Giving Away A Bedroom and a Whole Lot of Money

September 23, 2009

I was touring a house a couple months ago, getting a feel for the condition in order to price the house more accurately. I’d done my research online ahead of time and had a decent range of price in mind, depending on the condition that I found.

Except when I got there, the owner had torn down the wall between the two front bedrooms, making one long bedroom with a closet at one end.

That’s a problem, for several reasons.

First, now I can’t market it as a 3 bedroom home. More people look for 3 bedroom homes in this area than will even peek at the 2 bedroom homes. So instantly, we just made a huge cut in the number of potential buyers that would even know the home was for sale.

Second, most buyers are going to want to turn that back into 3 bedrooms. And from experience, I know that buyers nearly always overestimate the amount of money it will take to complete a repair. So while it might take $1000 to turn that back into two separate bedrooms, I know that in a buyer’s head, that number usually sits at 2-3x that estimate. And even fewer buyers want to take on that work anyway.

Both of those things mean that we’ll get less than top dollar for the house. And in a market where home sellers are already dealing with declining values, it is silly to just give away more money because that separating wall doesn’t exist.

Posted by Kelley Koehler | Filed Under sell-tucson-real-estate | Leave a Comment

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