Stage Your Kitchen for a Home Sale

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Introduction and Overview

 I have a couple things for you. When you get your house ready to sell, we'll discuss staging your kitchen for a home sale. We'll also talk about Los Gatos, home of the week, list price productions, and Tuesday's highs and lows of Santa Clara County. Let's get moving. 

Tuesday. 

Los Gatos Home of the Week

Los Gatos House of the Week

Las Gatos house of the week. This guy right here, two bedroom, two bath, mere thousand square feet built in 1949 for a paltry 2. 2 million, almost 2. 3 million, which you get for 2 million in Las Gatos. There you go. Little tiny house. 

What I like about it is it's a little tiny cottage. What I don't like about it is the price, Santa Clara County houses are average 2 million. So this fits right into what you get for 2 million, which we'll talk about tomorrow, I believe as well. This is the Los Gatos version.

It's. 75 years old, but it has all the basic modern amenities. It's got everything you need. It's got an office. That's actually a bedroom, right? So you can make it into, Ooh, that was cool. I thought that was an armoire. It's a Murphy bed. I like that. Murphy beds are just alongside, the fold-out couch where you break your back trying to sleep and, it's never actually ever comfortable. It's not a whole lot of land, but it is what it is, right? It's an older house. Probably had a lot of land and they sold it off to developers. And there you go.

And the best part about it guys is it's really walking distance to Los Gatos, to downtown. Unfortunately, You can't buy this for 900, 000 today. It's 2. 8 or 2. 3. So there you go. If you're interested in looking, let me know. I think this one's going to go pretty quick.

It's on the market for 21 days. 

Santa Clara County High's and Low's

Highs and Lows of Santa Clara County

This is the highs and lows of Santa Clara County. This one sold, and you know that Waverly tends to come up quite a bit. It's a high-end street, a high-end neighborhood. Area of old Palo Alto right down the street from Stanford. So yeah, this is the world of VC venture capitalists and it's a four-bedroom, three-and-a-three-half bath for 55, almost 5, 600 square feet on almost a half acre built in 2000.

This one sold in 30 days for almost 18 million. The good thing about this is it doesn't have that San Jose transfer tax where you're paying 4%, which is ridiculous. That's the negative thing about Measure E in, San Jose Why would you pay that transfer tax just to have a house like this in San Jose when you can live in a much more prestigious town like Palo Alto and have a house like this is gorgeous.

So where all the money is, there you go. The next one is the lowest-priced house in San Jose and it's in Burbank, right off of San Carlos. It's really close to Valleyfair, which is right there. And there you

go, that's the BMW dealership.

Creepiest House in San Jose

This house is the creepiest in San Jose, I gotta tell you. You got cracks everywhere, everything's half done. the walls are just crap, right? There are obviously leaks that were fixed. There are stairways. It just wasn't very well thought out. And here's your creepy little basement. Yeah, that's a basement room right there.

And just look, everything is just beat up and old. And yeah, you can live here for 500, 000, but what it is people have money and then they're going to, Oh,

that's horrible. So yeah, that's the main house and there's your little shed and people will just shove you right into a rental right there. This is a rental, multiple units. Seven bedrooms, two baths, 1, 250 square feet. The ADU, which obviously is not legal, is 3, 900 square feet.

It's sold for 755, 000 in 10 days. Go figure. This Waverly Street has been on the market for almost 60 days. These types of houses are market makers. So you might think it's worth 30 million, but the truth is. It's been on the market for a long time. We just saw a house sell in 15, or 20 days for a little bit less. I think it was 17, 000.

So this one's 7, 000 square feet versus 5, 500 square, really 5, 600 square feet, but it's a whole 10 million difference. So is it that different? Maybe,

maybe. I don't think so, but they're willing to wait for the right buyer to come along. So this could be a couple of hundred days, a year on the market, and that's okay. The other one, we talk about that all the time, right? I talked about it yesterday with Ryan Lundquist. He brought in a letter, which I'll talk about in a second.

Here is. 

FREE HOME BUYER CHECKLIST HERE

Lowest Active Home for Sale

The lowest active home for sale now understands that this is not a built house. This is a rendition. It's a lot for sale. Somebody's selling it out with the plans for 500, 000. You're getting 6, 000 square feet of land and a plan. And then you have to build that house on it. It's fully approved, blah, blah, blah.

And afterward, the price will be worth about 2. 8. Up to you. If you want to do it,

how long has that been on the market? Seven days. Let's see how long that takes to sell. I want to revisit it because unless you want to be a market maker you're super primed for waiting for that right buyer to come along and pay your price. Like this guy right here. And it doesn't matter what price range it is.

Price Reductions

Pricing Strategies and Market Insights

You should work on listing it low beyond, below the expectation, and let buyers come and tell you what they're really worth, right? If you read this again, I'm not going to go through it, but it makes sense because buyers will compare your house to every other house that's out there. And they will compare it and they'll make a judgment call.

And if they'd rather go for that house, that's a little bit more expensive, but it has a brand new kitchen or they don't have a pool or it has a new roof. It has all these other things that are completely updated in your house. Hasn't really been updated in the last five years. They're going to go with that house.

