettitt: Alice I have been working together for a long time and have a lot of experience getting listings ready for the market, so we want to talk to you today a little bit about some of the important considerations when listing a home.
Alice Schramm: Yes. So the biggest thing is going to be the home prep.
Andrea Pettitt: And home prep is getting everything perfect for the marketplace, right?
Alice Schramm: Yes.
Andrea Pettitt: And Alice I work really well together as a team. A lot of people are a little intimidated at first when they learn that we have a team. They think, oh my gosh, are you going to take care of me? But actually we are. And Alice’s the Yin to my Yang, the Yang to my Yin. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. So when we’ve got a seller that’s getting ready to sell their house, I’m working with them a lot on market strategy and price and an overview of getting the house ready and you are working with them to give them those checklists and the things to do. So let’s talk about a few of those key items that our sellers are doing to get their house ready for the market. Whether we are helping coordinate somebody to do it for them or they’re doing it themselves. So the first thing would be cleaning, right?
Alice Schramm: Cleaning is everything. We want to clean out the closets. You want to declutter your walls, that’s cleaning, cleaning the windows, your exterior needs to be clean. Yard work needs to look good. And then also, a big thing is we are pet owners, so we understand and I recently sold my home, so I do understand with two Golden Retrievers that they’re hairy and they’re smelly. And so, making sure that you have a plan for your pets.
Alice Schramm: And so, I went overboard in making sure that everything was clean when it comes to the dog hair. Another thing would be if you have a cat, that can be a turn off for people. And so, making sure you have a plan for the litter box and just toys, another thing. Most people love animals, they just don’t want to see it when they’re looking at a home, so that’s key when you’re getting ready for a nice clean home.
Andrea Pettitt: And that’s something that we talk to our sellers about all the time.
Alice Schramm: Yes.
Andrea Pettitt: We talk about how are we structuring our showings so that we can be prepared and how can we help in that process. What about things like when we walk in and your eye kind of goes to things like grout and baseboards, is that stuff important?
Alice Schramm: That stuff’s very important because I know it’s important for me as a buyer as well. I like to see the baseboards clean. The shower should be clean, get all that hard water stains off, if you have a glass shower door, you want to get that off and if it’s something that you can’t do, Andrea, our team, we have a great cleaning crew that we recommend.
Andrea Pettitt: We do so much work before that photo day in a listing. Why do we do all of this work with our clients?
Alice Schramm: We do all this work so that clients fall in love with the photos. They want to see it. We want to get you the most money for your home. We want to be able to see that you are prepared for it. I know that as a consumer myself, when I’m looking online, I’m falling in love with the photos before I even walk into that home.
Andrea Pettitt: And our job is really to get people to see your house in person and have their experience online be beautiful but then it’s sometimes those details in the house, that deep cleaning, that makes them walk in the door and fall in love all over again.
Alice Schramm: Yes. Yeah. So they can envision it when they walk in. They’re like, this is exactly what I saw online, but so much better. They just fall in love when they walk in the door.
Andrea Pettitt: Right. It smells great.
Alice Schramm: Yes.
Andrea Pettitt: It looks great.
Alice Schramm: Yeah.
Andrea Pettitt: It feels great.
Alice Schramm: I’m all about the smell.
Andrea Pettitt: You are, you have a keen nose. That’s always important and you’re an asset to our sellers when you walk in and you notice things, it’s important. So Alice, when we sit down with our sellers and we’re working with sellers, sometimes they’ll say to me, well I think we can get the house listed and then I’m going to move all these things into storage because I don’t really have time to do that before the photo day. What would you say to that?
Alice Schramm: No, everything needs to be ready for photo day. I am pretty strict about that. Photo day.
Andrea Pettitt: Yes. Alice is our timekeeper and why? Yeah, because we’re creating a product launch. In the real estate market there are actually a lot of channels that we are tapping into to market your home. There’s an online social media presence, there’s an Instagram presence, there’s Facebook paid advertising, there’s everything on our website, on the Sotheby’s website. And so, all of these things, we are doing everything at once to launch because we want your house to be so sexy and so in demand because buyers who are excited by a new listing who want to see it right away get emotionally vested and we end up getting more money in the process because we want to get you the top dollar, why else do you hire a professional, right? And Alice and I work really great together to attend to every step in the process so that the house is 100% market ready and that you are ready to get those offers on your listing.
Alice Schramm: Yes.
Andrea Pettitt: Totally. So when we’re getting a house ready for the market and we’re talking to a home seller, one of the hardest things is to be the task master, right? And I don’t like to tell people that they have to do all of this hard work to get their house ready for the market but I also want to get them the most money possible for their sale. And so, it’s really great to work with you and work together because you are somebody that drives the process and helps to make sure that all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed. In the process working with sellers what are your favorite things?
Alice Schramm: I just want to emphasize, I’m here to help you and Andrea. It’s so important as a seller, as an agent, and me as a listing coordinator, that we just all work together. We want you to get top dollar for your home. We want people to fall in love with your home, as you did at one point in your life.
Andrea Pettitt: So thank you so much for joining us today to talk a little bit about getting a house ready for the market and how we at the Pettitt Group work together as a team to make that happen.
Alice Schramm: Great team.
Andrea Pettitt: Yes, we have a lot of fun. So please reach out. Our contact information is here on the website. I’m Andrea Pettitt with the Pettitt Group and this is Alice Schramm on our team and we can’t wait to work together.
Contact the Pettitt Group at Group One Sotheby’s International Realty at (208) 917-3330, or email us at info@buyandsellboise.com
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