In a declining market, it's more important than ever to make sure your house is in top condition. Making home improvements is a great way to increase the value of your home, no matter what the market is doing. In this video, San Diego Realtor Kyle Whissel will share five projects that are guaranteed to add value to your house – whether you’re selling it or not!
If you're thinking about selling your home in the declining market of 2022, there are five improvements you need to make to your home to ensure that you sell for the highest price possible. My name is Kyle Whissel with Whissel Realty Group. And today I want to share with you the five improvements you really need to make if you're going to sell your home here in the second half of 2022 where values are declining.
'Cause when values are declining, you've got a lot more competition. If you sold a year ago, you're the only show in town. Now, there's a ton of other homes for sale. You've got a lot of competition. So you've got to make your home stand out from the competition to become the obvious choice. So I'm going to hit on five specific things that you need to do. And now this goes without saying, you need to depersonalize, you need to declutter, right?
Like, we all know that. We actually have a interior designer on our team here at Whissel Realty Group. So anytime you sell your home with us, she's going to come out to the house. She's going to walk through the house with you, give you a ton of pointers, depersonalize this, declutter this, move this, clean this up, right? So that's more of a setting the stage of the home. For us, that's just an automatic, right? We're going to do that on every home that we list. If you're talking to another agent, they don't offer that, I don't know if that's an agent you want to work with, but that's something that we include here at Whissel Realty Group. But I want to go beyond that.
What are the things that you actually should spend money on to improve your home to make it as attractive as possible to buyers? And so number one, most important thing on the entire list I'm going to start with, and then the second most important thing I'm going to save to the end so that you stay, right? I need you to watch the whole video because the platform you're watching this on gives me credit the longer you watch. So, hey, I'm just going to be honest, hang until the end and I'll give you number two. So number one on the list I want to give you value right out of the gate, you have to finish unfinished projects. So, so important because here's the problem.
Buyers turn molehills into mountains all the time. And what I mean by that is they could see the smallest little thing. Like, maybe you have an outlet cover that's cracked and half of it is gone. And now you can see the electrical wires behind it. The buyer assumes the electrical in the entire home needs to get redone 'cause it's totally unsafe, when you could have spent a dollar to put a new cover on that outlet. That's what I'm talking about, right? Buyers, they just spiral. They make things into these huge deals that don't really need to be huge deals. You need to eliminate that before it happens. So walk through the house, think about all the different projects that you started that you haven't finished. Another one that really causes a lot of grief is if we look at the ceiling.
Maybe you had some lights in the ceiling that you took out. So you patched it but you never got around to, like, texturing or painting. Well, guess what happens? When a buyer walks through the house, they look up, they see a patch on the ceiling, roof leak, the whole house needs a new roof. I don't know if you know this but construction costs have gone up. A roof even on a small house is like $15,000 today. Bigger house could be upwards of $50,000, all because you replaced a light and forgot to texture and paint the patch on the ceiling. So you've got to finish unfinished projects. Number three, and, again, I'm going to come back to two at the end, you got to hang in here. Number two, or I'm sorry, number three on the list: curb appeal. This is so important, especially today. Buyers are so critical that they're looking online.
They're looking on their phone, they're looking on their tablet, their laptop, their computer. That first picture's really got to grab a buyer's attention. And that first picture's typically going to be the front of the home. And then a buyer's going to see the home. They're going to go drive by it, see if it, you know, looks as good in real life as it does in the pictures. And that all is about curb appeal. That is a place you want to spend some money. So a lot of times this could be really easy. One, just take care of the damn lawn, right? If your grass look is dead and looks like crap, water it, get it cleaned up.
If you have grass that's so far gone and there's no irrigation, you can just put bark in there. Believe it or not, buyers are okay with bark. If you have grass that's not salvageable and you don't want to spend money to put new sod in, just lay a ton of bark. Believe it or not, buyers are okay with bark. We love bark. It's so damn cheap. You buy a huge bag. It's, like, five bucks. So if you need to and go from dirt to bark, that's a big improvement and it's a very inexpensive improvement. If you have planter beds, make sure you refresh the bark in there. And if you need to go bark yard and bark planters, do dark for the yard and light for the planters or vice versa. Make sure your planters have some fresh plants in them. Make sure there's a little bit of light, little color, little energy. That makes a big difference.
If you have anything, you know, like stucco cracks or you have paint that's peeling, like, you might need to make, you know, do some paint work, do some work on that. And then this is a real simple one. Just put a nice welcome mat, a nice, fresh welcome mat at the front door because as somebody comes in and they get to the door for that first time and they're going to be standing there with their realtor who's fumbling around with the keys, opening the door, like, how nice is it to have a welcome home mat there? Nice, fresh clean mat. So curb appeal is a huge one. Number four, and, again, we're going out of order. We're coming back to two. Number four is paint. Paint is very inexpensive compared to other improvements that you can make on the home. So we touched a little bit on the outside.
If you got cracking, peeling paint, you should take care of that. It's probably going to get called out in the appraisal anyway, but inside as well, if you have tons of different paint colors or you have, you know, maybe you had a little girl's room, a little boy's room and you had a pink room and a purple room and a teal room and a room, nobody wants that. Just come in and refresh the paint. Just do a nice neutral. Do Navajo white, do graige, that's gray and beige mixed together. Yep, that's a real color. It's actually one of the most popular colors there is. Just come in and do some fresh paint. Makes a huge difference, very inexpensive. Hey, and if you're on a budget, you might be able to just paint it yourself and save some money. Number five on the list is flooring. If you've got really dingy, dark, smelly, ugly carpet, your wood floors or laminate floors are peeling. Like, you want to replace those. It can make a huge, huge difference. And right now, the flooring that's super popular is what's known as LVP, luxury vinyl plank.
A lot of times, you can lay that right over top of the existing floors, saves a lot of money, less labor, and it's relatively affordable. So flooring can be huge and carpet is insanely cheap. You're talking hundreds of dollars to carpet a room. That's a very, very worthwhile investment. And then we'll come back. Number two on the list, which I think is the second most important, is you've got to complete repairs. If you have things that don't work, you need to fix them. If you have windows that don't close, don't seal, don't lock, fix them. If your windows are foggy, fix them. If you have lights that don't turn on, bulbs that are out, fix them, replace them. You want to complete all of the necessary repairs on the home because otherwise a buyer's going to come in there and they're going to start adding them up. "Oh, I got to do this, and I got to do that. And I got to do this, I got to do that. No, this is too much. I don't want that.
" In this market, buyers want move-in ready homes, make your home as move-in ready as possible. Make it so they don't have to come in and fix all the things that are broken and that's going to help make your home stand out. So there you go. Five things you need to do to your home here in 2022 in a declining market if you want to sell. I hope this helps. If you'd love to find out what your home could sell for in this new market but your value has changed a lot in the last few months, we'd love to come out and give you a free appraisal on your home, help you nail down exactly what it's worth. Give us a call, shoot us a text at the number down below. No obligation, no cost. We'll come out, we'll make it happen. I'm Kyle Whissel with Whissel Realty Group. Thanks for watching.