Home Inspection CHECKLIST HERE

So you're just shooting yourself in the foot. So just be careful. A good way to look at it is by downloading the home inspection checklist, Going through and making sure every little part and parcel is working.

Now understand that this isn't A home inspection. You want to have a third party person that does this professionally know what they look for and document it so you don't have to disclose it, but there's nothing wrong with you going through before the inspection saying the walkways are in good condition.

The railing in the stairs means blah, blah, blah. You can do that. So the link is in the blog. So go check a look at that list. Price reductions out of all of them. I chose this one because it's 95123 where I live. It has been sitting on the market for 19 days and all of a sudden, Oh they reduced the price.

Why? Look, it's not completely turned up. They compared it. They priced it a little too high. They only dropped it 40 grand. think about it, guys. Buyers will look at your house and compare it to other houses that they're interested in buying. And if it doesn't match up, then you're going to shoot yourself in the foot.

Price, location, condition. Condition location. That's why it matters. there's marketing that goes behind it. When you hire an agent, there's negotiation, there's arm's length so that you don't have to get emotionally involved in the negotiation process and have to knock that out.

I like being a pit bull. I like tearing out my opponents. making them bleed so that you get extra money. That's my job to do. That's why you hire an agent. You don't hire him to put it on the market. Anybody can do that. But if you force your agent to overprice it, you're not going to be happy because it's just going to sit there.

And then guess what? You'll blame the agent because it's always the agent's fault. Okay. 

Staging Your Kitchen for a Home Sale

one of the things you could do to upgrade the value of your home obviously is Remodel the home or remodel the kitchen. I don't necessarily always think you should do that. I don't think you're going to get the ROI out of it.

You could put a new countertop on it. You could paint it. You could put, stainless steel everywhere, and apply it on the appliances. You could absolutely do that. You'll get the money back on that. Absolutely. But if you tear out all your cabinets and put everything new, you're talking about extra cost, extra expense, extra time and dust and everything, and then it might not turn out exactly how you wanted it and then you don't get to use it and you're not going to make a whole lot of money out of it, 

So you can fix it up, tidy it up, fix whatever's broken, and then make it look pretty. people want to look at kitchens, bathrooms, and living areas. And the first thing is curb appeal always, right? So have your kitchen cleaned by a professional. I can't tell you how many times I've looked into a stove and it has Carbon everywhere, it has ash everywhere, it's dirty and filthy.

Have your cleaners professionally clean it. They know what they're doing. They come in, they scrape it, make it look really nice. On top of that, they'll get rid of any kind of nasty smells. clean out your appliances. Clean out your dishwasher. Clean out your fridge. Get rid of old food. Clean up your pantry, and make it look nice.

remember my rule of thumb. It's no more than three things on any surface on your counter. You can have three things on every angle or every level. So if you have, a U shape, you can have three things on each angle of that, make sure your pantry looks good.

You can stage it, store it, get rid of food you don't use. You're going to move anyway, so you might as well get rid of it. Organize all the shelving. 

And, I have 15 different types of cutlery and silverware. Break it down, right? Break it down, make it look. Don't just shove stuff in there. Get rid of old cups and glasses. If it's something that sentimental to you, pack it away. You don't want that breaking anyway. And then stage up. If you have a counter where you have a bar where you can eat at the stage that is up with a couple of different place settings, 

Dining table and yeah, buy fruit, buy flowers, exhibit cookbooks. You can absolutely do that. So there's nothing to this. It's just time and energy that you would have to do. We have a stager, we have a project manager, and an interior designer who can come do that for you, or you can do it yourself. So there you go.

Conclusion and Recap

All right, that's it. We went through a lot of stuff today and it was only 15 minutes. So there you go. Today we talked about highs and lows, price reduction, Los Gatos home of the week, get a home inspection before you sell your house. And that's pretty much it. I'm Vito with Avatano.

Vito Scarnecchia Real Estate Broker, Veteran, Dad DRE#: 01407676 408-705-6817 Vito@abitano.com Website: abitano.com https://www.onereal.com/vito-scarnecchia-1 update your home value: https://hmbt.co/bT7qRJ RELOCATION@ABITANO.COM FREE DESKTOP APPRAISAL https://www.propertyrate.com/agent/vitoscarnecchia If you are moving ANYWHERE in the world - Let me know! I know a LOT of AMAZING Agents! Book appointments here: https://calendly.com/abitano/15min Home Buyers Course YT YouTube.com/SanJoseLiving IG https://www.instagram.com/abitanogroup/ FB https://www.facebook.com/vito.scarnecchia/ LI https://www.linkedin.com/in/vito-scarnecchia/ Blog http://blog.abitano.com/ POD https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/oxdH1Hwfcvb Professional Photography by Kim E https://photosbykime.com / Local Real Estate Market and Home Value Report https://hmbt.co/bT7qRJ Financial Intelligence https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0R5pjHIAPguZ5GDEB-fTbGJXKpWK3coK9Khymv_GTWkMnyQ/viewform?usp=send_form https://www.onereal.com/vito-scarnecchia-1 Willow Glen's five most expensive homes https://youtu.be/3A_E2ck0ePg

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