BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 261: 16 Tips for Selling Properties Faster and for More Money with Mindy Jensen

Episode Date: January 11, 2018

Here on the BiggerPockets Podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about buying properties—but what about needing to sell them? How does someone get top dollar and get their home sold quickly? Well, today on the podcast, we’re excited to dive deep into this topic with Mindy Jensen, the Community Manager at BiggerPockets and author of the newest book from BiggerPockets, How to Sell Your Home. You might know some of these tips—but others might just blow your mind (and make you thousands next time you sell a property), so grab a pencil and paper and get ready to take some notes! In This Episode We Cover: Mindy’s story How to pay zero dollars in capital gain taxes The tax exemptions involved with getting married What exactly a live-in flip is 16 ways to sell your property: Have a pre-listing home inspection Clean up your home Doesn’t pass the sniff test Great Pictures of your house Be available Be informative Know your competition Use an agent Ask your agent Price it right List in Peak market time Double check your listing information Stage those weird areas that don’t have an obvious use Leave during your showing Be prepared to walk away from an offer Tell everyone you know that your house is for sale Why Mindy wrote the book Bonuses! And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Money Podcast Email Support How to Buy Your First (or Next) Property by the End of the Year [The 90-Day Challenge!] (podcast) What I learned buying a house (blog) Books Mentioned in this Show How to Sell Your Home by Mindy Jensen Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki Long Distance Investing by David Greene Set for Life by Scott Trench The Book on Rental Property Investing by Brandon Turner The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason Fire Round Questions After taking initiative, landing the deal, and successfully completing renovations, how can you be sure your property is going to sell? Selling home with no agents How do people work on the timing of selling and buying a home? Selling challenge Tweetable Topics: “Try not to sell a house with a tenant in it.” (Tweet This!) “Home inspection is totally worth the dollars.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Mindy Mindy’s BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 261. There is this tip that I have heard from a lot of different real estate agents about how you want to get as many people as you can through the house. No, you don't, you don't win a prize for having 500 showings and no offers. You want to get as many targeted people into your house as possible. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors, large, and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the height, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What is going on, everyone?

This is Brandon Turner, your host today of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with not just my co-host today, Mr. Scott Trench, but also my guest slash co-host, Mindy Jensen. How are you guys doing? You're doing great. I'm doing wonderful. Okay, good, good. All right. So today's show, obviously, beginning a little bit different than normal. Normally, we, you know, we talk bad about the guest ahead of time, and then we get them on the call. I'm just kidding. We don't usually talk bad about people, but we talk behind their back and then we bring them into the interview. Today's a little different because our guest today is also somebody who regularly, is that the word, regular, hosts the Bigger Pockets podcast as well, and that is Mindy Jensen here.

So our guest and our guest host today, if you want to call it that, is Mindy. But before we do that, let's talk bad about Mindy behind her back. Scott, what's up? Hey, Brandon. Well, talking about Mindy behind her back, she actually has had a heck of a past couple of months between hosting a bunch of Bigger Pockets podcasts, you know, continuing to do all the community management stuff, doing some sort of writing project. I think we'll hear about that in a few minutes.

There is a writing project. another podcast, which she is also the host of. So it's been a- Wait, what's that other podcast called, Scott? Oh, the Bigger Pockets Money podcast where we talk about personal finance and building the foundation from which to begin investing in real estate and other big ticket investment items. Yes, I'm really excited about that show.

It's a great fun show. It's related to bigger pockets, but not related to bigger pockets. And that, you know, we talk about real estate all day long here, money's a big part of that. If you can't finance the property, if you can't afford to buy it. a house, you're not going to buy it. You're not going to get it started investing in real estate and on and on and on. So yeah, the Bigger Pockets Money Show is a great way to learn about money, how to fix your financial house so you can start investing. We also talk about different ways to

invest. I know this is blasphemous on the Bigger Pockets podcast, but real estate is not the only way to invest your money to grow your wealth. Blasphemy. Blasphemy. That's the last time I will talk about anything other than. The point of all this, though, is that Mindy is the busiest person on the planet right now. And we're going to hear about a little bit about the things behind what she's doing in this upcoming show, right? Isn't that right? That is what we're doing? No, I'm not going to tell you about that.

All right. So before we get to the show today, talking about actually today we're going to focus on one topic. Normally we do interviews on people's stories. Today we're actually in that zoning on a topic and talk about how to actually make more money when you sell properties and how to reduce your stress. It's something that all of us have to deal with in our life with real estate investing and something that I've been dealing with a lot lately as I sell off some of my earlier properties. And a lot of you guys don't know, Mindy is actually a licensed real estate agent, and she is an awesome real estate agent. And she knows how to sell houses. So that's what we're talking about today.

But before we get to that, let's get to today's quick tip. I was waiting for you guys. All right. The tip is really awful. Good job. All right. Today's quick tip is actually, so three months ago or so, I did a podcast here on the Bigger Pockets podcast alone. It was called the 90-day challenge, how to buy your first one next property before the end of the year or something like that.

Anyway, and a lot of people have done just that. In fact, I get emails almost every day because now here we are 90-ish days later. And people are like, yeah, I took the 90-day challenge and I bought a property. So here's what I just want to ask. If you are somebody who did that, who went and bought, took the 90-day challenge and went out there and bought a property in those 90 days, do me a favor and let us know. Actually, shoot an email over to support at biggerpockets.com. What I actually want to do is put together a special, either a whole episode of the podcast,

maybe just a piece of a podcast, not really sure yet, just with some stories that people about what they did during the 90-day challenge, just kind of a ways to encourage everybody together. So if that's you, shoot an email over to support at BiggerPockets.com and just say, hey, I took the 90-day challenge, and then they'll make sure they get that over to me. So with that, 90-day challenge, hit them up. But yeah, congratulations to everyone who did that, and we will be doing another 90-day challenge here. I mean, you don't have to wait for a 90-day challenge to buy real estate,

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I don't really got anything else, Scott. Mindy, should we just jump into this content? I mean, people want to hear how to sell their properties. So you guys up for it? Bring it. All right. So today's guest is Mindy Jensen, and we're going to do something fun here. I'm going to actually try to pretend I know Mindy's entire backstory, like I remember it from when we

interviewed on the podcast. And you're going to tell me, am I high. or cold, Mindy. You ready for this? This is going to be great. I bet you're going to remember every single thing about me from show 129. Oh, wow. It's a long time ago. All right. So Mindy Jensen was born in the Midwest. Wow. Yes. Okay. And she was actually an only child. Yes. No. Okay. She had a lot of siblings. And she got into real estate when she was in her 20s by buying a house and then fixing it up and then selling it. Correct.

Except it was a condo. Oh, condo. Okay. And then she became a real estate agent. And today, Mindy is 29 years old. Yes. Okay. Yes, 29 years old.

29 years old. And she has been a real estate agent for 18 years? Sure. Okay. And she is an expert at this. So we're going to, that's Mindy's story in a nutshell. Scott, anything you want to add to Mindy's story? Yeah.

Mindy has also been investing in real estate for over nine decades. It's a lot of experience here. Yes. I have this really amazing way to bend math so that I'm 29 years old and I've been investing for nine decades. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. All right. So the truth is, Mindy has been a real estate agent for how long?

