Should You Fix Your Home Before You Sell It?

As you get your home ready for a sale, you may start to notice things that don’t look quite right. As you inspect things through the eyes of a buyer, you begin to notice things that will likely detract from your asking price. This is totally normal, but you have to have a sort of idea of what is acceptable and what will likely take away from the home’s value.

You have to ask yourself how much you are willing to drop the price to accommodate the repairs the buyer will have to take on. The other option is to make those repairs yourself so you can maintain the asking price without losing too much of the value of the home.

In this article, we will go over several of the things to keep in mind to help you make the decision easier.

What’s the condition?

You’ll need to do a thorough investigation into how much work your house actually needs. It may seem fine at first glance, but as you inspect, you’re likely to see some things that you’ve never thought about before. And any savvy home inspector will pick right up on it.

The key thing to do is to make a list of what you think needs to be fixed and divide everything into two different categories. There are going to be some items that you should put into cosmetic flaws and the more serious ones that will be picked up by a home inspector professional like a Syracuse home inspector are the more serious ones that should go into the structural defect category.

Sell it “As Is”

Part of the problem when you decide to fix up the home before selling it is that too much money gets spent that may not come back when the house is sold. Flaws may not even be noticed by the seller or they don’t care as they have plans to fix things their way anyway.

If the condition of the house has more items in the “flaws” category then for sure, you would want to just sell it as is to not put too much money in.

Now, if you have a lot of items in the “structural defects” category then you may want to just drop the price and sell it as is because you might spend more on the repairs and take a lot longer to get the house market ready than if you just decide to drop the price some.

Before doing repairs

Be strategic about what you decide to fix and what you don’t. If you decide to not sell as is, then that doesn’t mean you have to fix everything. Doing the roof will get you the highest return on the investment as people will be happy to have one less thing to do.

For cosmetic items, then a kitchen will bring the most return so focus there.