You may be thinking NEITHER!!! Just sell it AS IS!!!
I’d like to share with you a story…. an attorney referred a client to me… she needed to sell grandma’s home. He referred her to me because a CASH BUYER approached her and offered to pay her $425,000 CASH and he will take care of cleaning out the house. He will buy it AS IS!
When I spoke with her, she stated that she had no funds, not even to rekey and secure the property, and it’s a mess inside, and she doesn’t want to deal with the headache of cleaning it up, which is why she was inclined on selling it to the CASH BUYER and not placing the property on the market.
I offered to have the property rekeyed for her and cleaned up with NO upfront cost. She liked my proposal and agreed to proceed.
I visited the property with my locksmith and clear out vendor, the yard was severely overgrown, and the padlocks on the gates and garage were previously placed by her brother……. my vendor was able to secure them with new padlocks, and, we got the property rekeyed. The kitchen and laundry area had paint hanging from the ceilings… it looked like this:
My client just walked in and came right out… she was frightened by what she saw.
Two weeks later, it looked like this:
For $3,000 the yard and the interior of the home were cleared out, the peeling paint was scraped off and touch-up paint applied, and the house was cleaned so that it smells and looks good.
AND my vendor also spent a couple of hours with my client in the garage to sort through the personal property that her grandma left behind, so my client can keep those items that have sentimental value…
The reward: We just sold it for $570,000!!!
That’s $145,000 over what she was offered by the CASH BUYER!
We sold the property to owner occupants, a nice couple who work in the construction industry and are now working to renovate the property for themselves.
We also had many CASH offers on the table, but none were close to the highest financed offer of $570,000.
Is my client happy with her attorney for referring me? Absolutely!
You see… it’s not necessary to have a complete renovation in order to sell a property to an owner-occupant at top dollar…. Sometimes it’s enough to just do a “QUICK FIX”, so that buyers are not distracted or disgusted by paint hanging from the ceiling and bad smells…. You want to allow the buyers to be able to IMAGINE themselves living there. Some owner-occupant buyers don’t mind remodeling themselves…and some are in the construction industry as were these buyers!