Should you do inspections before you sell?

 




Introduction: Can a Garage Sell Your Home?

Could a garage get your home sold? Yes. We'll go into that as well as these projects could lower the value of your home. And should you get a home inspection and bank-owned properties of the week talking about Grand Park Circle again and Apple House of the Week and Mountain View House of the Week as well as the 40 days on market report let's get moving.  

Garage Upgrades: Do They Add Value?

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Could Your Garage Get Your Home Sold?

Could your garage get your home sold? Yes, it could actually help you with selling the house.

Now are you going to get value out of the house? If you upgrade your garage possibly, right? It depends on the buyer who comes through and says, Oh my God, I have to have this totally decked-out garage looks so amazing. Most people don't care. Most people come in, park their cars on the driveway,, and then use it as storage.

So keep in mind, if it's something that you want to enjoy while you're living there, absolutely do it. But, certain things that people do want to look for. Replacing your garage door is imperative. My garage has a pole right in the middle of where the roll-up would go. So I can't put a roll-up.

I have the old plywood heavy tilt-up garage door and it annoys me. I can move the post on either side of this beam, but it's just not worth it for me. So I never really cared. What I'll probably do is wind up getting the roll-up panels stick them together So that they're sturdy and then make it into a tilt-up So that even looks more modern than my dumpy old-looking garage door, Does it add value? Absolutely in this market? I don't know if it really matters though Finishing out the garage means making it look like this where you have All sorts of dangles on it.

TV workbench, make it look like yours. Absolutely. Are you going to get the value out of it? Probably not, right? Just adding epoxy could be a couple hundred bucks to do it yourself or three or 4, 000. If you have somebody else do it, should you do it? I don't think anybody cares.

Unless they're garage heads, right? If they're gear heads and they absolutely love being in their garage, that's something, but let's say 95, 98 percent of the houses I go through, don't have a finished garage. Maybe they have paint on the walls, drywall, and paint. They're not even taped or they're taped, but they're not floated out and textured.

They're just boring-looking, right? 



Storage Solutions for Older Homes

Storage is huge, especially in older houses. This house is 2, 300 square feet and it sucks. The storage is horrible. I had to blow out a wall in my pantry underneath my stairs to get more storage. In these older homes.

It wasn't a concept 50-something years ago today in newer homes. There are places for more storage I'm selling down in Hollister. There's 2600 square feet of attic space. You walk up a flight of stairs in the garage and you can go into this walk around at it. It was designed that way huge.

Storage is a huge thing. So if you want to turn your garage into a storage unit, absolutely. But then you don't get to park your car in it. If your house does not have a garage, a lot of the older houses don't have one, they might have a detached garage or something like that.

If you want to add a garage like a third car garage, I always thought maybe I'd put a third car garage on my side yard because I have one big side yard. The value wasn't there. I couldn't get my ROI out of it. It would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars.

For that, I might as well throw stuff away or get a storage unit. 



Garage Conversions: Pros and Cons

So I never got that doing a garage conversion. If you're thinking about turning into a living space, it's. Always an opportunity, but most buyers don't care for it. At least the buyers I work with.

So can you add value to it? Yeah, you can turn a three-bedroom into a five-bedroom if you want to, or maybe a four-bedroom or like a little mini-suite. Then how do you put a bathroom in there? How do you put plumbing in there? It's a pain. So how do you figure it out? You can absolutely add value to it.

And if you do that, then your buyer becomes an investor. So keep that in mind. You're not looking for a family anymore when you go to sell it. When I tell you about doing these renovation projects, I'm always talking about ROI and who the buyer is that would buy something like this, right?

Cause you have to know who you're selling to. 


DIY Projects That Could Lower Home Value
These projects could lower the value of your home. Do-it-yourself projects that look DIY. I've seen homes that just yell. I knew a guy who put doors on himself and he didn't understand the concept of having the door go into the frame. So it locked onto the, just have an expert do it, show you how to do it, or have somebody do it with you.

