Kelowna Real Estate Blog | Kelowna Real Estate News & Information

 Let AJ fill you in on the top 3 things you can do to prepare your home for sale for the most money and quickest sale.

Host: A.J. Hazzi of Vantage West. We promised to give three tips on how to get more value in selling your home. So what are they?

A.J.: Sure. Well, what you want to do is get way ahead of it. About five to six weeks before you're gonna sell your home, have somebody come over, an agent that specializes in maybe flipping homes, something like that, to give you some consultation on what you can do before you list the property to get it in tip-top shape. Five to ten grand before taking the home to market will usually result in anywhere from 10 to 30,000 more in the sale price by spending the money in the right spots.

Host: So almost every home could use a little spruce-up from an outsider to decide how to increase the value?

A.J.: We send a stager and one of our consultants through every listing beforehand and make recommendations on what they can do to tweak it. So the next piece is you want to put a "coming soon" sign on the real estate sign about a week before you go live, and you start to market the home a little bit behind the scenes so you can create some pent-up demand for the home.

Host: Really?

A.J.: Yeah. Host: So before you list it, you start putting the word out? It's almost like a pre-launch.

A.J.: Yeah, it's a pre-launch. We have a whole seven-day sequence that we use and there's about a dozen things that happen in that seven days to get sort of the sizzle happening for the home. And then, you list it on a Thursday.

Host: Really?

A.J.: Yeah. You list it on a Thursday...

Host: You sure you want to share this secret with the whole world here?

A,J.: I'm happy, I'm an open book. You list the home on a Thursday and you let traffic go through. There will be all this pent-up demand, you'll have all this traffic, and then you say, "No offers until Sunday." Okay?

Host: Wow.

A.J.: What this does is you're pre-determining that this house is gonna go into multiple offers. You've got it in tip-top shape, you've priced it properly, you've done a seven-day launch, and now you're telling the market that, "Hey, this is a hot commodity, and we'll be taking offers on Sunday."

Host: So someone comes with an offer on Friday, you say, "Sorry. I'll talk to you Sunday."

A,J.: Occasionally, someone will come with an offer... Host: You would break your own rule? Yeah. A.J.: Occasionally, someone will come with an offer and we'll say, "Listen. If you want to circumvent this whole system, the offer's gotta be very good. It's gotta be over list price," and we do. We sell homes all the time for 10 or 20,000 over list because somebody wants to jump the queue.

Host: Brilliant.

A.J.: Yeah.

Host: A.J. Hazzi, I learned a lot.

A.J.: There you go.

Host: Thanks for coming on "Biz 1 on 1."

A.J.: It's been my pleasure.