Almost five years. Okay. And so you've, in that time, you've helped a lot of people sell houses and you've sold a lot of houses yourself. I know you guys do a lot of live and flips. I've sold a lot of houses my own self. A live in flip is when you live in the property while you're rehabbing it so that you can and you do the work. while you're living there. So it's a nice disaster.

But then when you go to sell, you wait for two years after you buy the house to sell the house and then you pay $0 in capital gains taxes up to $250,000 if I was single like Scott. Since I am married, I am exempt up to $500,000. That's awesome. One thing I want to chime in here about that is some people are confused because they were talking about in the new Trump tax code whether or not they were going to actually change this rule. So it was going to be four or five years you had to live in your property.

And we're safe. And they had that, they had that in one version. And from my understanding, they actually do not have that in the final version that passed. You can still do this exact same strategy that Mindy was just talking about and exclude those capital gains up to like $250,000 or $500,000 for these sales. Which is the number one reason you should get married right there. So you can exclude more. Yes, right there. $250,000.

Right in the bank. Forget love. I forget who said this, but someone told me that getting married to save money on taxes is like buying an airline to get free peanuts. I thought that was a good analogy with that one. That's not right at all. It's totally like getting married to save money on taxes. You save so much money. I wonder.

This is a tax advice. I don't know that you can do this. But could I, could Scott be a currently single man and buy a property and fix it up? And then, oh, I'm going to make $400,000. Maybe I'll just get married and get the exemption. Like, can you do that? I don't know. That's an interesting question.

If you're a CPA, listen to the show, let us know on Twitter, Mindy at BP is your Twitter handle, right? Twitter handle. That is correct. Let me know if I'm committing tax fraud. I mean, I'm already married. I've been married forever, so I'm not committing tax fraud. But let me know if Scott would be.

All right, no tax fraud here. All right, so let's get to today's show talking about 16 ways to make more money when you sell or, you know, I guess a house or a property. We will separate this. Now, the reason we're talking about this today is specifically because Mindy actually has a new book that Bigger Pockets is published in a new book. And Mindy wrote this book and it is called, what Mindy? How to sell your home. All right.

What's it about? It's about DIY anesthesiology. Oh, wow. What's about? Put you right to sleep. Oh, my God. I can't believe I watched it to that. That's the end of the show.

Goodbye. Unlike DIY anesthesiology, this book will not put you to sleep unless you don't care about real estate. state, in which case you're probably not listening to this show anyway. No, this is the essential guide to a fast, stress-free and profitable sale by me, Mindy Judson. All right. And we will obviously can talk more about this later and about the launch and all that good stuff later in today's show. But I just wanted to give a good preface on why we're talking about this topic today. One, because it's actually really important, especially right now in today's economy.

Like the market is really, really good for selling properties. That's why I'm selling off a number of my properties. So I'm looking at my portfolio saying, hey, this is probably the top of the market. We're probably there. We're close anyway. Why not sell some of my, you know, ones that maybe were underperforming and then wait when the market crashes. I'll buy a bunch more and then I'll sell again. So anyway, this is a very timely episode. And your book is very timely as well because we know this is very, very hot right now, this topic.

So without further ado, let's get to 16 ways to sell your property. Number one, Mindy, what do you got? What's our first tip for selling faster or making more or whatever? Making more money. Number one is one that's going to sound like you're not going to make money off of it, but you really are. Have a pre-listing inspection performed by a licensed home inspector. Pre-listing means before you put it on the market, you go and you have the property inspected by a home inspector. And you're going to want to do this for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it's not that expensive. Three or $400 will have a home inspector show you exactly what they're looking at and what the buyer's home inspector is looking at. if they find something big or not so big, you have the, you have the opportunity to fix it in advance. Let's say you have a bit of water leaking in through a roof, like a hole in the roof. Your buyer is going to freak out when they see this problem on their own home inspection.

So when you go and you have the home inspected before you list it, you have the opportunity to fix this problem. All of a sudden your roof doesn't leak. Therefore, you don't have to disclose that the roof leaks because it doesn't. There you go. So true life story, two weeks ago, well, okay, like two months ago, I put a house for sale. It was a flip I did. Put it for sale. I did not do an inspection ahead of time. I actually never did an inspection when I bought the property. That was a mistake number two there. But I thought at the time I walked through it and I was like, this house is great. Like it was doing really good shape. What do I need to do an inspection? And I mean, I've been doing this for 12 years. I'm not saying newbie should never do inspection. But I was like, this is really good shape. There's probably nothing going to come up. I'm just going to go ahead and do it. So I did it, did the flip, went to put it on the market. Got it, got it an offer. right away. Everything was great. Went down to like a week before closing and the appraisal had come back and the appraiser had seen that there was some rot in a beam underneath the house. So then when we're supposed to be closing, we ended up having to get an inspector in there, I mean a contractor

in there to go do all this work to replace a beam. It cost me like, oh, $1,500 or something like that to replace this one beam. Really knowing push closing out a week, which is money right there, would have been cheaper to get the inspection. But anyway, then we find out on the day of closing after we recorded that the contractor had lied. He was not an actual licensed contractor. He lied about being licensed. So then I had to send another contractor in to verify all the work and to certify that it was done correctly under their license and bond after the thing closed.

Anyway, had I gotten a pre-listing inspection, like Mindy just said, I would have avoided all that. Would have probably closed a week earlier and not had that drama and probably saved a bit of money. So there you go. Yeah. Thanks for not taking my advice, Brandon. Yeah, anytime. This is my fault for not having recorded this show six months ago.

You know, I'm sorry. I asked you back then and you were like, no, I don't like you. I hate this. And another thing to remember is like, I remember going back to my first purchase that I ever got. I'm relying really heavily on this inspection. You know, for most people are not like the people on bigger pockets who buy many realest, many rental properties throughout the course of a lifetime. They're buying one property, maybe two or three in their lifetime.

And so when you see, oh, a beam is rotting under the. beneath this thing, that's like an overwhelming problem for someone who's never hired a contractor or never done any of this kind of stuff. And it's normal day-to-day business for folks like us. And that's the power of having that inspection, I think, ahead of time is, is, yes, avoiding giving the people that are buying this, making this the biggest financial decision of their life, cause to worry unduly about these little things. So I'm a big fan of home inspectors. I think that everybody should have a home inspection, unless you are buying the house to completely knock it down to the ground and rebuild.

And maybe even then you need to have like a foundation inspection. But I think I am not in any way talking smack about home inspectors. But here she talks about smack. Here she talks about home inspectors. They will always find something. There is no such thing as a perfect house. It doesn't matter if Brandon Turner himself built it all by hand. It's not going to be perfect.

Sorry, Brandon. I'm offended. You need somebody. You get this home inspection. They come in and they list everything. They have a really great ability to make something sound like a giant deal. Yes, they do, right? Yeah. It's the language they use or whatever. So you find this, they say there's no GFI outlet by the water, by the sink. And you're like, oh, okay, that's going to be like a thousand dollars to repair. I'm going to make the seller do it. It's like a $4 fix or maybe $10. I can't remember what a GFI outlet cost. Like, it's not a big deal. On the other hand, if you don't know what's going on, if this is your first purchase or, you know, you could see all these little things add up and think, oh, this house is just not ever going to,

it's going to fall apart tomorrow. So you have the pre-listing inspection as the seller. You see everything that the buyer is going to see. And then you have the opportunity to fix it. Or maybe there's not that much wrong. You are missing the GFI outlet by the kitchen sink. So you go and repair it. You've got a very short list with your pre-inspection.