But if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it. I do that REWTF line on my Facebook all the time. People love it. It's because people don't know what they're doing. They just assume that they're thinking that this is a good idea and then they do it and then they wound up creating a big turd that they have to have repaired or it becomes other people's problems.

Garage conversions. Could probably give you less value because. People don't want it unless they're investors. It depends on who you're selling to, typically what we do is if I come into a house and it has garage conversion, and there's a suite in there or a house or a room or what have you, I just say, leave it.

If the buyer wants us to remove it, we remove it. Or we can say, we have five other offers, and nobody else asked for it. If you're going to use it to rent out or have your grown kids live in that's something you can think about, 



Luxury Custom Upgrades: Are They Worth It?

Luxury custom upgrades. What's an example of that? Like a wine storage thing underneath your stairwell that's refrigerated. That's great. But in this neighborhood, it probably wouldn't pass if you were in Los Gatos, it would be expected, right? Trash compactors love trash compactors.

I wish they were still a thing, but it's past vogue. People really don't expect it. And a lot of people don't know what to do with it. And it's hard to find them anymore. Luxury custom upgrades, things that are just totally out of the whack. High-end windows in a neighborhood like that.

Not saying that I live in a nice neighborhood. I don't live in a luxury neighborhood like Gatos Saratoga or Palo Alto. My house is not worth 20 million. If I had a 20 million house, I would be putting in high-end custom upgrades. So think about the neighborhood that you're in. What we call designed obsolescence doesn't work well with the design flow of that neighborhood, like putting in an eight-bedroom house in a neighborhood that typically has four or five-bedroom home additions.



If you have a three-bedroom and a 900-square-foot house, you add on another suite for your master. With the bedroom hallway bathroom and walk-in closet, all that. Absolutely. You can do it, but you have to get something out of it.

So enjoy it. Get that utility out of it because you're not going to get the ROI out of it, except for maybe 20 years, once it's paid off because the value of money will go up. So you're sinking money into it. If you don't plan on going anywhere in 15, or 20 years, then absolutely think about it.

But if it's something that you're like, it's going to cost me 250, 000 to add on an extra room. And I know down here, it's not in California going to cost you that much, right? Cause contractors are busy and they're going to tell you, Hey, if it's going to be worth my time, it's going to be worth this much money.

So there you go. 



Pools and Sunrooms: Love or Hate?

I always tell people pools are love, and hate, Thing you either want to have a pool or you don't There's a big population of people that absolutely don't want to pull so we take pools off the list There are people that absolutely want to have a pool There are some people that are in between that don't care if get a pool or not So we don't worry about it, but pools can be a maintenance nightmare.

They can be very costly. You could be paying four five, six, seven hundred dollars a month to maintain them with the water and electricity and everything and then having to repair a pool and having your pool guy come in. It's a costly endeavor, something that you can enjoy. If you're a pool person, absolutely do it.

But understand that pools are like a 55 45 percent of the people absolutely love pools. A percentage of people absolutely don't want pools. And there are some other people in between sunrooms that started dying out in the nineties.

Nowadays, I have a friend who just put one in and It's amazing. And the way his yard lays out, it works perfectly. Instead of doing an addition, he put a sunroom in and it enclosed. It's not completely sealed off from the weather. So it's still considered a sunroom. It's great to have if it's something you're going to use, but if you're going to use it, use it.

Like I have a pergola. I go up maybe once or twice a year. Wish I never put it in. I like it. It's very nice looking, but I don't know. Maybe somebody, if I ever sold the house, would be like, Oh, this is the best thing ever. Don't go overboard on landscaping. 


Landscaping and Neighborhood Fit

Especially for a neighborhood. Now, if you have five acres and everything's lush in your neighborhood, you must have water features.

Absolutely. But if you have a 20 by 30 front yard, don't put in a 10-foot fountain, Go with the flow, what the area is. The neighborhood looks like right? So don't go overboard.


