STOP Wasting Money On RENOVATION Mistakes

One of the questions I get the most is should I renovate my kitchen? Should I paint my home? Should I replace my carpet? And I say, well, I don't know, we got to go into a lot more questions, a lot more answers before I can figure this out for you. Because you can't answer this in a vacuum. Now I know you want to, and I know you don't want to talk to an agent, and so that is why I have the best tool for you to figure out how you can do this by yourself, sitting right where you are. I'm gonna take you through one of my real-life listings. I'm gonna show you exactly, start to finish, how I figured out what category this home is in, of the five categories that I have, and how much money they should have put into the house to get it ready. And at the end, don't leave too soon, because I'm gonna have the five biggest mistakes that you can make when you're thinking of selling your home, and the very last one is one that I promise you have not thought about. So let's get into it. So I had a seller who reached out to me, and he's been in my database for like eight years. I had been sending him things, and we hadn't been really communicating at all, he hadn't asked me any questions, but all of a sudden, he said, Katie, we're ready to go. I was like, fantastic, so what is your timing? He said, we're ready to go, we're ready to sell right now, and I was like, oh, okay. I hadn't been in the house, we hadn't talked about any updates to make, we hadn't talked about the market, we hadn't talked about pricing, anything like that, and so I figured that when we got to the house to take a look at the house, it probably wasn't gonna be in the exact condition that we probably would have wanted to have it go on the market. As you can see, these are the original pictures when we walked through the house, and the condition that it was in when we were getting ready to go on the market, and they thought, well, you know what, we're ready to go. Now, the thing is, is that they had not sold their home in many years. They had not been in the market, and if you guys know, I have that video about how to sell your home over 60. This video is super, super important for anybody that you know who is thinking about selling, and maybe hasn't sold for a long time. So if you're watching this, that video is for you. If you know somebody who that's about, make sure that you share this video with them as well, because that's going to tell you all the things you need to know, and how the rules have definitely changed. So as I looked around, there were a lot of things I would have recommended that they do over time, like paint, maybe replace the carpet, basic things. I mean, the house was in pretty decent condition, it just was not show-ready. But the real issue is that they were ready to go on the market right then and there, and usually it does take a few thousand dollars to get your house ready to go on the market, and that wasn't something that they really wanted to do. They didn't have the time, they didn't have the energy to do that, and that would have been a big outlay of cash right before they went on the market. And they just, it wasn't worth it. So we just went ahead and we got it ready. I felt like the price was probably maybe a little high, but it was sort of in range. So the sellers got the house ready to go, and we took our pictures. Now we always know, fake it, take it, make it. You want to kind of fake the way the house looks, you want to take great pictures, and then you want to make your money. Now it was kind of hard to fake the way the house looked. You can see the carpet looks like it probably needs to be replaced. The colors aren't very neutral, it's not super trendy. Now the kitchen and the bathrooms had been redone at some point, but they weren't brand new. However, the house was definitely livable. So as you can see, our pictures did look clean and crisp and well done. However, the house wasn't really showing extremely well. We were kind of not really faking it. So I really felt like we needed to figure out how to get people into the house. So what we did is we got a few rooms virtually staged. Now, you guys know, I don't love virtual staging. It is not my favorite, because what happens is you kind of get people like, oh yeah, that looks pretty good. And then they get into the house, and they feel like there's just not energy, there's just, it is missing something. They just don't love virtual stage. I mean, the pictures look pretty good, but the results aren't really what you're looking for. However, I thought, you know what, let's just try it. Let's see if we can get a few more people into the home. So the ultimate question would have been is, what should they have done to get their home ready to go on the market? Now this is where my investment matrix comes in. This is a proprietary model that I have created that shows you exactly what condition your home is in. One of the five categories that your home is in. And then from there, it's going to tell you how much you should really be putting into your home, thinking if you're going to be selling at some point in the future. Now, this is important because you don't want to price yourself out of the market with too many updates. But the goal is really to make sure you're putting your best foot forward and to make sure you're maximizing your dollars, so that when you do go to sell, you're maximizing the value, the price that you're going to get out of the home without putting too much money into it. So I'm going to show you exactly what I did on this matrix. You guys can either follow along either on this video or you can go and download my seller's playbook. It is in there. I am constantly updating that playbook. So if you're one of the 10,000 people who has downloaded it before, I want to make sure you download it again because I got a lot more information in there, including this investment matrix. This will help you figure out without asking an agent how much you should be putting into your home. If you're thinking about selling, what should you be renovating and what should you not be? So I already knew what condition this home was in when I saw it, just because I've done this so many times, but you may not know. There are five different categories that your home can fall into. First is restoration required, and that is a complete gut of your home. The next one is concealable condition. That's where it's in pretty good shape, but you might not have a lot of updates in it. The third is surface shine. This is where it probably looks good, but you probably have a lot of deferred maintenance that you haven't fixed and you need to update over time. Next one, unpolished potential means that your home is in really, really good condition. It looks great. It feels great. It might not be super trendy, but it's a great base for a buyer to come in and kind of put their own stamp on it. And then there's modern move-in. Now, modern move-in is really, truly like the top. What people are striving for, a lot, especially the younger people, are striving for this modern move-in. That's where all the mechanicals are updated, the roof is updated, and it also is trendy. It looks good. It's exactly like you might see on HGTV. So in going through and applying these different categories, different ages, different condition, questions that you might not think that are worthwhile, they do all add up to something. So you can see in my list, these are really important things that you need to be doing in your home over time. I know people are gonna say, cleaning, what does it matter if I clean weekly or monthly or never? It really does matter, because right before you go on the market, if you haven't been cleaning ongoing consistently, it probably needs about four or five deep cleans to make sure you've gotten rid of everything, kind of everything in the corners. So that's why the matrix is really showing you kind of