You can give that to the buyer and say, hey, here's the list of the things that the pre-inspectors saw. Here's everything I fixed. So now you don't have to have your own inspection. If I was your agent, I would recommend, yes, you should absolutely have your own home inspection. But in a hot market, this could be all that the buyer needs to make the offer. They see you fixed everything.

They see that it's a licensed inspector and they forego their inspection. I'm not suggesting that foregoing inspection is the best idea for a buyer. I'm not suggesting that you're like trying to pull one over on the buyer. But it could be, you know, every inspector is different. So what your inspector finds, maybe the next inspector would find something slightly different that you didn't catch. But it's still totally worth the three or four hundred dollars it costs to get the inspection done. All right.

I like it. Good tip. By the way, just one more side note because I like 10 stories. I sold a flip one time. The inspector had written on there. The siding has failed. It's just those, those like four words. The siding has failed.

Well, what it was was there was a little bit of rot in the bottom six inches on one side of the house. You know, go cut off the bottom six inches, replace it. It was just wood siding. No, the seller refused to buy the house unless we replaced 100% of siding because the inspector said the siding has failed. Even when the inspector said, well, I'm just talking about this one section. They said, no, you said it failed. And we didn't spend like $8,000 to get that deal done. And that was the market was really crappy.

And so, like, they weren't a lot of buyers out there. So we had to. I mean, today I'd be like, no. Screw you. But I mean, like, back then, I was like, fine. So we replaced all the siding, repainted the entire house because it had failed. Wow. So anyway, I love inspectors.

Yeah, they're great. All right, number two. Listen, a home inspector is a good person to have in your toolbox. I would not allow you to talk smack about them. No, I love home inspectors. But, man, they can make things sound bad. All right, number two. What is it, Mindy?

What do you got? Clean up your home. It's obvious, so, isn't it? Come on. Everyone knows that, don't they? You know what? As an agent, I go through a lot of houses. I want to keep up on my local market, even if I don't have clients that I'm helping buy houses at this moment. I go through every house that comes on the market in my, like, farm area in my local town. And nobody knows this tip. Honest to God, nobody knows this tip. When I was little, my mom made me take off my shoes when I came into the house because she had, she bought a house with white carpeting. I don't know why that's even a thing. And I'm in the habit of taking off my shoes as soon as I walk into a house. But it's really. estate agent, I am firmly getting out of that habit because people's houses are so disgusting.

You walk in the door and you're like, oh, what is that? Like you take off your shoes because you're not thinking and then you step on something crunchy or gritty. Like there's don't have dirty dishes in the sink. Don't have like clean your floor, sweep and vacuum and or hire somebody. Like cleaning up your house just automatically puts your house head and shoulders above every other property because they're not clean. Nobody understands how to clean. And this also applies to decluttering. Nobody wants your stuff. When you move out, all of your stuff is going to be gone.

If you are a landlord, this is going to be a little bit different. If you're a flipper, all of your tools need to be picked up. All of everything needs to be gone. And even if you're just showing an empty house, have it clean, sweep the floors. Don't look like a gross house. Yeah. And I'll say if you're like me, I'm not a very clean person. In fact, as I'm recording this podcast, I've shoved all of the crap in my office just below the sight line of this computer.

Here, I'll give a quick little glance at the piles of junk in here. Hire a professional to clean your place because they're just going to be able to do it in a very efficient manner and move all of the junk out of the way. I think that that, you know, when I do that before I list any of my properties for rent, and I'd certainly do it before selling a place. Yeah. And it's not that expensive to have somebody come in. But they're really good. They're really efficient. If you don't want to clean, I wouldn't say you're not a clean person, Scott.

I would say you're not the tidiest person I've ever met in my life. You should see my car. I have seen your car. It's beautiful. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that as well. In fact, that was one of my favorite things, like my favorite first outsourcing gigs in my life. Like when I would do houses, whether rental or flips, when I started outsourcing the cleaning, like I realized, like, professional cleaners charge like nothing.

Like, I feel bad they make like nothing. And like they, they do a really good job, 100 times better than I could ever do. So it was like, at the end of the day, I'd get like a bill for like $150 for like they worked for a whole day. And I'm like, wow, you did an amazing job for like, it would have taken me a week to clean that house. But I'm always surprised because it's not like a high paying job. I mean, that 15 bucks an hour, maybe 20 bucks an hour, you can get most people to clean your house for. So anyway, get a house cleaner. Yeah, definitely hire a house cleaner if you're not willing to put in the time to do it.

But, you know, get rid of your stuff. when let's say you're having a personal property that you're cleaning, you have things in your house. Nothing in your house is going to stay there. Your table's not going to stay there. Your pictures aren't going to stay there. Your dog isn't going to stay there. Pick up all these things that you don't need every day and put them away.

Get a head start unpacking and just get the stuff out of your house. You want it to look like nobody lives there. Yep. There you go. All right. Number three, what do you got? Oh, does it pass the snares? Nif test.

My neighbors, the sniff test is you walk in and you're like, ew. That did not pass the sniff test. My neighbors were selling their house. I know they have two big dogs because I live right next door to them. And I went and viewed their house anyway. And I walk in and I'm like, oh my God. It smells like my dog in here. Like the dog had been out for a month and came in.

It was really gross. And then the next, I showed it to a client. The next time I came in, it was very. flowery with an undertone of wet dog. Nobody is going to walk into your house. Nobody that you know is going to walk into your house and say, wow, your house smells like garbage. But if your house smells like garbage, the people that are walking in to buy it are going to

walk right back out again and say, no, thank you. Or they're going to offer a really, really, really, really low price. Like what do they say cat pee smells like money on bigger pockets in the forums? They walk in, smells like money. It doesn't smell like money to you as the seller. It smells like money to the buyer. they know it's not that difficult to get rid of the smell. It isn't that difficult for you to get rid of the smell either.

So ask your real estate agent. Ask a trusted friend who will come over and give you an honest opinion. What does my house smell like? And if they say anything other than, wow, I don't smell anything. You need to fix it. You need to, you can rent something called an ozonator at like a big box home improvement store. You can rent, you can go through and see what are some other ways to deodorize your house?

dishes of vinegar, little dishes of white vinegar around the house. The vinegar kind of sucks up the smell. Dishes of charcoal briquettes will also suck up the smell. I had an aunt and uncle who used to smoke like crazy. And when they'd come to my parents' house, they'd just smoke in the house, which I think is weird now. But at the time it was like the thing. And then every time they'd leave, my mom would put these little dishes of vinegar all over the house and these little plates of charcoal briquettes. And it would take a couple of days, but the smoke smell would be gone.

I'd never do that. One thing I've also, one thing I've also heard. is that sometimes folks won't like the smell of like the cleaning materials as well. So if you have a lot of, if you're doing a lot of cleaning at the same time as trying to remove the smell, which is probably going to be happening at the same time, the tip was bake a bunch of cookies. I don't know if I'm going to take that tip, but if your house smells like fresh baking, that can help maybe overpower some of these other, the cleaning materials and those kinds of smells.