Should you get a home inspection before you put your house on the market? Yes For a couple reasons one gives you an opportunity and I've been telling you this because I always tell you to download this home inspection checklist Get one before I just had my inspector go out to my house and my listing in Hollister to do a run through the main reason why you want to do it is that you want an as-is offer to come in.
So you get the buyer, the inspection saying, this is what's wrong with the house. These are little things that I did fix up, but there you go. Because if you don't have that inspection done, the buyer is going to have that inspection done and a termite inspection done And they're going to come back to you, say you didn't disclose 30, 000 worth of termite repair. I want you to fix that, right? That's the number one reason why you want to do it. But let's go into what the Wall Street Journal says. Waiving an inspection became a negotiation tool for buyers navigating the pandemic. 

And it was even before that here in the Valley, after 2008, We started seeing offers come in, and as is means there's no inspection. You're waiving the inspection. You're waiving any kind of fees. You're waiving any kind of credits as is, right? So when it's a hot, crazy market, you absolutely should do it.

When it's a cool market like it is right now, you should do it because you don't want people coming in and saying, I'll give you 2 million for your house. Then they do the inspections and come back with 50, 000 in repairs, which you have to do or give them credit for. I'd rather you spend 1, 500 on it.

People do get outside of the Valley. It's not expected, but here in Silicon Valley is pretty much a norm for us to have inspections done because we want that easy transaction It's not required by law. It's just something that we suggest because real estate has to be a transparent transaction by having a third party come through and tell you what's wrong with the house you're alleviating yourself of any issues.

But also we're laypersons. We don't know how to look at every nook and cranny. My Checklist goes through every little bit and piece, but are you going to go underneath the house and make sure there are no leaks?

Are you going to go up in the attic and do that? That's what an inspector does. They give you a full picture of what you're looking at there. What's it going to cost? I'll tell you, a 3500 square foot house is going to be about 1500 bucks. 

If you have a pool, it'll be more. If you have a foundation, there will be more issues. It could be about 12, 1, 200 for a smaller home, but just getting in that area as that's the norm here in the Valley. It's not 400 anymore. That was inflation.

The third-party inspector will check major systems, mechanicals, windows, and doors. They check everything. Dishwasher, washer and dryer, everything. They want to make sure it works. And if not, then they're going to write it down. I've heard of agents getting pissed off at the inspector saying you shouldn't have disclosed that.

Here's the thing. I would rather over-disclose and scare away crappy buyers or buyers that might be timid Get into a contract with a timid buyer and then they go, Oh, there's 30, 000 worth of damage. I got to get out. And that becomes their right. I want to find the right buyer for that house. So that alleviates any kind of problems for my client.

When should you do a pre-inspection, or pre-listing inspection? I do it right before, We bring in the handyman or contractors, and we get it all fixed up. And then we have the inspector come in. If you find something big, then we can identify it.

And go through it later always disclose anything you do to your house replace a plug, a switch, a light floor, windows, anything Disclose it, right? I don't have to do the dishwasher, do I? Yeah, just disclose it. Why not Again, there's no advice on what you should repair. I always say if it's obvious like a crack in the window a crack in the wall, or a buckling of the floors, have that attended to figure out what the problem is. Get that fixed because that's going to scare away buyers. The little things you can leave, but I'd say get them done, right? I just had a client for another house replace plugs and switches because it was the old bisque color and you wanted to turn it white. So just depends on what you want to do. No house is perfect. No house is perfectly level. No house is perfectly plumb or square.

Understand that when you're buying a house, it's. Made by human beings it's an imperfect product. You're going to have dips and curves, especially older houses that are 56 years old are going to have some growing pains and they're going to have some old bones. Is it going to break and fall down?

You're going to have waves. Imperfect, unsquared, walls, right? So what we want to make sure is anything that's safety related Hey, your water heater looks like it's going to blow up. You might want to have that replaced or your toilet seems to be leaking.

