Location , location, location. It might sell the neighbourhood but it wont necessarily sell your Barrie house. Your home needs some assets that will set it apart in its price range and make it stick in the minds of the potential Barrie buyers who will be visiting your and probably a half dozen or so other homes that day. We are taught that certain things will help to sell a home. An updated master bath with a soaker tub, a modern kitchen with higher end appliances and walk in closets are features that along with having your home well staged and clutter free will score it points with buyers who will be filing through to give it the once over.
If making gender specific remarks might get me in trouble then let me apologise here and now, as the rest of this article will be my observations over ten years as a Realtor of men and women and some of their differing home shopping behaviours. The above mentioned details of a home tend to catch the attention of the woman more so than the man in most instances. He is paying as much or more attention to her enthusiasm as to the home and if she is enthusiastic he will smile and follow along knowing her happiness is good for him too. If there is nothing about the home that appeals directly to him rather than saying so he is more likely to encourage the searching to continue and might make a couple “yes but” comments about the existing or potential faults such as the need for a new roof or windows, perhaps the lack of room in the driveway.
If there are at least one or two things about the home he sees that appeal to his testosterone driven needs such as a recroom hideaway, he will quietly continue to nod and smile, envisioning himself in the future picture possibly in front of a 60 inch big screen watching the super bowl half time show. Or maybe its the image of being surrounded by a dozen candles while in the corner soaker tub and Dianna Crawl playing softly in the background. I'd bet on the former to be safe.
There is one room in the house that is usually the last one to visit if at all. The garage. Typically the door is opened for five to ten seconds during a home showing. Everyone peeks in, the light is switched back off and they leave. On the few occasions I have had to show a home with a garage that even Jay Leno might approve of, the response is usually “honey why don't you go check out the bedrooms and those closets again, I’ll be in here” as he steps in and soaks it all in.
The last home like this I sold in 48 hours. It was only a single garage but it was insulated, had bright fluorescent tube lighting, a high wall mount heater and a rubberized painted flat grey floor. Across the back wall were black metal cabinets with stamped and chromed steel doors and a wall to wall work bench below. To finish it off was a beer fridge and a TV on a high wall bracket in the back corner. The owner had spent $500 on the cabinets, $400 on the foam insulation and $40 for the garage floor paint and for under $1000 dollars, turned the garage from a room likely to be overlooked into a big boy’s sanctuary making an older roof and windows things that could be dealt with.
You can spend $4000 or more on a new roof and three times that on new windows as part of your preparing to sell investments. These are all good things to make your home more saleable don’t get me wrong. At the very least you should stage your home and bring the interior finishing's up to date with paint and decent floors. My suggestion is instead of looking on the garage as the place to stack up all of your clutter while the sign is on the lawn, give some serious thought as to whether this might be the one room in your home that could set it apart from the competition and earn you back the expense and effort invested, a few times over.
This funny video emphasizes the point somewhat.
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