Best approach is to have the basement completely clear of everything before you show the house. Anything else is a turn off.
Also when it's empty, the place looks bigger.Yes, you want it as sterile as possible so they can picture themselves living there. No family pictures, etc...
Also when it's empty, the place looks bigger.
When you have a lot of stuff, they get distracted by the stuff instead of imagining themselves living in the place.
I make up a small cardboard sign with FREE spraypainted on it. Nearly everything goesFirst load of stuff out near the street. It will be gone today. Anything I put near the road gets picked up.
Caterpillar and Boeing announced moving their headquarters out of state recently.Geneva is a awesome town, a rare gem in Chicago area. This home is in west Dundee, a nice town but the town next to west Dundee annexed mega farm land and allowed it to be developed with zero master planning. The shopping centers have huge vacancies, banks shut down and vacant, even a newly built Ashley home center quickly shut down.
Illinois overall is very troubled. Safeway, the monster nationwide grocery chain excited the state not selling any stores, just shut down and left. Bank of America just did the same thing. Shame, very good people in Illinois.
There is an alternate approach. Your home is "staged" to look like what people would like their home to look. There are professional stagers who bring in nice furniture and furnishings for the viewing period. We have really nice furniture and though we've never actually staged our home, several times we've thought that people were "buying our lifestyle".Real estate professionals will tell you that to show a home you need the bare minimum of furnishings and nothing else—no clutter, stored items, any of that. Once it's time to sell, even the bare minimum of furnishings goes.
That is one of possible various factors that were at play.....It is Illinois.....
X2Still too much clutter for a sale. I don't think that party was that interested in the first place.
It's so unfinished, it can't even be considered started. It doesn't have any of the things a finished basement needs, like electrical outlets. That bare stud wall frame in the middle of the room isn't doing anything but making it look smaller.It's [basement] just a little bit unfinished.
Depends on the price point. For cheaper properties, we don't bother staging them, for more expensive ones, yes, it's worth staging. However considering the owner is that far away and the cost of staging and the value isn't really there to make it worth the cost of staging.There is an alternate approach. Your home is "staged" to look like what people would like their home to look. There are professional stagers who bring in nice furniture and furnishings for the viewing period. We have really nice furniture and though we've never actually staged our home, several times we've thought that people were "buying our lifestyle".
I agree with the sparse look. There should be no clutter at all. We put stuff away, particularly family photos.
To me an empty home has a desperate look about it - "These people really need to sell. No-one even lives here."
I seem to recall that GON had to drag his motor oil stash across the country in the past year as well.I hear you-It seems nonsensical to drag stuff all over the country as well.
I'm the same. My wife, on the other hand, isn't. We recently got a shed and the primary intention was so we could park 2 cars in our 2-car garage . Problem is, the garage had some large, heavy-duty shelving so whenever someone didn't want anything anymore, instead of throwing it away ("I might want it later"), it ended up in the garage.I'm so glad I'm not a hoarder, I have the opposite problem - I can't stand keeping stuff around that isn't being used or won't be used in short order.
It's now considered a medical (mental) disorder (obviously there are different levels or scales of hoarding).Need to look at my hording tendacies.
Home was built in 1988. Custom built, 2x6 construction.
But the design, especially the floorplan is like a 1970s home. formal living room, formal dining room, all things 95% of buyers don't want in a home at this price point. Has some features like two full kitchens, a six teared garden (awesome if maintained, horrible if not), you can sled in the backyard in the winter; canoe, rowboat and fish in the summer.
Crappy floorplan and poor eye appeal in the original design. Has a sunken family room with a wonderful fireplace and two huge windows overlooking the water. Issue is, the home is a ranch and a ranch should never have a "sunken floor", especially in a room required to get to the kitchen, hallway, bedrooms, defeats the benefit of a ranch. Retired people have looked at the home, they run away when they discover the sunken family room floor.