landscaping — Silicon Valley Real Estate: Home Buying, Home Selling & Getting Your House Ready to Sell

National Home Selling Survey Results: (Part 3 of 3) Marketing while selling a house

Keller Williams Realty conducted a national survey based on over 2,000 KW realtors and the homes they sold over a 6-month period, ending December 2009. The housing market results have just been published in a 2010 Keller Williams Market Navigator “White Paper” of sorts. I wanted to pass along information from this important report, in a three-part series on the home selling portion of the survey. The first covered getting your house ready to sell & the second concerned home value. This portion deals with marketing while selling a house.

Survey results for marketing during home selling:

This national survey piggy-backed on the National Association of Realtors survey about home buyers…which reported that 90% of those home buying use the Internet to search for homes. Those home buying, after searching on the Internet took the following actions: 77% drove by the home; 61% walked through the home; 22% requested more information. And, those who were home buying cited the following as most useful online: photos, detailed property information, virtual tour, realtor contact information, plus more.
The KW realtors in the survey used the following means of marketing for selling a house: MLS, for sale signs, online placement, open houses, web listings, and fliers.
Curb appeal ranked as one of the most important ways of marketing during home selling, since online buyers typically drive by a home before requesting a showing. 52% of those home selling took an effort to improve their curb appeal. 77% to 89% of the homes sold had good to excellent curb appeal, and those selling a house spent an average of $1233 on curb appeal improvements. The top five best upgrades were trimming landscaping, applying mulch, adding new landscaping, power-washing, and washing the windows.

In today’s housing market, applying the strategies from this series — getting your house ready to sell, pricing for correct home value, and marketing well while selling a house — likely will translate into more money at closing.

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Home selling? Find out your home value & start the consulting process for getting your house ready to sell by clicking My Home Value in the top navigation.

Getting ready to buy a house? Use our Santa Clara County property search tool to create & save your search.

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It’s Amazing What a Little Landscaping Can Do

If we were to help you with getting your house ready to sell, the question would come up about what to do about the landscaping (it always does). For starters, it usually runs about $800 for the landscaping prep, to get ready. The typical rundown of what our Silicon Valley realtor team recommends is a light pruning, mulch in all flowerbeds/beds, and removal of any dead branches or leaves. Any trees touching the house need to be pruned back as well. Also as part of the exterior spruce up, a good powerwashing of the house, driveway, sidewalks, and patios makes everything sparkle and creates an impression of “clean” and is a home selling marketing strategy. And, inevitably, there are one or two other things that come up that need to be done. For example, if there are dead patches of grass nearby a flowerbed – create a new border for the flowerbed using inexpensive bender board. Then make the previously dead patch a part of the new bed. Dig it up a bit, add a new planting, and mulch around it when the new mulch goes down. It works like a charm. We have lots of tricks we use for getting a big bang for your buck, and we coordinate the job for you starting with choosing a contractor for landscaping, plus a contractor for powerwashing. This element is an important factor to curb appeal, and to you getting top dollar for home selling.

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Home selling? Find out your home value & start the consulting process for getting your house ready to sell by clicking My Home Value in the top navigation.

Getting ready to buy a house? Use our Santa Clara County property search tool to create & save your search.

Need to find a contractor for a remodeling construction project? Get a contractor list of recommendations from The Look Team (Silicon Valley realtor professionals) by clicking “Find a Contractor” in the top navigation.