The 3-C's of Real Estate

After Location and Price, the most important things that aid or deter the sale of a specific house are referred to as the 3 – C’s of Real Estate - Condition, Clutter and Cleanliness. You can’t do anything about your location and hopefully you’ve heeded the advice of your agent and set the price to reflect the market that we are in. Likely your agent already has factored the current condition of the 3-C’s into his/her pricing recommendation; but, you can increase the probability of a sale or hasten the sale by focusing your attention on the 3-C’s.

Condition has as much to do with how the home looks as a potential buyer walks through it. Chipping and peeling paint, overgrown flowerbeds, holes, scars ands marks on walls, doors that don’t close properly, cracked windows or mirrors, missing shingles or overgrown rain gutters, soiled, worn or ripped carpeting and many more easy to spot issues can immediately give the prospective buyer the impression that there’s likely much more wrong with this neglected house. I don’t advise major update projects as part of getting a house ready for market, but doing all of the little repair jobs that you’ve been putting off is advised. It’s not so much that it will improve the value of the home; so much as it is that not attending to those things will detract greatly from the value that you want the buyer to perceive.

Clutter is something that sneaks up on almost everyone. It’s all about having to much stuff in the house. Stuff lake furniture and knickknacks and tools and clothes and shoes and boots and pictures and stuff and stuff and stuff. Most people tend to have too much furniture in most rooms. That makes the rooms look crowded and smaller. Buyers should be able to freely move through each room without having to run through and obstacle course. And, buyers don’t really care all that much to look at every family picture that you’ve ever taken. Your Hummel figurine collection is another thing that few buyers may share an interest in seeing. Less is better is the mantra that you should adopt when getting ready to sell, even if it means renting a storage unit somewhere to put a bunch of your stuff in until the home sells.

Cleanliness is the final factor and likely the hardest for many, especially those with pets. Buyers don’t necessarily go looking for your dust bunnies, but they often stumble upon them while looking in places that you may seldom visit. Dirty floors, dirty dishes in sinks, unclean bathtubs and toilets, unmade and disheveled beds, pet hair all over the furniture or floors, pet odors, dirty windows, dirty carpets, dusty shelves, cob webs in ceiling corners, dirty overhead fan blades, cluttered and dirty panty shelves and anyplace else where someone might look that is currently unclean are definite turn-offs for buyers. I’d even suggest hiring a cleaning service at the front end of a listing and asking them to do a thorough top-to-bottom cleaning of your house. Then try to keep it that way, ot have them come back at least once a month.