Yeah, that's a good tip too. And no, that's a really good tip because when you walk into a house that somebody's been baking cookies or baking an apple pie, it smells amazing. And you don't even actually have to bake something. You can just put a couple of caps of vanilla into like a baking dish and stick that in the oven for $3.50 for a few minutes. It makes the whole house smell beautiful. And you don't actually have to cook anything. Wow.

Quick tip. Quick tip. All right. So I would caution against using just like air fresheners. Those start to get really sickly sweet. And like sometimes you can walk in and you're like, oh, I can taste that air freshener. It's like it's too strong and overpowering. And it doesn't remove the smell.

It just covers it up. Oh, we are all three idiots. What about Fabriz? Have you ever used Fabriz? I actually bought a car once, which is not a house, but the same thing. I bought a car and the guy before me had, yeah, well, okay. We'll talk about that later. The guy before me used to smoke cigars in the car with the windows up.

It was really gross. But I had no money and I had to buy a car. I took a bottle of Fabriz and I sprayed it all over the car and it took two entire bottles. It was really, really infested. But two entire bottles of Fibrize, which is what? $4 a bottle and every smell was got in this car. That's impressive. I mean, that's what their whole campaign is, right?

On the commercial that's like, have you got nose blind? Yes. Well, don't go noseblind. Get a bottle of Fabriz. Wow. And today's episode is sponsored by Fabriz. No, no. Scott, you can get on that.

Get Fabriz to sponsor the Bigger Pockets podcast. All right. Number four. What do you got, Mindy? Number four, take great pictures of your house. Oh, so good. Yep. Okay.

There's this tip that I have heard from a lot of different real estate agents about how you want to get as many people as you can through the house. No, you don't win a prize for having 500 showings and no offers. You want to get as many targeted people into your house as possible. And using things like wide angle lenses or funky angles when you're taking pictures of the home aren't going to change. the actual layout of the house. They will get people through the door. But nobody is going to buy the house based on the pictures on the internet. They're going to buy the house based on what's in the actual house.

So there's a house in my neighborhood. I remember this because I actually got on my stomach to try and figure out what angle they shot this room from. It looked like an actual bedroom, eight foot ceilings, you know, 10 by 10 or whatever. It was actually a four foot nook under the stairs that they had. They had shot with such a crazy angle that it looked like an actual bedroom. And I was walking around the house and like, oh, it had a very distinct painting paint job on the sides. Like, where's that one room?

And I sit under the stairs. I'm like, are you kidding me? This is not a bedroom. This is like you can't even put a bookshelf in here. So don't take great pictures with funky angles and, you know, fancy whatever. Take excellent pictures of your house. As it is, if there's warts on it, show the warts. because those are going to show up when people walk through the house.

There you go. What about lighting? Is that? Yeah, I've noticed that when I take pictures that are really brilliantly lit, they just happen to look a little better. Is that something that you've found as well? Yes. So actually, in the book on how to sell your home,

I give you DIY photography tips. My husband takes pictures of every house I list because he's a really great photographer. He takes them with some like random camera. He doesn't have a lot of fancy equipment, but he takes his time. He stages the property. He, you know, looks through the camera and takes a bunch of different angles, turns on different lights in different places. And yeah, lighting is really important.

You have to have pretty much all the lights on. And some rooms are actually going to photograph better at night versus during the day. And so when he'll go back multiple times during the day and take a bunch of pictures. And I don't think it looks weird to have the living room. with a photo, photo, with a picture. I can't even talk. I don't think it looks weird to have a living room with a picture taken at night

versus the kitchen has the picture taken during the day. You want to showcase the house in the best light that you can, the real house in the best light that you can. Also, when I bought my first property, it had snowed the day before and the yard was terrible.

And I didn't get to see that because the snow was on top of it. So maybe that helps as well if they're, if you're, trying to cover that up, you know. Yeah, wait until it snows. I would not recommend that as a seller that you wait until it snows. As the buyer, I saw a property when it snowed.

The snow covered up the roof problems. So then when I went to sell, like, what do you mean it needs a new roof? Let me go back to my inspection. I never would have bought a house that needed a new roof. Nope, needs a new roof. The inspector even noted, oh, I can't view this due to snow. I'll come back. So he came back.

He went up on the top. He's like, yep, needs a new roof. Great. Awesome. That's all right. That's all right. I like it. All right.

Number five. What do you got? Number five is the two-parter. Be available. Be available. Like romantically? Be available. Yes.

You can't sell a house if you're married. Scott. You could actually sell a house tax-free if you're married, I thought, right? That was the whole point of what we were doing earlier. You're getting married to avoid the capital games and this. Okay, be available. Part one of that is be available for any questions. If your real estate agent cannot get in touch with you to ask a question that the buyer has,

the buyer make it really frustrated with you and just move on to the next house. If your real estate agent can't get in touch with you for any other reason, you're going to just harm your sale by not being available for questions. So share all the information you can with your real estate agent, but the buyer's always going to have some question that you forgot to share with your agent. The second part of that is be available for showings at almost any time. Your buyers want to see the house on their schedule. They don't want to see the house on your schedule.

And if they're driving past and they see the outside of your house that looks amazing because you've already fixed it up and they call you to say, hey, can I see the house? Oh, sorry, it's not ready is not a good answer. They're not going to come back most likely. So being available to have the showings, that means keeping the house in show condition at every moment, even if you have young kids, even if you have pets, It's one thing when they're driving past and they're like, oh, can we just come in and see the house? Oh, let me just take the dog to the backyard.

That's very different than, hey, we've got a schedule. We're going to show your house tomorrow at noon. Oh, sorry, that doesn't work for me. You want to sell your house. So make yourself as available, make your house as available as it possibly can be. Yeah. I love it. What about, and maybe you don't cover this one, but what about if you have tenants?

How do you get them to maintain a clean house for when you're trying to sell? Is that? Good luck with that. So I think you should incentivize your tenants. What I see a lot of times in the BiggerPockets forums, biggerpockets.com slash forums is people will say, oh, I'm going to sell my property. I don't know if I should tell my tenant or not. Yes, you should tell your tenant.

You don't want to surprise them, even if they're the reason that you're selling. This is still where they live. You don't want to surprise them by having people, oh, by the way, we're going to have somebody come look at your house tomorrow. And you actually can't do that, can you? that's illegal to just walk into somebody's house. You have to give them notice before you can walk in. But it's just it's a courtesy to tell them that you're selling the house.

You want them to present the house in its best light. So you're going to have to incentivize them to have the house looking nice. Maybe you pay for the cleaner to come in. Maybe you offer them a rent credit if they don't cancel showings. But it's it's definitely more difficult to sell a property that is that has a tenant in it. and I was actually showing clients a house with tenants in it. And I walk in and I'm like, oh, gross. Like, of course, they don't own a vacuum.

They don't know what a broom is. But there's like dirty dishes in the sink and food on the counter and the whole thing smelled like smoke. And my client was like, I don't want to buy this house. This is disgusting. So I think you should definitely view the tenant's house beforehand. And honestly, if they're gross, you may just want to wait until after their tendency has ended before you need to sell their house.

Or maybe you hire a cleaner or something, right? And you just say, hey, hey guys, free house cleaning for you guys. It's like valued at $300. They're going to be in there for like eight hours this Saturday, just scrubbing away. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. Yes. And if you have a hot market, you can arrange it.

