Selling a home is not an easy task. It takes a lot of planning and preparation. Just the thought of moving and selling is stressful enough. Will you find a house that you want? If you’re married, will the kids love the new spot? If you’re relocating, will your family and friends be happy with it? Will you miss them? So these are stressful as it is, let alone preparing your house for sale. I’m going to talk about what not to fix and save yourself some time, hassle and stress by doing these things. So let’s get right to it. 

1.) So the first tip I can give you when it comes to selling your home is don’t remodel your kitchen for the sake of remodeling your kitchen. Now, if you’re thinking about moving two or three yearsdown the road and you feel like you want to enjoy the house and you want to remodel the kitchen, absolutely, go ahead, spend $20,000-$40,000. That’s how much it costs these days to really remodel a kitchen.Then go ahead and do it, enjoy and then sell it. But if you’re thinking about selling and you feel like if you spend $10,000-$30,000 to fix up the kitchen because it’ll look nice and it will improve your appeal of the house, then don’t do it. Because just remodeling your kitchen and not remodeling the other side of the house is not helpful at all. You will not get your money back. So what you may want to do is just fix some things. If the sink is really bad, just replace it to the level of the other things in the kitchen. But just by remodeling your kitchen to get more money is a loser’s game. You may just get back 50% to 70% if you remodel the kitchen and if your whole house matches your kitchen. Because the last thing you want is you have a really remodeled kitchen, but you have old carpet, old flooring, old bathrooms, all lighting. It doesn’t match. So the last thing you want to do is remodel a kitchen because it’s one of the most expensive remodel things to do. Plus, you may want to remodel it. Or you may remodel it and spend this much money. And the buyers may come in and say, “I Love your house, love the location, love the bathrooms, but I don’t like the colors of the cabinets. Or that you did not use stainless steel. I want black stainless steel.” Or I wanted this and that. So it’s a big gamble to remodel a kitchen.

2.) The second tip is you may not want to remodel all your bathrooms. You may have one, two or three bathrooms. And again, remodeling or updating your bathrooms can be very expensive. You have painting, you have tiles, you have faucets, you have sinks, you have lights, you have showers. A lot of things add up to $5,000-$20,000 just like that. So again, the whole picture is if you want to fix it to enjoy, and you are one-four years away and planning on selling but want to stay. Absolutely, go ahead and do it. But again, don’t fix and remodel your bathroom just to get more money because you don’t know if you’re going to get more money. The other thing is, what else are you remodeling in the home? When a buyer looks at the home, they may look at your bathrooms that are totally remodeled and love it. But you may not have remodeled your kitchen or your carpeting again, so it’s a whole risk that you take. The other thing you don’t want to do is don’t fix parts of your bathroom and I’ll talk about it later in another tip. Again, the one thing to remember when you’re remodeling or fixing or updating is that are you going to get your money back? What is your return on investment? On Average when you remodel or upgrade things, it depends what it is. Whether it’s bathrooms or kitchen or flooring or windows, the average rate of return is 50%-70%. That means if you spend $100 remodeling, you may get $50 back. When you sell, you may get $70 back on average and depending on the area, but you will never get 100% back. And by the way, that’s not counting your time and stress that you go through. I’m just talking about the money part. So in a sense, you don’t get your money back as much as you should, especially in this market when there’s more homes coming on the market. Buyers are very fussy, rates are up, so they want a lot of things for the house and they’re not going to pay you a lot of things for the house. They’re going to bargain with you. So be careful what you remodel.

