Do You Remodel Your Home Before Listing?

Do You Remodel Your Home Before Listing? - Video Transcription

You're ready to list your home for sale. The question is, do you re-roof the home, do you replace the kitchen that's outdated, or do you just paint the interior of the home. I have some answers for you so let's get to it. Let's talk about the remodel first. My take on that is you're a homeowner, you're not an investor. If you're a homeowner, don't act like an investor and start re-doing a bunch of things because if you're not right about the margins between what you improve versus where the sales are at, the past closed sales, then you could lose a lot of money. If you put $50,000 in, that means you got to get the $50,000 back plus some risk money in return for your $50,000 risk. You got to get back to $60,000, $65,000. You're better off listing the home for $50,000 less than, as if you were gonna remodel it, and see if you get a sale in 30 days. That's a lot less risky for you. Be careful. You don't want to be the best home in the neighborhood. So, if you're redoing the floors, the kitchen, the bathrooms and the new roof could be $60,000, $70,000 dollars. You could outprice yourself and lose money from that transaction. In other words, there's a difference between an investor that buys at auction, or that buys an undervalued home, puts money in with the intention of a profit, that's not your intention. Your intention is a sale, but the highest sale, and I'm not saying if you live in a wonderful neighborhood, and you are savvy, some seller are just savvy, they get this. They can just see money and know how to flit that deal and put money in but most sellers are not like that. Let's get to the things that you need to do before you sell your home or list your home so let's start with the roof first and then we will back into the electrical, plumbing, mechanical things like that.

The roof is pretty simple explanation. A roof that's 15 years or younger is okay. Buyers will not pay you more whether it's a five year old roof, an eight year old roof or a fifteen. They still will accept your roof as a roof because it doesn't, it's not dead yet as they call it. A dead roof is one that has less than five years of useful life. If a roof has less than five years of the useful life it becomes slightly problematic. At our company, ADDvantage real estate, if we represent you, in let's say the Platinum plan we'll give you advice of what to do with that roof. Sometimes we can explain that old roof away on the sellers disclosure by saying the seller is selling the roof in it's current as is condition and the roof is not leaking. Sometimes that works and then the buyer will close. Sometimes the buyer will get temporary insurance, because they failed the four point inspection, because the roof doesn't have five years of useful life. They failed the four point inspection but they get temporary insurance and they close and they re-roof after. Sometimes if we're having a problem with the buyer, and we have an older roof that's either dead, like at 18 plus years, we'll offer, let's say one-third of the value of a roof to a buyer or buyer's agent to keep the deal together. So, if the roof was $10,000, maybe we give a concession of $3,500 which will give the buyer some cash but not the full value. It's not our roof anymore. We're selling the home. We don't owe them a new roof is the point. Let's get off the roof and move on to electrical

before you list a home, yeah, you should possibly get an electrician look at your panel box. They will tell you whether you have any double tap breakers. That's two leads going into one breaker. They'll look for CGFI. Those are the ground fault interrupters that keep people from being electrocuted in all the wet areas like kitchen, and baths, and exterior. Homes should have CGFI's. You don't have to bring it up to code if you don't have CGFI's but it's not a bad idea. It's not that expensive. About $60.00 per CGFI. So electrical, what else should you look out there. Well, you could have aluminum wiring but highly unlikely. Aluminum wiring is one out of forty homes. The aluminum wire was done I think in the 50's and in the 40's and it is dangerous. There's a fix for that called Coppercon. But, anyway, most homes don't have aluminum wiring but if you do you got a Coppercon it before you list a property because you cannot sell a home with aluminum wiring. It will not work. You could do it for a cash buyer, one that you know is gonna give you a lowball offer. Yeah, but not a financing buyer. Let's get off of electrical and move on to plumbing.

No plumbing leaks. Pluming leaks are a no, that's about it. Plumbing's pretty simple. There is something called polybutylene plumbing out there that's done in the 80's, early 90's. The bad PVC version, leaks. Yes, that's problematic chance of you having polybutylene are one in 30 homes at best not going to happen usually and that's about it for plumbing. Let's get to AC, mechanicals.

If it's working, it's working. Not a big deal there. It's if it's old, it's old, they might have to give a concession or a couple thousand dollars for very old AC but workings working. Let's go to the bathroom, something you wouldn't think about.

So, calk and grout. If you've got cracks and gaps and tile missing that means water is penetrating behind the tile, getting behind the wall, which is the green board, the waterproof board, and if that's happening, they will call you out on that every single time. So, look at your tiled areas in the wet areas and make sure everything looks good there.

Let's go back to the roofer, just one more thing, I got one thing I forgot in the roof. So, on the roof, if you get a handyman up there or a roofer, take a look for nail pops. These are little nails that are coming through because they're rising up. So, they got to get hammered back down. Look for missing shingles, look for lead boots that are chewed on by squirrels. Those are the metal extensions coming off the roof deck plumbing stacks if you will. The squirrels eat them and if they eat through the lead, it creates holes and then water intrusion. Got to be replaced. Those are the big areas, gutters of course, keep them clean

As far as the interior of the house, should I paint or not? Sure, if you want to paint, paint. But, remember this, you're not gonna change the dynamic of the house too much by doing, you know, improvements. If it is a B home, is probably gonna stay a B home. If it's an A home, it's gonna stay an A home. A+, A++ etc. So, you don't want to over improve, you don't want to try and change it. You're better off getting a price correctly, we'll do a comparative market analysis fo you if you want to choose the Plainum plan, and let me tell you a little bit about that plan. That's flat fee plan. We charge $499 dollars up-front, $2,500 dollars at close and we do everything. The schedule of showings for you, we do all the negotiating for you, contract addendums, watch out for appraisal shortfall risks. We got a big team over here. We're professional from beginning to end and our negotiators are expert because of me. I've trained them all. They know what they're doing. They leave no money on the table. It's a lot to be said about negotiating. We're pros and we don't charge very much. Thank you for listening to this video.