Keep the temperature of your home for sale in a comfortable zone so that home buyers linger longer!
The other day I showed a vacant home in the Evergreen area of San Jose that was easily 95 or 100 degrees in the master bedroom, perhaps more. Yes, we’re in the middle of a Silicon Valley heat wave! But the owner’s suite had no curtains and faced the blazing afternoon sun. More importantly, though, the house has central air conditioning, but it was turned off. Completely off!
Why was the A/C not turned on when it was 90 or 100 degrees outside? The seller did not want to spend the money.
Here’s an important piece of the home-selling puzzle: the longer buyers stay at the property, the more likely they are to want to buy it. So home sellers, make it so that your buyers will want to linger! If they dash in and out, you can pretty much forget that visit resulting in a sale. In our case, we quickly left because our visit went from uncomfortably warm downstairs to intolerably hot upstairs.
I see this with homes in winter, too, where home sellers don’t want to pay for heating when they’re not living in the house. They turn the heat either all the way off or so such a low number (in the 50s) that buyers are uncomfortable the whole time they are seeing the home. Similarly, those buyers leave to find relief in a warm car – and seldom either come back or consider writing an offer.
Heat and cooling to make a home comfortable is not a waste of money. It’s a type of staging. Just as we want the house to be clean, uncluttered, and looking its best so that our seller clients make the most money possible from the sale, we also want the home to feel comfortable in terms of temperature (and smell nice too!). All of these things matter if you want to leverage this important asset and sell for top dollar. To turn off the heat in winter or the cooling in summer is counter-productive to your and your real estate agent’s goals. Keep it comfy!
Addition resource for Silicon Valley home sellers: http://SellingYourHomeInSiliconValley.com/
