As a listing agent, one of the first rules of real estate is that you have to get prospective buyers and other agents into the house. They won’t buy – or advise others to buy – it if they don’t step inside to see it. Real estate investors provide the only exception to this rule.
They’ll buy sight-unseen, but most sellers don’t want to settle for the price a shrewd investor wants to pay. To get top dollar, you must win the curb appeal game. As an agent, nothing is more discouraging than giving up your Saturday or Sunday afternoon to host an open house, only to watch cars drive by without stopping all afternoon. The culprit is almost always a lack of curb appeal – a lack of first-glance pizzazz.
Few people have the gift to see what a home could look like. My wife, Joan, has that gift. She can look at a listing that I know isn’t quite right and tell me in short order exactly what to suggest to the seller. The following provides similar advice for you to follow.
Landscaping
Landscaping recommendations depend largely on the age of the home you’re getting ready to show. Newer homes are frequently so under-landscaped that they look remarkably like the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, older homes are surrounded by such overgrown yards that they look like the Amazonian jungles in Brazil. Know the age of the home you’re listing and, more often than not, you’ll know what kind of tool your sellers need to use to ready their property for showing: A machete or a shovel. The most frequent curb-appeal obstacle comes from too much landscaping, which needs to be attacked with the following steps:
• Trim and limb trees to create openness in the yard area. Large fir or evergreen trees can make a yard look smaller than its actual size, particularly if expansive branches hang close to the ground. Advise the seller to limb large trees up 12 to 15 feet.
• Use the space opened by tree trimming to plant colorful annuals to brighten up the yard.
• If the seller’s yard features grass, make sure it’s healthy and green. Recommend a little over-seeding or sod replacement in troubled spots if necessary to achieve a look that’s more like a golf course than a motocross course. There is nothing more inviting to kids than a nice patch of grass where they can run and play, and when kids are happy, parents are usually happy, too.
• Add landscape dimension to otherwise flat lots with plants, berms, or rocks. Don’t overdo it, but do add a little height and depth to break what otherwise might look like a dull lot.
• Also create dimension through color. Especially if you are presenting a home in a season other than spring, the landscaping can look pretty monochromatic. Colorful plants go a long way toward adding visual interest and strengthening curb appeal.
Exterior paint condition and color
In a split-second, the color and condition of a home’s exterior paint can either attract or repel a prospective buyer.
Color: Recommend that sellers think long and hard about pastel colors like robin’s egg blue or pink, or color schemes that resemble the uniforms of their college or university team. Just as with hard surfaces on the inside, the exterior of a home for sale should be painted in classic, muted tones. The architecture of the home can contribute to the decision regarding what colors are appropriate for the home. For example, white paint on a colonial-style home can enhance the property’s visual impression from the curb, evoking the image of great, stately homes such as the White House or President Washington’s Mt. Vernon home.
The same white paint on a 1950’s or 1960’s ranch home might result in a house that looks like a plain little box with no character. The more a home looks like thousands of other personality-free homes, the lower the chance that buyers will make a strong offer in hopes of calling it their own.
Paint Condition: It doesn’t take long for sellers to cross off homes in need of new paint from their lists, whether the chipped paint is on the body or trim of the home or on fences or railings. The worst outcome is a non-stop drive by, but even if a prospective buyer stops, more trouble likely lurks. If the exterior paint condition is poor and buyers consider the home anyway, you might wish they hadn’t, and here’s why.
Once buyers notice that paint is peeling, cracking, chipping, or stripped down to bare wood, they go into high-scrutiny mode and begin to pick the home apart. Rather than looking for wonderful things about the home, they fixate on what they think is wrong. They assume that if something as obvious as the paint is in poor condition, there must be worse things to discover. A buyer determined to find faults will succeed. No home can withstand a microscopic faultfinding inspection. Even if the home passes the inaugural buyer examination, the sellers aren’t out of the woods.
If the buyer decides to make an offer, almost certainly it will be accompanied by an extensive repair list and the request that every minor offense be rectified before the closing. Then a home inspector will enter the picture, providing a more extensive report and the chance for the buyer to hit the seller up all over again. All this from a little chipping paint that could, and should, have been fixed before buyers ever drove by to view the home in the first place.