The spring selling season is upon us in Los Gatos, San Jose and Santa Clara County generally, and it looks like the pace of home sales is picking up fast this year. If you’re getting your Silicon Valley home on the market and are planning to have your condo or house held open, you may be wondering what to do.

First, plan to be gone during any open house events! (This goes double for any pets!)  One of the biggest mistakes I see is home owners hosting their own open houses. Bay area home buyers don’t want you there – they feel inhibited and worried that they will say something offensive, so they say nothing and hurry out. Serious home buyers will want to linger and will want to imagine where their furniture will fit. They may be mentally remodeling your home too. But if you’re there, they will be very uncomfortable. Hire a good agent who will handle this task for you (or have someone from that brokerage do it).

Second, make your townhouse, condo or house as close to perfect as possible for the open house. Your property needs to be squeaky clean, safe and inviting. I’m presuming that you’ve already done all the fixes and staging needed generally for selling your home. Here’s a list of a few last minute to-do’s:

1. Keep your driveway clear of cars so visitors can park there.
2. Make all walkways free of tripping hazards (garden hoses, toys etc.) – you do not want your buyers to be “on edge”. Don’t water the garden just prior to the open house or guests might slip (or track in more than you want).
3. Your front door should be impeccably clean!
4. Color near the front door (front walkway or front porch) is a good “bang for the buck”, so if you have room, provide flowers there. (more…)

Today I showed a newer home in San Jose’s Cambrian Park area to some great first time home buyer clients of mine.  The house has a nice location and fine floor plan.  Some elements of the home were really appealing. But unfortunately, the sellers hadn’t made their home “show ready“.  They cut corners.

As we walked through the property, my clients and I noted places where there was neglect.  The items were generally not big, but unfortunately there were many of them.  Had the owners brought in a painter to do minor cosmetic changes (patch and paint), the home could have looked “like new”.  Instead, it was as if the home were full of red flags. Talk about making a bad impression!

My buyers asked me what I thought, if what we saw would scare me off.  No, I told them, they all seemed relatively minor to me,  but I did understand their concern.  One of them explained that “if we see things like this, we believe that the sellers have not taken good care of their home; what else is wrong that we cannot yet see?”

Confident buyers write offers and tend to write good offers.  Nervous buyers who are concerned that there are hidden defects (and therefore hidden costs) either don’t write contracts at all or they write lower offers.
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Twelve Silicon Valley Doors, shown as black & white sketch(photo by Mary Pope-Handy)

Thinking of selling your Silicon Valley home?  When your house or condo is for sale, curb appeal is crucial because if buyers don’t like what they see on the outside, they will not bother to see what’s on the inside!

It’s hackneyed but true:  “You never get a second chance to make a first impression“.

This is no where more true than with front doors! Staging begins on the front porch.

In my real estate practice, I usually see at least 10 or 15 San Jose, Los Gatos or Saratoga area homes per week – usually many more than that too.  A good, clean front door with nice paint or varnish, no dust, clear glass and sparkling hardware gives a good welcome to your home’s visitors, whether they are coming as prospective buyers or simply as guests.  Amazingly, though, not every home seller gets this basic principle quite right. Very often, front doors are dusty, dirty, in need of paint or perhaps even in need of replacement.

And we’re just scratching the surface!

A home's front door sends a message. What message does yours give off? Photos by Mary Pope-Handy

Here (to the right) are some doors I’ve encountered recently in my work as a Silicon Valley Realtor.  What do you think of each of these?

The first one has a “security screen door” in front of the regular front door, which is mostly obscured.  What message does this kind of strong grill give?  If it’s the only one on the street, it might imply that one person nearby has concerns about safety. But if there are several doors like this on the same street or nearby, it screams, “Danger, high crime district!”

The next front door is perhaps a typical or average San Jose or Santa Clara County door.  It has a painted exterior and a fan light window on top, which allows some light into the home.  It’s a little more inviting than something solid or without side panel windows.  This type of door is not super expensive, but it does come across as at least fine, if not “good”.

Next is a door which we agents were required to use to enter a home in west San Jose.  It’s not the front door, but the key to enter the house required us to use this dirty, scratched up door (which actually faced the back yard).  I shared this image, but a larger version, on Facebook and Twitter and my agent & client friends were all appalled.  Several asked if it was a short sale or bank owned property.  To everyone’s amazement, no, it’s a “regular sale”!  This kind of introduction to the property, though, is anything but regular!  It is a discredit to the agent and the seller to put a home on the market with such a terrible first exposure to a property.  It was completely unnecessary as the regular front door was infinitely less offensive than this.
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If you want to sell your Silicon Valley home, you need a good amount of qualified traffic coming through your doors. That is, you want people who really do want to buy a home and who are capable of doing so to have a look at your condo, townhome or house inside as well as out.  Should the photos in the MLS and online be non-existent, scarce, or poor, those buyers may reject your home without ever seeing it.  It is imperative that your home’s photos nicely showcase your property so that buyers want to come and see more in person. 

In this post I’ll share a few tips on how to make the front of  your home show well for the photos (and for in-person visits of real estate agents and home buyers), a few things to do or not to do.  This will help you even if someone else is in charge of taking the photos – you can propertly set the stage before the photographer ever gets there.

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Sometimes when I meet prospective clients who are thinking of selling their home, I hear immediately, “we only want to sell As Is“.  In the next breath, they tell me, “and we want top dollar for our house”.  Those two are often mutually exclusive desires – that is, getting one usually means you won’t get the other.  But not always, and I’ll show you how to increase the odds of doing both.

To get top dollar, a Silicon Valley home for sale must appear to be the best value for the money and attract the most qualified buyers who step forward with a strong offer.  Buyers will pay more IF they feel that your home is a better value.

There are a number of things which need to be done for that to occur, but one of the most important has to do with the condition and appearance of the property. Confident buyers write stronger offers than buyers who are concerned about the house or condominium and potentially unknown risks. (Buyers are thinking “risk, risk, risk” and “beware of hidden costs”!) Home buying is both a business decision as well as an emotional decision.  To get top dollar, your home has to make sense and appeal to buyers on both levels, and we’ll discuss both in this post.

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