3.) The third tip, and that’s a very important question about replacing your roof. That’s a big question and we as agents,it’s very hard to “advise” sellers onwhether to replace the roof or not.My recommendation is that if your roof is leakingin fact, it’s raining this week and my deck is leaking, so I’m going to have it fixed. In fact, I’m waiting for the deck guy to come and fix as soon as it stops raining, because I’ve been waiting for four weekends for him to come down. So I’m just going to fix the deck. I’m not even going to replace it. So when it comes to roofing, should you replace it or should you fix it? I recommend that you just fix it, if you’re going to think about selling it, unless it’s really old or you have one or two layers of roof and it does not look good, and you might have a city issue with the weight, then go ahead and change it. But in a sense, replacing a roof is very expensive. In California, they start at $10,000 for a shingle roof. Tile roof can cost you $20,000-$25,000. Metal roof goes up to $40,000 to replace it. So you may not want to replace it, because what if you put a metal roof and a black roof and the buyer loves your home and the design and the location, but does not like the color of your roof? So again, going back to the basic, only replace what you want to, and you may want to give credit for the other things that you’re not fixing, because your rate of return is not going to be 100%. Imagine spending $40,000 because you want to sell the house, not that you want to enjoy the house with a new roof, and then you only get $20,000 back in return. So, not a great idea. It’s something very touchy when it comes to roof because it’s one of the biggest items that you will change. The good thing is the roof don’t need changing for 20-30 years. So if you replaced your roof ten years ago and you’ve stayed here for 15 years, you shouldn’t have any problem with the roof. But again, changing the roof is very, very, very individual and to the location. So talk to your local real estate agent and decide together whether you should replace it or repair it. Of course you can replace it if you’re going to be staying there for four or five years and you want to enjoy rainy season coming up and depends what state you’re in. I’m in California. It doesn’t rain a lot. We’ve had four years of drought, and this year, January 2023, for the last ten days, it’s been raining a lot. And there’s going to be a lot of roof leaks and the roofers are going to be busy. And I’m sure some of them are going to change the roof so they can enjoy the roofs. And maybe they’re thinking about selling, so they’re thinking ahead, hey, I’m going to sell my house in four or five years. Maybe it’s time for me to change the roof. So the rainy season may wake you up a little bit.

And also I will give you five quick tips on what to do when selling your home at the end of this video. So please be sure to get those tips. It’ll be like a quick five tips that I’ll give you. 

4.) The next tip is how much should you do on landscaping? Now, landscaping, you have front and the back. This is also very tricky because you don’t want to overdo your landscaping just to sell your home. In California right now, we have a lot of drought days.So a lot of the cities recommend that you take out your grasses, cut back on your watering, so the lawns are dry. They recommend that we put succulents or artificial turf and we get rebates and things. So depending on what city you’re in and what you want to do, don’t spend a lot of money in landscaping. I’ve talked to a lot of homeowners and sold a lot of homes. And a lot of the sellers go out of their way to really spruce up landscaping. And of course, landscaping is very important because the first thing a buyer sees, what we call the curb appeal, is when they park the car, they’re going to look at your landscaping in the front. When they go in the backyard, they’re going to see the backyard. So the better backyard you have, the better landscaping you have, the better chances of you selling. But I would not recommend you spend $5,000-$20,000 just to make it look good to sell. Again, going back to the basics, do it to enjoy, and then do it knowing in your mind that you’re going to sell in one-three years. So be careful how you spend your money in landscaping. I have seen sellers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the pool and the waterfalls and concrete and California rooms and gas barbecue pits out there. It can get expensive. So be careful how you spend. The other thing you don’t want to do when you do landscaping to sell, maybe you haven’t done it in 10-15 years and you ignored it, and now you’re going to sell next year, so you need to do the landscaping. Look at your neighborhood and keeping in frame or on the standard of your neighborhood, don’t go way overboard on doing the landscaping. At the same time, don’t go very cheap landscaping because your landscape or your yard will not look as appealing, as attractive, because as they come in and drive in and walking, they’re going to walk your block or look at the other homes. So they’re going to compare your yard with other yards. So you want to be in what I call standard of your landscaping. You don’t want to be way over the landscape, way overboard on spending, and you don’t want to be way underneath on the standard that you do the landscaping. So that’s a tricky one. But landscaping is very important. It’s the first thing they see in the house what we call curb appeal is very important. 

