Seller Question: Should I renovate my Albuquerque home before selling it?

(Transcript Snippet): “Tracy:

Sellers questions. They ask a lot. Should I renovate my house before I sell it? Tego?

Tego:

Yeah. That’s uh, that one comes up a lot and, and I think the, the answer, unfortunately, I’m going to take the cop-out answer is the answer depends. And the, the, the real answer is ask your realtor, ask your agent for advice, because it really is going to vary house to house to house. I will say, uh, just to make one broad statement is that major renovations usually do not pay for themselves, uh, if you’re going to do them and then just sell immediately for the most part, again, very generalized. It does not major renovations do not pay off. And when I’m saying major vendor renovations, I’m saying, you know, redoing the kitchen, redoing all the flooring, redoing stuff now, and I’m talking about, you know, updating stuff. Now renovations very different than taking care of deferred maintenance. That’s a different conversation, right? And so deferred maintenance is things like, um, your soffit in facia, you know, under your overhangs of your roof, you know, the paint is appealing and it looks dry and tired.

Tego:

Your roof, your roof shingles are worn out. Um, para pits are cracking, which we get a lot of times here in New Mexico. You know? So it’s, it’s the deferred maintenance stuff. Those things we’ll, we’ll, we’ll definitely distract from the sale of your house. Now, with that said, can I finish in today’s market right now? You know, we have such a low supply of homes on the market compared to the number of buyers, buyers. We have seen buyers, Tracy, and you can tell me if I’m right or wrong in this. We do see buyers, you know, maybe overlooking, you know, some condition issues with a property that maybe they didn’t five years ago.

Tracy:

I believe that’s true, but I would still say, if you have deferred maintenance, getting that taken care of before you put your house on the market is going to affect your sale price. And a lot of times buyers are going to ask it to be fixed once they go under contract on your house anyway. So it might be best to get the maximum dollar out of it, major renovations, um, you know, that’s what house slippers are doing, right? They’re trying to find a house that hasn’t been updated. That’s in a neighborhood that can justify a much better price if it gets updated, but still has plenty of room above what they’re going to spend. And they typically as a flipper, right? They have their go-to people, or they do the work themselves. They have trusted contractors and trusted resources. They do this all the time for us as realtors to recommend somebody to do 150,000 update on their house to get it sold is most, most sellers are just not able to even facilitate that, let alone,

Tego:

But many times it is possible. And in many times you will net more. It just really depends on where you’re starting. What is the condition of the home that you’re starting at? Cause that really is going to dictate if those remodels make sense or not.

Tracy:

I would say the best advice on the answer to this question, besides what you said and talk to your realtor and look at all of the implications are best thing you can do is just plan to really clean purge your house, get it staged properly and take care of the visual things, whether it’s smells, sights and what people are going to see when they see your house. And those are the things that most sellers are doing and make sense. Yeah.

Tego:

And, and, you know, merchandising it, you know, that’s gonna, you know, it’s going to net you the most when you’re getting ready to sell is have it cleaned beautiful, you know, and it, if it looks like a model home, you’re going to get the top dollar for.