You should have that fixed and obviously disclosing.

Yeah. And smaller fixes and maintenance issues can have an impact because once a buyer sees a crack in the wall, they're gonna be like, Oh, I wonder what else is wrong with this house? And now instead of going, Oh, this is a beautiful house.

I love the kitchen. I love the bathroom. They're going to be looking for imperfections and where they find one imperfection you're going to see a hundred of them. And that'd be like, that house needs some repair or maintenance. I'd rather have it taken care of. So the current trend is stainless steel.

Stainless steel appliances. And here's my problem with appliances. They are all crap. KitchenAid's a good, brand, but I have GE and I just spent 1, 200 on relatively new appliances. They're like five or six years old. And I had to have 1, 200 to repair a refrigerator, the oven, and the dishwasher.

Some appliance manufacturers build in obsolescence so that they start dying over a few years. KitchenAid doesn't do that. If you have white or black appliances, it might turn off some buyers. Just think of that because you're looking at six, 7, 000 to replace all that, to make it look brand new.

Do I really need a pre-listing inspection? No, you don't. But understand that the buyer has the right and duty to have their own inspections done. You can present them with the offer, with the inspections along with the disclosures. They can sign it and then halfway through they can say, you know what?

I didn't see this on the inspection and it wasn't disclosed. I want to have a full inspection done. So be careful with that. The older the house, the stronger we incur. The increase between falls. Should you do an inspection and repairs? Yeah. Make your house look nice.

Make it look like a showroom. Make it look like you've done the work, right? I have multiple videos on packing your stuff and making your house look showroom-ready. Get it staged up with your own furniture. Make it look nice and pretty. Three things on every surface, that kind of thing.

Having the inspections is part of the work. There you go. Enough said. Home Inspection Checklist, download it today. 
 
Market Report: Current Listings and Trends

Bank on the property of the week, Grand Park Circle again, still on the market after 48 days. Wonder what's wrong with it. It was overpriced for the condition. And I think this was the crack house that we had earlier this year.
 
So be careful. Last couple of days to vote. Register to vote. If you haven't registered get out there and register. 
I have my ballot right here I'm gonna be turning it in a couple days house of the week 2. 8 million dollars three bedroom two bath 1300 square feet built in 1962, but guys look this is a beautiful house it's dated, but that's okay. It still looks nice and pretty. They put new lights in, new paint, and updated the floor. It's going to sell pretty quick. This is on the market for just a couple days, seven days. If you're thinking about buying a house or going to open houses, download this checklist. It walks you through the house so you can compare and contrast five, six, and seven houses so you don't go nuts.



Valencia house, Mountain View house of the week, Valencia AB, not my listing 3. 5 million, four bedroom, two and a half bath, 2, 400 square feet built in 2009. And the best part about it is that it has an HOA. But you can also walk to Castro Street where you have nice restaurants.
Over the last couple of months, I started doing this new chart and grid, and I wanted to show you a visualization of it. To have a balanced market, San Jose needs to have about a thousand homes for sale, plus or minus Right now we're at 442. In June, the highest this year was 533. We need to have a thousand. That's why prices continue to go up. This has nothing to do with the cost of houses, affordability, or interest rates. People are going to continue to move here.
We're not building enough houses. We don't have enough for sale. So once we get to a thousand, we'll have a balanced market. But right now you're still in a seller's market. Same thing with Santa Clara County. We need to be about 2000, 1800 to 2200. But right now we're at 700. And at its peak, we were at 1, 138.
So these numbers are all showing you what we're seeing, right? We have 207 houses that are over 40 days on the market. We have 78 houses that are 90 days on the market, and we have 83 bank-owned properties. It's just not there. We just don't have that inventory. I'm Vito with Abitano. Thanks for watching. We'll see you out there.

Vito Scarnecchia Real Estate Broker, Veteran, Dad DRE#: 01407676 We’re Hiring! 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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