So you have the cleaner come in and then you have like an open house where the tenants are out of the, out of the property while you're selling or while you're showing it. But I think you're right on the, I think you're right on the try not to sell a house or the tenant. And if you can avoid that, that makes life a lot easier not to have that. Yeah, one time I actually offered a tenant. I think it was a thousand. I told them I'd give them $1,000 if they kept their house clean and somebody bought their house, you know, and they ended up actually moving out before somebody made an offer. But yeah, that was my plan.

I was like, well, I'll just give them a thousand bucks. But it was contingent on them, you know, being able to help sell the house. And so that was my theory at the time. If you do have to sell it with the tenant in place, I recommend working with the tenant, asking them when is your ideal time to show houses, when is a time that just doesn't work for you? And if they're working with you, maybe even give their phone number to the showing agency

or the scheduling agency so that they can make the appointments themselves. I would caution that if they start canceling a lot of appointments or denying a lot of appointments, then maybe you take that privilege away from them. But it's their house. What do you care when the showing is? Cool. All right.

We are on number, that was number five. So what are we on number six? Number six. All right. What do you got? Be informative. If you've updated anything in the property, share that information. Let's say you have a whole new kitchen.

When did you do the kitchen? Who did the, who performed the work? What work was done? It's all new pipes or it's just brand new electric or it's just cabinets. Like, tell them what you've done. This is especially helpful in a flip situation where you bought the house at X. You put in so much work. And now you're selling it for significantly more or try and

to sell it for significantly more. Every buyer who has an agent, has an agent who can look up when the house last sold. Oh, it sold five months ago for $100,000 less. Why? You want to just share with them all the things you've done. And on the other side, you want to share what needs work. It needs a new roof. And I'm not going to put it in there. Don't try to hide that. Share everything up front. Because again, the goal is to get the most targeted buyers through the door. There's no prize for having a ton of buyers with no offers. Good. Maybe Scott will give you a price.

Scott does. I think it. I'll give you a copy of my book if you have 500 showings with no offer. Nope. You get nothing. I like that. I think that's good. I think also like you ever heard the phrase people buy with emotion.

No, they're sold with emotion. What is it? Like it's like they buy with emotion, but they justify with logic. Right. So like they want the house. They like the house. But when they see, hey, it's got a new roof on it. We don't have to put a roof on for 30 years.

Then that's the logic they need to justify it making an offer to justify it to their spouse, to themselves, to their, you know, significant other whoever, hey, look at all this work that's been done. This is why it's a good deal. But in reality, nobody buys a house because it's a good deal. I mean, investors do. But most homeowners especially, they buy a house because they want to buy that house. They like it. They like it. But they don't want to say that in their head.

So they have to justify it with look at all the work that has been done lately. And that's another reason why it's good to, yeah, list what you've done. It's smart. Yes, absolutely. and, you know, don't hide issues because they're going to come out anyway and then you look like a skis. That is sure.

Is that a word you just made up or is that a word I don't know? Brandon, we used that. Well, I used skeezy a couple of episodes ago. All right. I like skeezy. That's pretty good word. All right. Number seven.

Know your competition. So your house is not going to be the only house on the market. While you hopefully have priced your property correctly, which is a tip down the road. Well, hopefully you've priced your property correctly. You don't know if that's actually the right price until you see what other houses are going for in the general area. You want your agent to send you a list of comparable prices, comparable properties. Like you've got a three bedroom two bath house that you're listing at 200,000. You want to see all the three bedroom two bath houses. Like you want to get a listing of all the three twos from like 150 to 250 or 175 to

225. So you can see what other people are offering at that price. If everybody else is offering granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and hardwood floors and you've got crappy old carpeting and laminate flooring or laminate countertops and white appliances, your house is not going to sell for the same price that those other ones are. Yeah. So you definitely have to know your competition. You want to get competitive listings. And if you're having a hard time coming up with the price for your property, ask your agent to take you. into the actual properties that are being listed at the prices that you're that you're considering. Let's say your agent is offering is saying you should listen at 175 and you think you should go to

two. Have your agent show you something at 175 and show you something at two so you can see what's actually currently on the market and where buyers are going after they've left your house. I think it's a fantastic tip. I mean, I don't like, yeah. That's good. All right. I'm moving on. Scott is speechless. Number nine or number eight. No, eight. Number eight. Number eight.

That does not know how to do his numbers. He hasn't learned numbers yet. All right. Okay. Number blue. Number eight, number blue is use an agent. Why, Mindy? I don't want to use an agent.

I can, I don't want to give them six percent. I'm sorry. What? I'm sorry. I'm going off on a tangent to my head. Okay. Number eight is use an agent. I have sold FSBO before, before I was an agent.

What is that? FSP. What does that mean? Oh, what a great question, Brandon. Thank you. FSP stands for for sale by owner, meaning you are selling the home by yourself without a real estate agent. And this sounds like a really awesome idea. Oh, I'm going to save all this money because while it is a violation of the Sherman antitrust laws to say there is a set rate of a commission, commissions hover between like five to six percent. So that's five or six percent of the entire sales price. You are paying to somebody else to help you, sell your house. This sounds like a huge chug and it is. But studies show that houses sell on average for like 15% less than when they're sold for sale by owner than they do when they're sold with

an agent, even accounting for commissions and things like that. It costs, it takes more time to sell for sale by owner. And I have to, I have to say I am a licensed agent, but it's just, it's a lot easier to sell when you use an agent. So if you're looking to make the most money for your house, statistics don't lie. What about what about if what about if I'm attempting to sell my place and I decide to get my license? You know, maybe somebody's thinking that. Maybe their place is worth a lot of money like five or six hundred thousand dollars more.

And they're like, hmm, you know, three percent or, you know, of this is going to be, what is three percent? Fifteen grand or six, you know, even more. Should I consider getting my license to sell my own home so I can, you know, avoid missing of those advantages? Good question. So that is a. good question. If you are getting ready to sell your house and you have a timeline, a deadline to get

your house sold, I don't think learning your market and becoming a real estate agent and going through the coursework and getting the background check and all of that is a good choice for you at this time. I mean, if you already have an agent's license, then sure, you can go ahead and try and sell it. But if you don't know your market completely, you don't have a lot of time to sell your house, getting your license is just a, I don't want to call it silly, but it's a silly endeavor. All right. And one of the main reasons that you use an agent is because they know the market, presumably. I mean, I'm not recommending that you get an agent that doesn't know the market.

You want to sell your house for the most money. You use an agent who's got connections who can help you sell your house in the time frame that you need to sell it in. I love it. Yeah. One thing I'll throw in there, though, is that just because you're using an agent doesn't mean that it's still your responsibility to make sure that your house is ready to sell, right? all these tips that you've been giving, you know, these are things, people will hire agents and not and leave their house smelly or leave it messy. Yes, I know. I go into those houses. It's like, it's not just like you hire an agent. They're going to take care of everything for you. It's you hire an

agent and you plan on doing all of the work necessary to get this property ready to sell and get it in good conditions that you can, you know, this is perhaps the second biggest financial transaction of your life to this point, right? With buying the property in the first place, being the first, first. So I think that that's something that, you know, a point of this is, hey, use an agent, but don't rely on that agent to do the things that are necessary to basically present your home in the best possible light. And know and be informed going in. That's a really good point. So yes, you should absolutely use an agent. But the agent is not going to come clean your house. The agent is not going to make sure it doesn't smell. The agent is not going to be able to answer all

the questions that somebody may have about your house if you haven't given them the information. And the agent is not going to have a pre-listing inspection performed. They're not going to come clean your house. They're not going to take great pictures of your house. Almost exclusively, if your agent takes pictures of your house, they're not going to look great. Yeah. And I don't mean to talk smack about agents, but they're not photographers. My husband is just multi-talented.

