Want ten years of selling experience distilled into one sentence? The way to sell houses is to exceed Buyers’ expectations (plus dangle a tempting price, and stir up lots of “pre-list” and “new list” buzz). The corollary to that would be, “the best way to lose a Buyer is to disappoint them.” Exhibit A How does that work ...Read More
When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss On the list of awkward first questions that Buyers’ Agents ask Listing Agents — “Are those abandoned oil tanks buried in the front yard?” — has to rank pretty high. And responding, “the Seller doesn’t have any idea, they were there when they bought the house” doesn’t exactly help matters. Even...Read More
Clean-Up Report Just because I didn’t host any open houses yesterday doesn’t mean I took the day off (see, “Father’s Day Off“). In fact, I showed two different clients ten homes in five different Twin Cities neighborhoods. Including Minneapolis’ Camden neighborhood, which was slammed by tornadoes exactly one month ago. Debris-Free By now, most of...Read More
Father’s Day Off For an avowed contrarian such as myself, “following the crowd” has a decidedly negative connotation. However, the reason I’m not doing any open houses today is that . . . no else is, either (or practically no one; according to my front desk, open houses today are off 75% from a typical June Sunday)....Read More
Whitewash One of the best ways I know to render a scary basement . . . less so, is to paint it (white, obviously). The floors, the ceiling, the posts and beams — everything. Not only is the space more appealing, it invariably feels bigger and lighter, too! P.S.: Tip #2 — adding a couple...Read More
Knowing When to Move On — or Skip Altogether First, a definition: a “deal breaker” to a prospective Buyer is anything that, all by itself, rules out a particular home. Exactly what that is, though, varies by Buyer. So, from past experience, I know that deal breakers can be anything from a dated Kitchen, to...Read More
