Central Mass Real Estate Market: February 2024

If you want to know what’s going on in Real Estate in February 2024, and why the market is behaving as it is, please read about what was happening in Real Estate last month, because really nothing has changed–we’re still in a counterintuitive real estate market. Despite interest rates being high, making mortgages costly and pricing out some buyers, home prices are remaining high as well. This is because there is an acute shortage of homes for sale. 

So instead of a redundant ‘state of the market’ report, I’m going to write about what I offer, from a strictly functional perspective, when selling a house for a client, that results in the seller getting the highest price possible. 

Put another way, this is about how I ensure that the house is presented in the best way possible when it hits the market. These steps aren’t secrets, which is why I don’t mind sharing them. There are plenty of reasons why all agents don’t do these things, and sometimes it’s just that they don’t know, in which case I’m happy to provide this advice, but other times it’s laziness, or just being very old school, or sometimes funding is a problem. 

A shortcut you see a lot is agents taking their own photos of a house they’re listing. These homemade photos never present a property as well as professional photos do, but hiring a professional photographer can be pricey–they just may want to save the money and think that their photos are ‘good enough’. If the agent takes their own photos and all the toilet seats are up, and there’s stuff on the counters, or even trash on the floor, then the reason is laziness. How your home looks online is critical to you getting the highest price possible for your property, so your agent needs to spring for professional photos–and impress upon you that the simple things are important. If the property has a large lot, is waterfront or just particularly scenic, drone photos and video are also helpful. Anything that can be done to present a property well pays for itself many times over–it’s one of the best investments you can make. 

To take full advantage of these professional photos and video, I also often work with sellers to stage houses, which means hiring a professional stager to go to the property being sold, and make recommendations of how to make the home look attractive. In some cases it’s even worth bringing in staging furniture, which again may get pricey, but in almost all cases it pays off handsomely for the seller. The basic idea here again is to put your best foot forward when your home is going to be marketed, so as to make the home appealing. Not to be too blunt about it, but people buying a house aren’t looking for a home that looks shopworn, is dirty, or has a lot of photos of kids on the walls, or refrigerator art. Those things are all great for the owner, as things like that ‘make a house a home’, but the new buyers want to see the potential for what they can do with the house, rather than seeing ‘someone else’s house’.

And last, but absolutely not least, you need to have the home professionally cleaned (before the professional photos). When people come to look at your house, subtle things like a used looking stove, or a streaked refrigerator, or dirty light switch plates, or fingerprints on the wall all give off the wrong feeling about the house. These little things, that maybe we’re all used to, to some degree, give off the wrong vibe to people looking to buy your house. It’s psychological, but has a real world effect. A spotlessly clean house sells at a higher price point than even a mildly dirty house. It’s exactly like buying a car. Even if you personally don’t keep your car particularly neat (like me–I drag around so much stuff for my business, a recent client review mentioned my car is like a mini Home Depot), if you went to a dealership and they showed you a dirty car, you probably wouldn’t want to buy it. It’s just common sense to once again, put your best foot forward.