Now, a follow-up question is, how do we find a good agent who will do some of those things or will encourage you to do some of those things? Just pick a name out of a hat. It'll be fine. So my friend who knows me, knows my job, knows that I love real estate, she decided that she didn't want to live in her house anymore. It was her first property. She wanted to sell it and buy something new.

She's driving down the road and literally sees a sign in the yard. Like as soon as she's kind of impulsive, as soon as she decided she wanted to sell her house, she's like, bam, there's an agent sign. I'm going to call that person up. She calls up this woman, says, I want you to help me sell my house and buy another one. Of course, the agent's like, woohoo, dollars. Lists the house too high does not communicate with this with this friend at all. She doesn't give her any sort of advice.

There was some problem with the buyer. Like they missed closing. And my friend was like, wait, wasn't I supposed to close today? No communication for the longest time. Finally, it closed, I think two months after it was supposed to. She finds a new property to buy. She doesn't understand how a home inspection works. She thought that when she has the home inspection, the inspector will just,

give her a list of things that are wrong, and you turn that over to the buyer and the buyer fixes everything. But she didn't fill out an inspection objection form. She didn't ask for anything to be fixed. So then the objection deadline passes because her agent didn't give her any advice. And now she's stuck. I mean, there wasn't a lot. Luckily, there wasn't a lot that needed to be fixed. But there was a lock missing from the sliding glass door that she had to put in herself. And, you know, just a couple of things that were very reasonable requests if she would have made them on time. So how do you find an agent? Drive by a sign and just pick a name out of a hat. No, you want to ask your friends.

If you are selling an investment property, ask some investor friends. Who has sold your properties in the past? Who would you recommend? And just as importantly is, who would you not work with again? Maybe you come across this woman who was a terrible investor or a terrible agent for my sister. I would absolutely not recommend to work with this woman ever again. I wouldn't recommend anybody work with this woman. I don't know who should be good for.

She's definitely not good for first-time sellers. So if you are not selling an investment property, ask your friends, who helped you buy your house? Who helped you sell your house last time and get some recommendations from them? And then interview them. Ask them, if you buy how to sell your home, you will get a copy of an real estate agent questionnaire form. Ask the agent's questions.

You don't have to call up one agent and say, oh, I guess I'm stuck with you. you can interview a lot of different agents. And you want somebody who communicates the way you want to communicate, who is informed of the neighborhood, who really knows the area well, and who can help you sell the house in the time frame you need to sell it. I love it. I think that this is such an important point because, you know,

it's too many people, I think, are just helpless. They go to the agent and they wait for them to bring them a deal. And they're like, oh, that sounds pretty good. Great, you know, or whatever. They're unable to spot competence and fire incompetence. and you got to give yourself the tool set necessary to be able to do that at minimum. And you can just do that in a couple hours by reading this book, for example, and knowing what kind of questions to ask your potential agents that you can set yourself,

you can hire someone who's competent and capable enough to set you up for success with, again, what is a huge financial decision in almost everyone's life. Yes, this is an enormous financial decision. I really like what you just said, fire incompetence. people are hesitant to fire incompetence. If your agent is not working out for you despite asking questions and interviewing a bunch of people, make sure you realize that you can get rid of that. You can fire that agent.

And that might be in your best interest is to fire that agent. There you go. I also talk about that in how to sell your home. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing would, was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise Flagship Fund. Now, you can invest in a $1.1 billion

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We got 16 total. So we got the other half coming up. And the second half is a little bit shorter than the first half. So if you're listening, we're not going for another 50 minutes. But I do want to talk about the book here for a minute. So, Mindy, first of all, how to sell your house. What was the whole goal of writing the book? So the goal is there's this guy named Morgan Housel.

He writes for the motleyfool.com. He is brilliant and knows everything there is to know about finances. And he wrote an article a couple of years ago, I guess it's a couple years ago now, that said, here's everything I didn't know about buying a house when I bought my first house like six months ago. I'm like, wait a second, you don't know something that I know? That's amazing because he's so smart. He knows everything. So for him to not know this, I'm like, you know what?

If he doesn't know it, there's a lot of other people that don't know it either. And he was buying a house. And we wrote the How to Sell Your House book first because we do work for big. Pockets.com, and there are a lot of investors on the site who may have been buying as the market is increasing. And now people are asking, is it time to sell? Yes, but if you've never sold a house before, you have no idea what you don't know. So I took all the information that I have from years of investing and buying and selling. And I put it into a book so that people won't have to ask questions. This was further cemented when I was on the forums a few weeks ago. And somebody said,

hey, I didn't know I needed title insurance. Oh, that's a big thing. So I covered the things. You don't know that you need title insurance if nobody tells you you need title insurance. So that's why I wrote the book. So people can have a firm grasp on how to sell a house or a home. And of course, your agent should be telling you that you need title insurance and that kind of stuff. But the idea, the other part of it is there's a lot of agents out there that may not be so competent. And again, having that self-education, putting, you know, bothering to learn about this stuff before you go through it can save you tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

And, you know, if you've done something a hundred times in a row, do you remember what the step one is? Like, do you remember to tell people what step 37 is? You might not. You might skip a step because you just know to do it. So, anyway, that's why I wrote the book. That's awesome. So where can people get at? Biggerpockets.com slash sell your home, right?

Biggerpockets.com slash sell your home. Perfect. And we are, as we do with book launches, we just did a book launch about a month ago with David Green's book, The Long Distance Investing. And we like to overwhelm people with value when you buy it right away. And so during the launch, which I believe is the first two weeks, we're going to call it two weeks, which would be, comes out on January 11th, which is today, if you're listening to this show when it comes out.

So until January 25th, if you buy it by then, you're going to get a whole ton of cool bonuses, including some interviews. You got a book on, what is it? Mindy, tell me about the book. I have a member of the title of it. I got a written here somewhere. How to sell you at home. No, the bonus. No, no, no, the bonus book that comes with it. The bonus book, the ebook is called selling your investment property. There is a, there's a video with my absolute number one top tip for selling your home. There are video interviews with experts in the real estate field for selling your house. I've got a video about painting tips, some DIY fixing up your house painting tips. And if you purchase before January 25th, you will get access to the webinar that Dave Meyer and I are hosting

called the ins and outs of selling rental properties. Perfect. I love it. And again, live webinar. I love, I love those things because they're good for Q&A. Like, we just did one with David Green's launch. There's a few a week ago. It was amazing. We went for like an hour and 45 minutes of just questions with David about like buying out of state, you know, long distance. It was fantastic. So I'm looking forward to this one as well. Because like here's a cool thing about about this book is that like anybody who is ever going to sell a house ever. If there's one tip, which there's a million tips in this book, but if there's one tip that helps you just improve the sales price by 0.01%, you know, like it pays for itself 10 times over. Or, you know, like, so that's why I love the books

like this is because like, books are just like how to bunch of tips. Like, yeah, we know a lot of these things. We're smart. We've sold houses. Some of us. and some of us, you know, feel like we're smart. At the same time, like, if there's one, two things that can help you, man, it's totally worth reading. And I think, again, there's hundreds of cool things in this book. So pick it up, biggerpockets.com slash sell your home. Oh, and also, it's on, you can get out on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, right?

