Tips when Listing and Showing your House
Written by Callie
If you’re one of our good pals here then you are probably aware of the fact that Jason and I are moving back to Conroe from Fort Worth. This has meant putting our house on the market and this week we’ve been showing it a lot. I thought I’d share my experience with how all this is going so far and give you some insight to the process in case you’re like me and have never sold a house before.
Get Nice Photos
In this day and age I’m sure you’ve already figured out that nice photos can make or break a house listing. Half the time people are only looking at the photos and will just gloss over the description you painstakingly wrote. The majority of clients bring houses to their realtors now (instead of the other way around) and so your photos need to be nice because the actual home buyer is the one looking at them.
We had Point of View take our house photos and I love them! They were incredibly reasonably priced (we paid $115 when we had them taken but prices can always change) and they were in and out of the house in 15 minutes and the edited photos were delivered the next day!
You can 100% tell when a house has had professional photos and when the photos are taken by the homeowner on an iPhone 8. And while some people have a good imagination and can look past the grainy, out of focus potato photos most can’t and that will hurt the listing.
Stage the House
Again, this one is for before your photos and the duration of the showing period. Make sure everything is cleaned, clutter is put away, and that all personal touches are out of the house. No photos of you/your family out, no little trinkets/knick knacks that you love out. I had to learn this one the hard way. Luckily Jason’s sister is a realtor and she and their mom came up one weekend and she was able to go through the house and point out everything that needed to go. And it was a lot. Clean walls and minimum furniture is preferred. Nothing on counters. Very sterile looking, so that people can imagine their own items in the house instead of seeing all of your life things in there. And add some REAL flowers for a nice touch.
This step was the hardest for me. I’ve been living in this show house for a few weeks now and I hate it. It already doesn’t feel like my home any more which is really sad. But everyone loves the photos and we’ve gotten many showings so it for sure helps with the selling of the house!
Be Prepared when you put it on the Market
Jason’s sister listed our house on a Tuesday at noon. Thirty minutes later we had a request to show the house at 2 pm. We were not prepared. We thought it would take a day or two before people started to schedule showings and that when they did they would schedule them with hours, if not a day’s advance. So Jason ran to Lowes to get a lockbox while I frantically picked up and cleaned the house. So make sure your house is show worthy before listing it and be prepared to show immediately!
If Possible don’t be Home for Showings
We currently both work from home and the day after we listed we had a lot of showings scheduled. We were at the park for 4 hours in the morning and then doing random things for another 4 hours in the afternoon. It just wasn’t ideal. If we’d thought ahead a bit more it would have been more productive to go to our parent's house once we listed the house. That way we could have still worked all day and accepted showings at any time people wanted without having to clean our living mess up each time.
This especially goes for if you have pets. We have Basaroo so we couldn’t roam antique shops or make a museum date out of being gone for so long, it all had to be places we could take the pup.
Cameras can be fun
We have three Blink cameras on our house that we’ve had since we moved in just to watch the house when we’re out of town. Their all outside the house so I didn’t feel as bad for spying on the viewers but it is very entertaining to hear what people say about your house. Our favorites are our house was more of a fixer upper than what they were looking for and that, well at least it was “livable”. Our house is VERY livable and not what I consider a fixer upper but to each their own!
If you have high anxiety or don’t like to be judged then maybe don’t have cameras or listen to what people say… Oh there was also someone that wanted to paint the outside of the house dark blue with red trim. Blech. Please don’t.
Those are a few of the tips I have for you we have since sold our house and are in the lease back phase. The housing market is absolutely insane in Texas right now so it’s been difficult to find our new dream house in the Conroe area but I think we’ve finally done it! If things go well then we’ll be “homeless” for a little over a week between moving out of Fort Worth and into the new house but hopefully Mom likes us enough to let us stay with her. We’re excited for the move but will miss Fort Worth a lot too. Having owned two houses before I’m 30 is kind of fun but also super stressful too. I hope we’re in our new house for a long time!
