Does the Cleanliness Of Your Home Help Your Home Sell Faster?

Being in the spring market I am very busy with listings and buyers both locally and out of the area looking at homes and me previewing homes for listings. One thing came up this past weekend when i was showing homes that made me sit down last night and think and reflect back and realize something.....The cleanliness of a home tells more about the value of the home than some homeowners think..... Because Charlotte, NC. is more a sellers market right now, I have noticed a trend that was not there last year or the past couple of years. One of the things I noticed in the trend is that homeowners are not all keeping their homes spotless for showings. I am not saying that if you have two to three or more kids and you get a showing request in the next hour that it is realistic to think that the house is going to be perfect on a Saturday....But if you get one a day or two in advance I would expect it to be clean and presentable for the showing the next day. I showed homes in the $300,000 range on Friday afternoon and all day Saturday. Most of the homes were extremely clean and well kept up. Something I would expect since I booked the showings a couple of days in advance. However; there were a couple of homes that were not. One home was empty and I was very shocked at the lack of cleanliness of the house. Especially since no one was living there currently. The other one someone was living in and you could see the dirt in the carpet and the fresh stains in the carpet and cobwebs blowing from the corners of the rooms when you looked up at the ceilings. It was so bad my buyers told their children NOT to touch anything in the house and Dad even picked up one of them and carried them throughout the house for fear of what she might touch and put in her mouth. Now both homes have been on the market in excess of six months. They were both priced well below the market value for the neighborhoods they were in. In fact, for this blog post I did the actual market analysis and found the empty house to be 18% less than the average asking price in the neighborhood and the other one to be 13% below the average market value of the asking prices in that neighborhood. Yet neither one has sold...... My buyers ruled both homes out. They both said that as soon as they walked in and so the filth (as they worded it) in the house they were concerned about the way the sellers maintained the house itself. If someone is that lazy to not clean a house; what might be wrong with the house? Maybe nothing but the perception and first impression is there once they walked through that front door of the house..... Spend a little extra money and hire a cleaning service to come in and give your house a thorough cleaning before putting it on the market. Then maintain the house and run a vacuum and broom regularly through the house. It can make the difference between selling your home today and not selling your home for months. As well as the how much you will actually get for your house based on the cleanliness of it. As an FYI, my buyers selected a comparable house in one of the neighborhoods and we have agreed to a price that is still 6% above what the other home was asking for theirs. The homes had similar floor plan and a few differences....but ultimately it was the overall cleanliness of the home that kept them away from it...... Dave diCecco Realtor/Broker Coldwell Banker United Cell:704-519-7895 ddicecco@cbunited.com www.davedicecco.com