Yes. So cool. Wherever books are sold. All right. So moving on, let's go to number nine, Mindy. Number nine, what do you got? Ask your agent for selling advice. You've already chosen a good agent.

And now you want to pick their brain, part of it. of having them be your agent is using their experiences, which is market specific. I can sit here and tell you all about how to sell your house, but I can't tell you how to sell a house in Cleveland, Ohio, because I've never sold a house in Cleveland, Ohio. If you're trying to sell your house in Cleveland, Ohio, you want a Cleveland, Ohio agent, and then you want to pick their brain. What do I need to do to get this house sold?

Awesome. I love it. Yep. Number nine? That's number nine. Number 10. I'm saying, what is number, oh, that was number nine. I can't count today. Good grief.

Numbers are hard. Number 10. Number 10 is price your house right. You may be tempted to price it at slightly or even significantly higher than what it's actually worth, but that's a bad choice. And the reason is your buyers are seeing everything else that's on the market at the regular or reasonable prices and they're going to pass your house over. As your house sits on the market without an offer without selling, it gathers days on market

or D-O-M time, which makes the house look like there's something wrong with it, especially in a really hot market. There's a house around the corner for me that's been on the market for like 700 days. Everything else in my market is selling instantly for over-asking price, all cash offers, no contingencies, yada, yada, because we're in such a hot market. But this house sits and sits and sits. It's about $50,000 priced too high. And that's not, at that price point, that's not a significant amount of money. But it's a significant enough amount of money that nobody's buying the house. So it just sits there.

And now it looks like there's something wrong with the house because it's a stale listing. So price it right. Get it sold. There was a property. I flipped back, I don't know, this is probably six years ago now. And I listed it at $170,000 because I thought that was like top of the market. But I thought this is the best house ever. So I can get the top of the market in this neighborhood.

It sat on the market for, I think it was 10 months before we had an offer. It took a year to actually find the close, you know, like it took a year. beginning to end on the market to sell the thing. And I ended up selling it for 120. Like we dropped the price that much from 170 down to 120 just to sell it. I ended up losing money on the flip. It was the only flip I ever lost money on because I, and I really believe, yeah, I got greedy.

Had I just listed it at the 150 where it probably should have been, 155, I probably would have gotten an offer right away. But the longer it sat in the market before I started dropping the price, it just got longer and longer and longer days on market. Now, granted, this was the pit of real estate hell back in like, 2012, I think it was when I listed this thing. But still, like, I shouldn't have been greedy. I should have just taken the money. I just looking at dollar signs and I'm like, oh, I'm going to make so much money. I can get a lot of money. No, no, stupid. And even if I could have, I probably

wouldn't have gotten the appraisal to justify it. So they would have had to probably drop the price anyway. So. Yeah, exactly. How do I know if my agent is listing it too high or perhaps too low. How can they present the price that they want to list it at to me in such a way that I can have confidence they know what they're doing? That's a great question. You should ask them why they are recommending this price point, ask them to justify their price. They should use words like comps or comparable properties. And a comp is not a house that is currently on the market. A comp is a property that has sold recently in your area that is comparable to your house. Like you don't want a comp when you're trying to sell your three two, you don't want a comp of a six four.

You want a comp of three twos that are selling around the same time that yours is, one or two months, three months in a hot market and six months, maybe even 12 months in a really slow market. But you definitely want to see what other houses are selling for because that's what makes the house worth what it's worth. It isn't how much money you put into the house. It isn't how pretty you painted the walls. It's what other houses are selling for in the area at the time of sale.

Yeah. Can I talk about one more thing with this? is something that occurred to me the last few years. I used to look at like the sales price and thought, well, let's just say I dropped my price on a property by $20,000. But it took me, you know, four months longer to sell it, we'll say, right? Like, when I looked at that, I was like, well, that's like $5,000, am I doing the math, right?

$5,000 a month. So, I mean, my mortgage payment is only $1,000. So I might as well just keep the property on the market at the higher price because it's worth it. However, what I've discovered is like the opportunity cost is what I'm really losing. I'm not just losing out on the expense. of holding a property for three, four, five months longer. I'm losing out on the fact that I'm not buying more real estate for the next three, four, five months because my money is all tied up

into a deal. So just those investors out there listening, you know, thinking they're trying to get top dollar, you know, they really want to get the top amount. Like, ask yourself, how much are you losing by not dropping your price? How much are you slowing down on your ambitions? What do you, you know, what are you holding yourself back from by not lowering your price? So there's a little, some tip for you all. That's a good point. Another, another tactic that some people use is to price the house really, really low in the hopes that they're going to instigate a bidding war. I don't like this tactic personally. I find it disingenuous to list a house that's $200,000 at like $150,000.

I think if you list the price, list the property at that price, you should be willing to accept that price. Maybe somebody finds things that they find a really great deal and they're disappointed that they didn't get this house at $150 when it's really not ever going to be in their price range anyway. But that said, if it's a $200,000 price, that's a real psychological stop. So people will put their price range in basically in $25,000 increments, $50,000 increments. If I'm looking for a house for $185,000, I'm going to look for 175 to $200 because maybe the guy at 200 will come down. Maybe he's listed it and didn't pay attention to me and listed it way too high and now has to come down because nobody's buying his house. But listing it at if it's a $200,000 house, listening it at, 195 may have people come in and say, oh, this is a good deal. I'm going to make an offer at

195 or I'm going to go over asking so I can definitely get this house going and they'll go up a little bit. They might even instigate a bidding war, but it's not a disingenuous bidding war. It's instead of 195, you get 197 five or something. So you're still getting about what you need. You don't have to drop the price because maybe you're a little bit over price and you're not hitting that psychological barrier of $200,000. That makes sense to me. Awesome. I think it's a great, great tip. I think we're, let me try this. Let me see if I can get this right this time. Number 11. Oh, good job. Scott figured out numbers. Or on number purple. Sorry, Scott. Oh, number purple.

All right. List in peak market time. The whole point of this podcast is 16 ways to make more money when you sell your property. Selling it in the dead of winter is not the peak market time for you to get the most money. Buyers are looking in the spring. The weather's not so crappy. Kids are finishing up the current school year and moving on. to the next school year, there's a big space in the middle for summer where you can move and have a nice time, you know, move smoothly. So spring is when everybody is out looking at houses. And if you want the most money for your house, you want to be where the buyers are. And that's listening to in the spring. Can't argue with that. Can't argue with that because it's true. And I will,

I will add one tip on there. If you are a landlord thinking about settling your investment properties and you want it vacant, you don't have to do, I mean, unless your state losses differently, But you don't have to do one-year leases. There's been times where I know that I'm going to sell a property. So I will deliberately do a six-month lease or an 18-month lease just so that it ends at the peak selling time, which is usually late spring for me because nobody buys a house around, you know, in the middle of the winter.

