Today we’re going to talk about preparing a property for the highest return. Thanks for tuning in to the Real Estate Today podcast.
I’m Bob Nelson real estate investment broker, with Pacwest Real Estate Investments. And I’m Marcia Edwards, residential broker with Windermere real estate.
Marcia: You hire us realtors to help you optimize the return on your investment, whether it’s a home or an investment property. What we want to talk about today, is the preparation prior to putting it on the market, to get the highest return. Some people call it staging, but I think of it as much more than that.
Bob: Well staging is nothing more than preparing the property to look at its very best. As a buyer first visualizes it. You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. You’ve probably heard that before, and boy is that true.
Marcia: It is true and in fact the window’s even gotten tighter in residential real estate. You don’t even get to have the benefit of them driving in to your beautiful neighborhood, understanding the context and making a decision on whether they want to go in. It’s going to be a frame on a computer screen, possibly even just on a phone screen. They’re going to take a look at it when it hits the market, and that’s your window that you have to grab with optimum visual interest.
Bob: And that’s a 1.7 second opportunity to impress a person enough that they stay on that photo, they stay on that page. And if you can’t do that you got a problem.
Marcia: And the next photo you have the same challenge, to hold their attention and want them to go to the third. So that is tough, you don’t round off. You don’t say, we’re not going to paint the front door or replace the hardware on the front door because that is, that 1.7 seconds, they’re going to say, this house looks dated. Something like that and they’ll make a decision, so fast, so quickly.
Bob: And you’re not sure exactly what it’s going to be. But the more experience you have as a real estate broker, and real estate, the more you have heard people complain about the … well you would say that’s silly, for two hundred bucks that could be made different. But guess what, it wasn’t and guess what, it didn’t make the cut.
Marcia: That’s right.
Bob: So it’s just critical you evaluate your situation, and correct those things that you can correct.
Marcia: Now investment …
Bob: A lot of the time, it’s nothing more than cleaning things up, de sizing things.
Marcia: In investment real estate it is definitely trying to make the property look low maintenance, clean and pretty well turn key, like residential. So I think that when I want to invest in, is something that has nice high, tight vegetation. No peeling paint, those kinds of things.
Bob: Exactly, and that’s not easy. But that also means that the moment that I take a listing, I probably am not going to expose the thing on the market. I want to make sure that it’s clean, crisp. As crisp as they can make it and then we go from there.
Marcia: I’m Marcia Edwards Windermere Real Estate.
Bob: And I’m Bob Nelson, real estate investment broker with Pacwest Real Estate Investments.
Join Bob Nelson and Marcia Edwards Eugene, Oregon, real estate experts daily at 5:30 on KPNW for the “Real Estate Today ” radio show.
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