Just 3 Things: Is It Worth Spending Money on Paint and Carpet Before You Sell?
Just 3 Things, Part 3: Paint and Carpet. Missed the earlier parts? The Outside → The Inside →
There's two potential benefits from freshening up your property before going onto the market: a better price and a quicker sale.
We've been talking about property preparation, and what you should focus on as game changers, if you could do just 3 things on a budget. For those who missed the tips, the links are below:
These are relatively inexpensive things that you can do. However, for properties that are a tad dated, we're often also asked should I repaint the inside or replace the carpet to freshen things up?
The reason you might consider this, as a general rule, is that the more work there is to do on a property the smaller is the proportion of the market that will consider it. This is because a number of people just don't want to do much work when they buy. It doesn't mean the property can't be sold, but it does mean that freshening it up can widen the buyer pool increasing likelihood of a faster and better sale.
On price, it's important to note people will pay more for your property in two situations:
First, when they think it's worth more: think about visual inspection and adding value to this, and
Second, when someone else wants it: think about widening the pool of buyers for your property and creating competition…because it's often said that when it comes to competition in real estate, adults are just kids in big bodies!
While our earlier tips and suggestions were on a budget, needing only a fairly minimal outlay, repainting interiors or replacing carpet is more costly, and for both may total around $15,000-$30,000 depending who does it.
Firstly, if really needed and you can do it, then it's often worth it.
We did this in selling our 4 rental properties (3 had an interior paint out plus carpet and one had just the interior paint out) and it paid off. We'd worked out that the alternative of not freshening these properties up first was a far lower sale price, and much lower than the investment needed, plus a likely far longer time to sell.
We used ListNow, a 'pay later marketing loan', to cover a good amount of this cost, a service where vendors selling their properties can fund their marketing and improvements for sale costs, drawing down funds upfront to be repaid on sale or within 6 months, whichever comes first. There was a small monthly finance charge, about 2%, but it was well worth it on each of our sales when we looked at the resulting sale price and the much quicker sales we got.
The call on painting and carpet is tricky, as it doesn't always stack-up or sometimes doesn't all need doing: it can instead be about judiciously sorting out key bits.
For advice on how much work is worthwhile at your property to concentrate on the right things, and avoid any over-capitalising, or to find the current value of your property and how much value you could realistically add through improvements drop us an email leonie.snook@harcourts.co.nz or call 027 518 0008. We can pop by for a quick look and tell you pretty quickly what does and doesn't make financial sense and can often see smarter ways of dealing with issues. Or check what your home is worth.
No fuss, no sales pitch, no juniors, just service! Leonie & Steve
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