The Buyer’s Perspective

Selling your house quickly and successfully requires that you see a piece of
property through a “buyer’s eyes”. How do you do this? Well, put yourself in the
buyer’s shoes. What does he/she see about your house that you haven’t noticed
yourself?




One real estate broker said that a trick she’s learned in getting sellers to think
“out of the box” is to take them across the street from their house, and then asks
them to give their house a long hard look, and spot things they’ve never noticed
before.




When this exercise is done, she then takes them on a detailed tour of their house:
front yard, back yard, side alleys, garage, bathrooms, the whole look-see. This
way, they come up with a list of repair jobs that need to be done before they can
even think of putting their house on the market.






What Buyer’s Look For




What do buyers look for in terms of the house itself? Many agree that location is
a decisive factor, but so are tangibles like the price and condition of the property
(is the price worth the additional huge sums of money to put this house back into








Bill Effros. How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days. Workman Publishing, New York,
1998.


mint condition? How much time will I need to renovate the dilapidated portions
of this house?). Buyers will be on the alert for the following:




Start with the outside of the house and ask yourself the following questions –
because these are the questions that your potential buyer will be asking!:


strewn about carelessly an indication of the seller’s negligence?


 Are the gutters and roof in place? When was the last time the seller
changed the roof?




 Apart from the human occupants of the house, are there termites and
other insects that live here also?


sellers don’t want us to see?




 Is the lawn is looking unhealthy? Is the rest of the house like that?


we see what they actually look like?


uninviting?


 Why are there no lights outside the house? Is this the owner’s way of
saving on utility bills? Is this a safe neighbourhood?




The above questions are just a few of the many questions buyers are likely to ask
with respect to the outside of the house. A house’s constitutes the
buyer’s first impression. And we all know what they say about first impressions –
they are powerful and outweigh other considerations!3




Now let’s look at the inside the house: what are buyers looking at?




Barb Schwarz advises sellers to be guided by the 3 C’s in real estate:




1. cleanliness
2. clutter
3. color




These three are self-explanatory, yet many sellers overlook the fact that buyers
have fixed ideas about what makes a house clean, bright and uncluttered. Don’t
take clutter for granted. Clutter is a big turnoff. Too many objects lying
around the house collect dust, and when you have an open house and the sun is
streaking in through those large windows, the dust becomes very conspicuous.




Schwarz explains: “Clutter makes it difficult for a purchaser to mentally move
into a home”. This means that purchasers have a hard time imagining where
their sofas and entertainment centers will be placed because the clutter is
hampering visualization.




This is what Schwarz tells her clients: “the way you live in a home and the way
you sell a home are two different things”. This is just her way of saying that some
clutter does give a home a lived-in feeling, but too much is too much and makes
buyers very, very nervous.

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KNOW YOUR BUYERS!