everything that I take into consideration when I am going to price a home and tell people about how much they need to spend when they're updating their home. So no surprise, this home fell into the concealable condition category. I knew it would, I felt like it would, and when I added everything up, it actually was in that category. So now this category is the one that you really, really need to think about faking, taking, and making, because your goal is really to make the home look as presentable in pictures as possible, and that means kind of faking to make it look better as far as presentation. And in this home, they could have done something like replacing the carpets or painting or something like that, kind of small things. Now, if they had gone and redone the whole kitchen and made it trendy, that would have cost quite a bit of money, right? That probably would have cost maybe $20,000 to $40,000 for this kitchen. So if they had put the money into that, they might not have gotten it out on the other end because they still need to redo the bathrooms, they still have the carpet issues, they still have the paint issues. So when you're looking at concealable condition, you're looking at spending about 2% to 5% of the sales price on the home. So that would have put this in the range of about $8,000 to $20,000. Now, again, I don't really recommend putting the money in at this point unless you're going to be able to get it out. But you know that when your home is in this condition, you really want to keep the numbers low because you don't want to put too much into it and then you price yourself out of the market. The goal is to make your home look great, look presentable for the best presentation when you're going to put it on the market. And that is where the fake it comes in. Replacing the carpet, painting the walls, maybe doing some minimal staging as well. So as I mentioned, we wanted to do some virtual staging to see if maybe that would kind of increase our showings. And you can see by the virtual staging, it kind of covered up maybe some of the things that people might not be interested in seeing, like maybe it needs new carpet, things like that. It kind of detracted from the fact there was wallpaper in the master bedroom as well. When you're not getting showings, like I've always said, your price is too high. Now this home, I knew there was another model just like this one. And this house was under contract at a little bit higher price. So you can see the two differences between these two homes. And the differences are that the other one is more updated. Not a ton more updated, but is more updated. So when buyers were looking at both of these, because remember, buyers can see everything on the computer, when they're looking at both of these, and they're essentially the same price, the buyers are thinking, well, this house definitely should be priced less than the other one. So then they choose not to see it. So we were up against that a little bit as well. So before you undertake any big projects, it's really important that you do this investment matrix and or reach out to a real estate agent. Now, if I had been talking to them over time and going into their house and giving them recommendations on what to update or what to paint, what colors to paint, things like that, over time, it might have been much better for them because they might have then put money into the home over time. And the big, big thing, especially for sellers over 60, is to decrease the stress. I mean, I talk to sellers every day who are so stressed about all the work, the decluttering, the painting, the getting the house ready to go on the market. That's why if you guys are here, I want to make sure you're subscribing to this channel, because I have all of this information that means you don't have to talk to an agent necessarily very early. You can follow what I'm telling you here. So please, make sure you hit that subscribe button. As you know, if you guys need a real estate agent in your neighborhood, I definitely, definitely can help you with that. I'm not going to talk too much about it, but it's very easy for us to help you find two or three agents in your neighborhood. If you're looking for more information about that, you can watch this video about the biggest mistakes that people make when they go to sell their home. And honestly, I'll give you the answer. It's choosing the wrong real estate agent. So if you're interested in that, make sure you watch this next video. Now, real quick, I just want to give you those five biggest mistakes that people are making when they're getting their home ready to sell. I've talked about this at length in a lot of my other videos, but I'm going to hit it hard right here, right now. Number one, don't make cosmetic changes until you've really looked at the base of your house. That means all of your maintenance. That means your HVAC. That means your roof. You know, if you're thinking about updating your kitchen, that's fine, but you really need to make sure that you don't have water leaking. You don't have, you know, windows that are falling down. So I want you, it's not as much fun, but I really, really want you to put the money into that before you think about updating your house. I promise in the end, your home will be worth more. Now, the second thing, don't over-improve the home. And that's why I've created the Investment Matrix. And this will show you, for every category that you're in, how much you should be spending if you are thinking about updating your home. The third biggest mistake that people make is that they ignore the small little things that are broken. These are things that are not very expensive. And my whole conversation about this, I've talked about this for years, your doorbell. If your doorbell is broken, if you cannot repair a $20 doorbell, what else in your home is broken? So you may think, oh, that's not a big deal. Buyers definitely see it. Number four biggest mistake. Now, I just told you what the biggest mistake is earlier, and that's hiring the wrong agent. But I can't leave this without telling you that one of the biggest mistakes that people make is hiring the wrong agent, if not the biggest mistake. So make sure you're getting that agent in there early to give you advice, and make sure you know what makes the right agent. And the fifth biggest mistake that people make is not cleaning their homes weekly. Now, it doesn't mean top-to-bottom weekly cleaning, but it means that, you know, maybe one week you're doing upstairs, one week you're doing downstairs, one week you're doing bedrooms, or bathrooms, or whatever it is. Because as you clean over time, you start to see things that are broken, or you're like, wow, that paint job doesn't look very good. And once you do this every week, it lessens the amount of time and energy right before you go on the market. And I will tell you, doing one deep clean before you go on the market will not be enough if you've neglected the cleaning over time. So this is something simple, something basic, but it is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they're thinking about selling their homes. Now, the big takeaway is that you have to prepare yourselves in order to sell your home. This can be super traumatic, this can be super difficult, and I'm here to make sure that you are not going through it alone. And to that end, we have our Facebook group. Love our Facebook group. We are growing every single day, and people are posting their achievements, their homes, they're saying, hey, we just went on the market, what do you think of the pictures? And I invite you to join, completely free to you. Nobody's gonna sell you anything, you just get to come in there and collaborate with a lot of other homeowners who are in the same position as you. But finally, don't forget, click on this video because this is going to show you the biggest mistake that you can make when you go to sell your home.