5.) The other thing that you should not do when you are thinking about selling a home is don’t do patchy repairs or patchy upgrades. I’ll give you an example. About ten years ago, I went to my friend’s house and he said, “oh, come, let me show you my bathroom. I got a nice remodel.” What he did was he found a sale on a really nice expensive sink and faucets and the lights to match with it.And he changed the sink, the vanity stand, and the lights and the faucet. And it must have cost him $3,000. And he got it on sale and he changed it and looked really good. But when I saw it, when I went in the bathroom, I was shocked to see that because that sink and the vanity and the light above it and the faucets looked really, really nice, very contemporary out of this world. But guess what? He did not change the showers. He did not change the tub. He did not change the glass door. He did not change the faucets, he did not change the toilet, and he did not change the flooring. All those were at least 15 to 20 years old. And here you have a bathroom with everything old, and you just have the sink and the vanity and the faucets and the light one side really upgraded. So patchy jobs are not recommended. These things turn off buyers. They think you’re cheap or you have no taste. And just because of that, they’re going to think, oh, my God, I’m going to have to remodel when I move in because this doesn’t match and they don’t like it.

6.) The other thing that you don’t want to do is and I’ve seen this. Let’s say you have kitchen appliances and you haven’t done anything in your kitchen for 20 years, and you’re not going to fix the kitchen or update the kitchen, but because let’s say your dishwasher or your stub is not working, you’re going to replace it. So go ahead and replace it, but replace it with the standard appliance that you have that will match your current kitchen and your current house. If your house is not remodeled, if your kitchen is not remodeled, when you replace your dishwasher or your stove, don’t buy a really expensive thermador or expensive appliance so that it looks good, because that appliance does not match your kitchen and your house and your lifestyle. So just by showing that you have very expensive stuff is going to help you not sell the house. It’s going to turn off the buyers, because that’s not what you want to do.When you fix things, fix it to the standard of the kitchen that you have right now andto the standard of your repairs that you have.You can’t have something very highly upgraded like a sink and have nothing upgraded because it does not match.So you have to be careful on what you fix and how you fix it. Don’t try to trick the buyers. Buyers are very smart and when they make an offer, they’re going to offer you based on getting credit and changing your appliances and your tiles, et cetera. So hope these tips work.

I’m going to give you the bonus points about tips onwhat you may want to do to improve the appeal, the value of your home, and the sale ability of your home. And here they are. The one thing you want to do, and these are very brief tips, is do a painting job.Refreshing your house with the paintreally changes the whole house.The second thing you want todo is declutter your house.

We all have a lot of things over the years. We collect things on the walls, on the sofas, on the decorations, in the bedrooms. Declutter, declutter, declutter.

The other thing you want to do is depersonalize.Please don’t keep pictures of your family and yourpets and all kinds of religious pictures or pictures of your things where you went on a vacation.It’s good to have them as memories, but when you’re selling them, they don’t want to see those things. Buyers want to think about what they want to put on the wall. So depersonalize your family picturesand family vacation pictures, things. And the less things you have on the walland in the bedrooms, the better it is. 

The other great tip when it comesto selling is change your curb appeal. Fix up your landscaping, trim your plants, plant newplants, trim the landscaping, add maybe solar lights. Little things will really help as far ascurb appeal goes, and this is very important. And the last thing is, just before your ready to sell, clean up your house. Refresh your house. If the bulbs are missing, replace the bulbs. Fix little things. If the handles are missing, replace those handles. If the curtains are dirty, wash them up. Little things like that goes a long way.And as soon as you’re ready to sell, please take great pictures with great staging, great videography.Because a lot of buyers, 90% ofthe buyers, according to the National Associationof Realtors, look at homes online.So the better your pictures are, the better the staging is, the better the videos are, the more chance they have of coming in your house. Hope this helps.