Two Buyers, Two Numbers Every Twin Cities Seller Should Know

By Mark Callender

Hello, my name is Mark Callender and I am a licensed real estate agent with RE/MAX Results. Because I have been helping families buy and sell their homes for more than 18 years, I am now helping their children to buy their first homes and their parents to downsize. No matter the direction you’re moving, my goal is to make the process as calm and enjoyable as it can be.

When homeowners sit down with us to talk about selling, one question comes up almost every time. Should we put money into the house first, or should we sell it exactly the way it sits right now? It’s a fair thing to wrestle with, and a recent study gave us a clearer way to answer it. The whole decision really comes down to two buyers looking at your home, and two numbers you should keep in mind.

Paint and flooring pay you back. We’ve said this many times in past videos, and it still holds. There are a couple of things you can count on getting back nearly every dollar you spend, and those are paint and flooring. Buyers notice them immediately; they set the tone for the entire home, and they rarely cost as much as sellers fear. That’s the starting point for almost every pre-sale conversation we have.

One buyer wants it completely turnkey. The study looked at the two kinds of buyers walking through your home, and the first one wants it turnkey. They want to open the door, move their things in, and change nothing. There’s a real reason behind that. A lot of buyers are coming in with every dollar they have committed to the purchase already, between the down payment and all the other costs of closing. Once they move in, there simply isn’t extra money sitting around to fix up the place, so a home that’s already done is worth more to them.

Updating adds about 3% more. So the question becomes, if we get the house move-in ready, how much more does it actually bring? On average, the research put that figure at about 3% more on the sale. On a $400,000 home, that works out to roughly $12,000 in added value for having it done right.

Selling as-is costs far more. Here’s the part almost nobody talks about. What does it cost you to leave the property as-is and let the buyer handle the upgrades themselves? When a buyer walks into a home that needs work, they don’t just subtract the price of paint and flooring. They mentally pad that number for the hassle, the unknowns, and everything that might be lurking behind the walls. On average, that second buyer is willing to pay about 14% less for a home that isn’t ready. On that same $400,000 house, that’s around $56,000 off the table.

The gap is the whole point. Put the two numbers side by side, and the picture gets hard to ignore. Getting your home ready might add about 3%, but skipping it can cost you 14%. Here’s the encouraging part. When a buyer walks in, you almost never have $56,000 of real work sitting in front of you. More often it’s closer to $6,000 in paint and flooring, maybe some updated light fixtures, a few new cabinet knobs, the small touches that make a home read as fresh and move-in ready. Spending somewhere in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 to protect yourself from a $56,000 hit is the kind of math that’s worth running before you list.

We pulled the details from this study because it puts real numbers behind a decision most sellers make on instinct. If you’d like us to walk you through it for your specific home, we’re happy to share what we found and give you our honest read on where your dollars would work hardest. Call or text us at 612-961-9448, email us at mark@markcallenderhomes.com, or visit callenderhometeam.results.net. We’d love to help you walk away with as much as possible.