How I Sold My Home in One Week - in a Tough Market

This is not the first real estate crash, and it is certainly not the last; but it is turning out to be a messy one. With regard to the property market, we are by no means out of the woods and all indications are that this real estate crash is about to get worse before it gets any better. I survived a real estate crash once before - during a time when I owned a number of houses and condominiums. I managed to sell them off one by one during a horribly bloody crash - the one that began in 1987 on the East Coast of the United States; Connecticut to be exact. I HAD TO sell these houses since I had given up my job in the US and was moving overseas. I was under the gun.

People Sold Houses Even During the Great Depression!

I remember the feeling during those dark days - hoping that someone would come along and buy my properties - maybe even at pre-crash prices. Those were bad times for home-sellers. I saw my paper profits vanish into thin air. I had to keep reminding myself that even during the depression, homes were actually bought and sold, and nothing in modern times can compare to what our grandparents went through.

If I had the luxury of time, I could probably have ridden out the storm, but holding onto homes that were some 5000 miles away from my new home was not an option.

The house I paid $50,000 for and was later assessed at $130,000.00 I was able to dump the easy way - I almost gave it away. After years of profitably renting it to Section 8 tenants and putting countless hours of work into it, I was able to get $57,000.00 for a legal two-family colonial in New Haven. This house was sold by simply slashing the price again and again. I hated to let it go, and for so cheap - but I was leaving the country and simply had no choice. I had other properties to sell too!

Condominiums Are Always Hit the Hardest

My favorite home at that time - and I owned a number of them - was a condominium on the beach. I bought it for a good price many years earlier and always thought that it would be very easy to sell - it had water views from every room and was about 100 yards from a boardwalk and a sandy beach. I could not sell it. We got a lot of lookers, but no buyers. It was a small place with really only one and one-half bedroom, so while many loved it; the unit was more of a bachelor's apartment. The standard complaint was that, while lovely; it was just too small.

Fortunately, my younger brother loved the place and offered to rent it for the cost of the mortgage, taxes and common fees and live there with his young wife. It was a great location for a young couple - living at this particular beach in West Haven Connecticut was like living in a resort! With that problem solved, I moved overseas.

We're moving out

Things were fine for a couple of years, but the inevitable happened. My brother decided to move out. We had some time, and so immediately listed the condo with a real estate broker who had an office right in the building with our condo. He always sold the majority of the units in the building, so we listed with him and gave him a key.

Months went by and no offers came in. The place did not show well, as my brother and his wife were very busy. They had junk stored in the extra bedroom that made it look like a gigantic messy closet. My Sister-in-law had a "brown thumb", and all of the gorgeous houseplants we left them were dead sticks shoved out on the balcony. Worse of all, they had two cats which had marked their territory and left a distinct scent - the cats had also managed to shred the upholstery on the kitchen set which we had left in the unit.

The S.W.A.T. Team!

My wife and I spoke with the broker and he told me I needed to get there and do some cosmetic work or it would not sell. This home was costing me over $800 per month - and I did not want an empty condo burning a hole in my pocket! We took two weeks off from work and flew immediately to the States - a kind of home-fixing SWAT Team - just my wife and me.

Where to start? Coming back to see our once beautiful home with all this wear and tear - and smelling like cats was an eye-opener. We needed to get into house-selling mode and quick! The first thing was to throw away everything that did not make the house look better in some way; starting with the dead plants and pots on the balcony - everything that was not nailed down.

We then got to work cleaning. We scrubbed what we could, but some things MUST always be done when you put a house on the market. Starting with the bathroom: • Re-grout the tile. This is such a simple thing to do it amazes me that people will attempt to sell a home in a bad market with the slightest hint of mildew between the tiles in the bath! All you need to invest in is a "grout rake" a $10.00 package of grout, a sponge and some water! • If your grout is reasonably new (I don't believe you.) - you MIGHT be able to get away with using a powerful cleaner such as "Tilex". If you are not sure, re-grout! If your grout is more than three or four years old, re-grout. • "It's just a little chip..." Change the toilet seat. New ones are so cheap it's almost funny, yet this trifle is one of those overlooked details commonly ignored by home-sellers. Not sure which color? WHITE! An old toilet seat with the smallest chip brings your bathroom that much closer to a gas station rest-room. A new very cheap toilet seat looks much nicer than a very expensive old one.

As a former real estate investor, it has never failed to amaze me when I see mildew in a bathroom when I am looking at a home I am considering purchasing. People have hired a Realtor to sell their home, prepared to pay that Realtor tens of thousands of dollars as a success fee. Yet they were unwilling or unable to see the mildew in their bathroom that always makes others cringe when they see it. Other people really hate to see your mildew. A $5.00 bottle of Tilex can fix it in most cases, and in fact, a $20.00 grout rake and $10.00 worth of grout would have made the entire bathroom look completely new!

