I come to you seeking advice. We are preparing to sell our house, and we are getting ready to host an open house. Do you have any tips for us? Any pitfalls to avoid?
Regards,
The Sellers
Dear Sellers,
You would never guess it from my lavish advice columnist lifestyle, but your Aunt Slugger has never been a homeowner. I operate out of the Dear Aunt Slugger headquarters, which is inconveniently located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the average home is divided into seventy-nine tenement apartments that are infested with mice, rats, caterpillars, fleas, roaches, skunks, and sociopaths. The average Cambridge resident rents these tenements for prices equivalent to 150% of his or her gross income before taxes and change collected from the subway tracks. Occasionally, these apartments are available for sale at absolutely obscene prices, in which case they are referred to as "condos," which makes them sound nice but doesn't necessarily mean that all the dead bodies have been cleared from the bathroom.
So I can't necessarily offer advice on the actual act of selling your house, since I am not familiar with home inspections, appraisals, or mortgage brokers with no self-respect. However, given my vast experience dealing with the rental markets, I can offer some tips on what you probably shouldn't do.
First of all, there's truth in advertising. If you are trying to sell a 2,000 square foot four bedroom home with 1.5 baths and an unfinished basement, you should *not* advertise that you have a 4,000 square foot home with six bedrooms, an elevator, and a carriage house. You would think this would be obvious, but apparently, it is not. When your Aunt Slugger moved to Cambridge, I found a listing for a three-bedroom apartment. As I discovered after I toured it (with the landlord, who looked like a cross between Norman Bates and Dracula), it was a one bedroom apartment with a large walk-in closet (i.e. "the second bedroom") and a living room that "converted into a third bedroom." Despite many years of formal education, I was unable to figure out how exactly that worked. So tempting as it may be to advertise that your dilapidated tool shed is actually "separate servants' quarters," you should avoid doing so.
Additionally, you will want to make the house look as spartan as possible. And I'm not just talking about hiding your toaster oven collection to make the space appear less cluttered; that's a well-known real estate trick. I'm talking about not being there when prospective homebuyers are passing through. When your Aunt Slugger was in graduate school, obtaining a degree that was somehow even less academically rigorous than my undergraduate degree in political science, I was moving from one tenement slum to another. I found a fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment that looked like a pretty good deal - all utilities included, a kitchenette, bay windows. When the apartment broker brought me to look at the apartment, I wasn't able to get a really good look at it because there were three people in there, watching television and cooking dinner. This is just a matter of personal opinion, but I find it awkward to ask to look at the kitchenette when someone is marinating chicken thighs on the stovetop.
Other key tips for selling your house include
- Removing all visible pet droppings from common areas
- Putting organic fruits on display
- Sedating your neighbors so that they don't have another fistfight on the front lawn during your open house
- Putting all non-essential furniture, books, toys, exercise equipment and children in an offsite storage facility
- Displaying the china you received for your wedding but which has heretofore remained in boxes
- Not mentioning the demons you exorcised from the attic last year
Sincerely,
Aunt Slugger
