@Terry – I finally finished your book, it was a great (and inspiring read). Working on a review of it that should be up soon.

@Everyone else – Thanks for the comments and encouragement! I hope all of us can sell our homes fast!

I like the way you laid out each project you did to get your house ready to sell and the cost of each one.

I agree wholeheartedly with you approach for selling. Make it look the best it can be. Because of personal circumstances some people are forced to sell during a buyers market.

If one can wait, a much better situation is to let the economic cycles work for you, and sell when the market returns. If you must move, I think a better option is to buy your new home, and turn your present home into a rental. In much of the nation now, there is high demand for rentals.

Where do you get the money for a down payment if you don’t sell your residence?

If you plan ahead, you can refinance your present residence beforehand, and take enough out of your equity to cover your down payment for your next house. When the market returns, you will be able to sell you rental property for a better price than you could probably get now!

The toughest thing right now is the yard. It’s a newer house and while we have landscaping, we don’t have trees. We were given a pair of evergreens by my wife’s grandmother, but they looked so bad we had to toss them. It really was a bummer since we probably could have kept them with some TLC. However, a brown evergreen isn’t exactly a selling point, and we can’t be there to explain that it’s just from transporting the trees and it’ll probably clear up in a year.

Everything we get from potentials who choose something else boils down to “It’s a nice house but…” and then a nice thing that we have no control over. One couple wanted more, larger trees. One guy wanted a house closer to town. That’s the worst of it, waiting when you can’t really do anything beyond keeping up appearances (this weekend is more weeding).

The house we sold was only a few years old, but even so it still needed some work. We repainted all the exterior wood trim surfaces as they had started peeling. We power washed the concrete deck in back. We repainted all walls to neutral colors, and repainted any white walls that showed marks or smudges.

We then put everything in storage except for some key pieces of furniture and art- and staged the house for the quickest sale. The only thing we had to change for the buyers was fixing the broken water softener – $300. All in all we spent less than $1000 getting ready to sell the house, so it was much less expensive than your house.

Luckily my inlaws are also agents, so they sold the house for us, aided us in staging, and refunded their agents fee.

If you’re having trouble selling because of the houses layout/floorplan, that’s gonna be tough to overcome, but sometimes by staging the house creatively you can overcome those types of complaints.. Good luck!

We found a home that had only been on the market for three weeks. It is in a nice neighborhood and had been completely updated within the past three years. Even though it’s 70 years old, it looks brand new. There are things we want to do, but nothing we have to do to the house. We made an offer right away, and it was accepted. It really stood out among all the other homes because it had fresh paint, a new roof and siding, etc. It was nice to know we weren’t going to have to sink a lot of money into the house right away.

Good luck with your sale. I’m sure everything will work out!

I’m just curious, but how did you pay for the $15k in repairs? Feel free to totally ignore that question if you want.

I hope your house sells soon, and for your asking price (at least!)