So perhaps you have taken my advice about the wall tile grout and fixed it... Since you now have a nice grout tool, look at the grout on your bathroom floor. Dark in some places, light in others? Good thing you have that grout tool. You know what to do!

The last things to finesse before you can leave the bathroom are the fixtures. Do they polish up nicely or do they look old and worn out? In our case, we were able to get away with merely polishing them, as we had invested in nice ones that did not wear out over time.

The Invisibles!

What are "The Invisibles"? When you live in a home, you do not see a lot of the warts that every home has. Over time, they have become invisible to you. Fortunately, we had returned to our home after a multi-year absence, and so every little flaw was very visible to us. This made it much easier for us to identify the things which otherwise would have been ‘invisible' to us. If you are trying to sell your home, you should definitely create your own "Invisibles Checklist". There is one you can use on the HowToSellYourHouse.net website.

Psychologists call it selective perception - or in this case a more appropriate term might be selective blindness. The "Invisibles" are those things which are eyesores to others that you simply do not see. Picture your parents' or in-laws' home - you can probably think of something they have inside or outside of their home that you would love to toss onto a bonfire. Things like an old picnic bench that would be better suited for firewood. That rusting grill - it might cook up the best steak this side of Amarillo, but it's an eyesore and will not help sell your home. Invisibles can also be minor things like grass growing out through the cracks in a driveway, a rusting swingset. Unnoticeable, slight details; but one small little nick here, a scratch there and the entire cacophony of eyesores paints a far less attractive picture.

Painting - you know you have to...

It should be obvious that if you want to sell a home, it must be freshly painted. A can of paint is a cheap thing and looks so nice when applied to walls. Why people would try to sell a home without a fresh coat of paint astounds me. In this tough market, reach for the paintbrush or else...

There are some clever painting tricks that we employed when we painted this small condo. One of the complaints we heard again and again after showing it to potential buyers was that the place was just too small. Ours was a lovely location, a beautiful apartment... but just a tad too small. So we had to make it bigger. How? Easy! Paint and mirrors.

How can you paint a room to make it bigger?

There is a trick I learned many years earlier when I was renting apartments. It's simple really, you just paint one wall a different color. It must be the right wall, and the right color for the effect to work. In a nutshell - if you stand in the doorway of the room you would like to make bigger, the wall farthest from you should be painted a darker color than the rest of the room. Since I always paint a home I am selling in off-white, I make the far wall beige. This gives it the illusion of distance. The other trick is mirrors. You hate mirrors? So do I. But they will help you sell your home for a few reasons. They create an illusion of open space and they reflect more light about the room than a wall. The buyers can always take down the mirrors and throw them in the trash - the mirrors will have done their job.

Next on the list: Carpets! This was easy. You just know what you must do with carpets when you want to sell. Replace them. Yes, you are moving out; no, you will never get to walk on them, and yes, it does seem like a waste; but think of carpets as ‘gift-wrapping'. They must be new to sell a home. Just bite the bullet and replace the ones that need replacing. Our place was small, and so we replaced the entire living room and small bedroom carpet. The master bedroom carpet looked fine... until the new carpet was installed in the other rooms. We went back to the carpet store and bought another one for the master bedroom and put it in ourselves. Surprisingly, it was not all that expensive if you shop for bargains.

100 Watt Light Bulbs!

Take out all of your light bulbs, especially those energy-saving ones and replace them with 100 watt light bulbs. This is not a joke - it really works! Bright homes look cleaner and cheerier. People will come in and say, ‘Wow, it's nice and bright. Good light in here..." not realizing that you have thrown away all of those nice expensive energy-saving bulbs and replaced them all with 100 watt light bulbs.

I learned this trick from my realtor friend who made millions in real estate. He told me "Even when you have an open house, and it's the brightest day of the year - at 12:00 in the afternoon in the summer and the sun is blazing... TURN ON ALL THE LIGHTS AND LEAVE THEM ON!" When you have an open house, make sure you do this. I heard people say "Wow, nice and bright" when they looked at my place - just as my friend said they would. I don't know why I was so surprised. This really works like magic, and it is so inexpensive to implement.

Epilogue

You probably read my story because you too would like to sell your house in a bad market - and sell it fast. My wife and I worked on this condo for one week straight, from early morning until the evening, each night returning to sleep at my parent's home with our two young children. After one week the job was done. Then we put the home back on the market. Within the next week, we sold it. We were given an offer which we accepted. The closing was to be after we had returned home to Europe, but it was a simple matter of giving a power-of-attorney to my lawyer who handled the closing without us present.

Do you have a house to sell in a week? Make yourself an "Invisibles Checklist" and go over each and every item on it. This can only help. There is also the "To Do" list if you want to sell. You would be well advised to not only read both, but to act upon them. Your buyer is out there. Your home was right for you and it can be right for someone else - you just need to prepare it for display and your buyer will come along.

Don't forget, they even sold homes during the Great Depression.

Find more tips at HowToSellYourHouse.net. Your buyer is out there... Good luck!