Before Alex Drummond put his rustic mountain retreat on the market, his real estate agent paid to have the home inspected.
Drummond was told he needed to fix electrical wiring and leaky skylights. He also bought and installed a new water heater and new water heater vents to bring it up to code.
After the work was done in May, 68-year-old Drummond advertised his home near Ward, on 2 1/2 acres surrounded by U.S. Forest Service land, for $379,000. It sold for $365,000 in just five weeks, while other mountain properties in Boulder County have averaged 40 weeks on the market.
“The inspection showed we had nothing to hide. It was amazing how fast it sold,” said Christie Smith, 51, Drummond’s girlfriend.
With residential house sales slowing dramatically, Realtors like Bruce Drogsvold of Wright Kingdom Realty in Boulder suggest that sellers put their best foot forward. Options include home inspections, which cost about $300 and look for functional problems, and “staging,” which involves preparing the home aesthetically.
Staging can mean rearranging furniture, putting extra items in storage and emphasizing any special architectural details, said Jan Short, owner of Designed to Move in Lafayette.
Short recommended that Drummon add bright flowers in a dark corner and remove anything that blocked the windows and the spectacular mountain views.
“It’s the psychological grab,” Short said. “When a buyer is looking at numerous properties, you want your property to be memorable.”
Drogsvold paid for both services to help sell Drummond’s home.
In and around Boulder, houses that have been staged – usually vacant houses that are filled with trendy furniture pieces – sell 46 percent faster than those that haven’t, Short said, citing Boulder real estate sales statistics. Staged condos sell 62 percent faster.
At Drummond’s house, Short identified pictures, extra dishes, towels and even clothes that had to go. Books stayed on the bookshelves, as did specially painted pottery.
“We were very prepared when the buyer came along,” Drogsvold said.
A growing number of real estate agents are using similar techniques, said Mallory Anderson, executive director of the National Association of Home Inspectors. About 85 percent of all houses sold are given the once-over by inspectors.
Once the sellers agree to a home inspection, they can attach receipts to the finished report to show what was done to correct problems, said Jerry Chesser, a home inspector for Win Home Inspection in Denver.
“People are trying to sweeten up their deals,” said Peter Robberson, a home inspector/owner of Welcome Home Inspections in Colorado Springs. “(But) it appears that sellers would rather wait for buyers to ask for one rather than use a list to repair various and sundry things the buyer might not even care about.”
When a seller is willing to do a pre-listing home inspection, it increases the real estate agent’s comfort level as well, said David Fish, an agent at Re/Max in Boulder, who pays for the $300 inspections out of his own pocket.
“It’s dramatically reducing the chances of the contract blowing up,” Fish said. “Anything I can do to help my properties sell faster and for more money, that’s definitely something that adds value to me.”
For Golden homeowner Linda White, that meant making a punchlist of items that needed to be fixed and treating the repairs as a full-time job for two weeks. It even included painting scratches on windows and doors, she said.
“We rented a storage unit and put things in there to make the house seem less cluttered,” said White, 52. “I bent over backwards to make the house really nice.” The house sold for more than $600,000 last month.
With the average number of home sales down 20 percent this year, every little bit helps, said Anderson, the national trade group leader. “People are looking for new and innovative ways to make their properties stand out.”
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, because of a reporting error, it misidentified Mallory Anderson, who is executive director of the National Association of Home Inspectors, Inc.
