You Don’t Know What Sells

Andrea Skews is a licensed salesperson with Lowe & Co Realty, Real Estate Authority (REA) Board member and Karori Residents’ Association chairperson. The views expressed are her own and not made in any official capacity.

Thinking about selling? Before you repaint every room, replace the carpet or decide that the kitchen simply has to go, give me a call.

One of the things I often tell sellers is: stay in your lane.

If you bought your home as a first-home buyer and haven’t substantially extended or changed it, don’t suddenly try to turn it into an upsizer’s dream when you come to sell. Think about who you were when you bought it. Make it nicer than it was then, absolutely – but remember that someone like the buyer you once were may well be your target market now.

In other words, make your home the best version of what it already is. Don’t spend a fortune trying to make it something it isn’t.

And don’t assume spending $40,000 automatically adds $40,000 to the value, let alone $60,000. Sometimes an improvement adds value, sometimes it simply makes a property easier to sell, and sometimes you won’t get that money back at all.

But here’s the really important bit: don’t decide what buyers are thinking.

I’ve been selling real estate for 17 years and buyers still surprise me with what they love, what they don’t care about and what they absolutely can’t live with – or without. I’ve heard comments at open homes that I could never have predicted.

Independent economist Tony Alexander’s latest survey of agents backs this up. Buyer nervousness about prices falling after they’ve bought has just hit its highest point in three years – yet almost none of them are showing any fear of missing out, and first-home buyers keep showing up regardless. If specialists surveying hundreds of agents every month still find buyer behaviour hard to pin down, imagine trying to guess it from your kitchen table.

Because we’re all different. Our brains work differently, our priorities are different, and what you see as the glaring problem with your house may barely register with the person who eventually buys it.

So don’t rush ahead and try to jump inside the heads of buyers you haven’t even met.

That’s where your local property specialist’s knowledge and experience becomes useful. We can’t read buyers’ minds either, but we spend our working lives listening to them. We see what they’re buying, what they’re walking away from, what they’re prepared to compromise on and where they’re prepared to spend their money.

Before you spend yours, tap into that experience.

You don’t need to be ready to sell before you call me. In fact, sometimes the most valuable conversation we can have is before you’ve spent a cent.