So at least in my area. So anyway, there's a little tip for you is if you plan ahead and then schedule your leases accordingly. I do that as well for just renewal leases. Any rental property I have, I never want a lease to renewal any time between November, December, January, February, March, April. I'll just deliberately make sure it does not renew.

then. I think you're 12 months straight of winter back in Washington out there. It's like 10 months of rain and then two months of the most gorgeous weather you'll ever experience. So, all right. We live in Colorado. We've got the most gorgeous weather you'll ever experience. Yeah.

And nosebleeds. All right. Question orange. Number 12. This one is for after the property has been listed, double check your listing information. Every property that goes on the MLS gets, there's forms to fill out to put it on the MLS. How many bedrooms does it have? How many bathrooms does it have?

What's the square footage, garage space, etc. You want, after your agent has filled all of that information out and hits go live, you want to go into that listing and double check that all of your information is correct. That's not your good tip. I have seen houses that say there's six bedrooms and they're really two bedrooms or houses that, you know, two and three are right next to each other. You think you're getting a three bedroom house. You're like, where's the third bedroom? What's only a two bedroom house? Well, it says three on the listing sheet.

again, you don't want extra people in your house. It's a hassle to show your house. It's not a ton of a hassle, but it's a hassle to leave the house, especially if you have young kids. You don't want people coming into your house looking for a three bedroom house if it's only got two bedrooms. So make sure all the information in your listing is correct. This is, yeah, and I'm going to chime in here because, you know, first of all, sometimes

it's not the agent that's entering this information. Sometimes it's their intern or their office admin or something like that and they'll get it wrong and they're doing this all day long every day. They're going to make a certain number of mistakes when you're typing in, you know, hundreds or thousands of pieces of data into the MLS. And the second thing is this happens ridiculous amount of the time here in Denver. And the properties is like, the people will be selling like a house that's, or the listed as a house. It's really a duplex or triplex. And it'll be, it'll be listed at like $600,000. And it will be completely wrong. The description will be correct. But the actual listing information will be completely wrong.

So as a buyer, I have to go in and look at all these properties that are four, five, six, eight bedroom homes and just go through them one by one to make sure that I'm not missing any of the duplexus, triplexes, and quads that are hitting the market. And it's amazing the percentage of these things that are listed completely incorrectly. And those are real dollars coming out of the seller's pocket and into my pocket as the buyer that's the only one that's actually recognizing this as the correct type of deal. Yeah, and we'll use that tip in reverse when we publish how to buy your house. But when we're talking about sellers, we're the ones in charge of the listing right now. We want to make sure all that information is correct. It's really easy to go in and make the change. But if your agent doesn't know there's a problem, they're not going to go in and make the change.

So you want to make sure that, I mean, ultimately, this is your house. The agent made a mistake. It's not a huge deal, but you want to get it fixed. Perfect. Love it. It's a great tip. All right. Number 13.

Number 13 is stage those weird areas that don't have an obvious use. Have you ever walked through an open house that's vacant? And you're like, what on earth would they ever do with that space? Yep. Your buyers are seeing that weird space and they don't know they're going to just keep on walking. I went to a house. They had this basement space. And it was this really odd like L-shaped, wiggly, whatever weird basement.

but they had staged it in such a way that it was a reading nook. And that makes perfect sense in this particular space. But I would not have thought of that. And I'd like to think I'm pretty creative when it comes to houses. I would not have thought to make that a reading nook. I would have just looked at that space. But like, what on earth am I going to put there? I guess just boxes.

And I don't need any more space for boxes. So if you've got a weird, weird, weird space, but you have a creative use for it, stage it. even if nothing else in the house is staged, showing what they can do with that weird space. I mean, what's a bedroom? Oh, wow, you could put a bed in here. Like, if you do or don't have a bed in there, people are going to know what's a bedroom. Well, the thing with the book nook is that seems to be a go-to because I've seen a lot of places that are just like, have these really strange.

Like, I saw a place that had a four-foot, maybe three-foot high by four-foot deep box underneath the stairs. And so they painted it blue and they put in like a little pillow on the little carpet on there. And it looked like a, hey, book duck for the kids. I'm not going to go sit in that little crawl space under the stairs. Maybe some kid might. I don't know. But that's the, you know, it's funny.

Harry Potter. I thought you were describing my house because I actually do have that. And my father-in-law is, I do. My father-in-law is an electrician. And we had him put a light in there. And the girls go in there. I made a little curtain. And it's like their little hidey hole.

And they love it. I'll show you the next time. over Scott. I actually did. So I flipped a house once. I had a bedroom, had three bedrooms, but one of the bedrooms was only six feet wide by like 12 feet. It was the weirdest long, narrow bedroom. And so what I did is, I just went and bought the cheapest desk I could find at IKEA. It was like two little like easy, I don't know what they call them like saw horses, basically with a little platform on top. It was like $30. And I put that in there, put some curtains up in there, put a little desk, what do they call them, like pencil holders and like a piece of paper on

the desk. And it became a really nice office. And the house sold. I mean like that house sold really, really fast. Nobody ever brought up the fact that this bedroom was six feet wide, which is just an awkward size for a bedroom. So it works. Because it's an office. It's not a bedroom. Yep. But legally it was a bedroom, but we just called it a, you know, we just let people envision what they want. So. Cool. All right. Moving on. Number 14. Okay. Number 14 is leave during your showings and make sure you take your pets with you. So people are allergic. to animals. People don't like certain types of animals. Take your pets out of the house, if at all possible. And don't ever be in the house during a showing. Your buyers do not want you there. They don't care

for your opinion of what the house is or they don't want to see that cool little thing that you did. They want to talk about your house freely. And if you're in the house, they won't feel comfortable. They will come through, see you there, glance around and leave. And you have lost a sale that you may have not lost if you just weren't there. get yourself out of the house for showings and leave a few minutes early. Leave before the showings are even scheduled to start because if somebody's running late or running early, they'll be able to come by and just walk in. You're not there. They can go ahead and start the showing.

If you're there and you're like, oh, I just need five more minutes. They're going to go someplace else. They might not make it back to your house and don't come back until after they're gone. All right. I like it. Great tip. Number 15. Hey, actually on that note, let's talk about.

for investors real quick because, you know, obviously more applies towards homeowners selling their house. But what about an investor who's, you know, we talked about tenants earlier. Do you think you should encourage your tenant to leave, tell them to leave? Or do you think it's okay to have the tenant stay there? Same applies to the tenants too. You don't want your tenants there. You want to encourage them to leave. And in fact, you don't want to accept showings if your tenants are going to be there. I've been in properties where there's tenants just sitting around watching TV. And you're like, wow, it's the same thing. I feel uncomfortable because regardless of who, owns the property, the tenant lives there. I don't want to see you the person who lives in this home

when I'm looking at the house. I want to be able to talk about the house freely with whoever I am with. Well, what about someone like me? Like, I like to meet the tenants. What about for that type of person? Should there be another opportunity for them, for the investor to meet the tenants? Do you want to meet the tenants if you're not going to buy the property? You don't care. That's correct. Yes. So after the house is under contract, then you absolutely should meet the tenants. absolutely should go over there when they're there and say hi, I'm going to buy the property. I'm going to be the new landlord. Here's a little sheet. I'll tell, I'll give you a call at, you know, closing to let you know that it's official. But yeah, you do want to see them after

you're under contract. But this is still while you're just looking at your house. Yeah. And this is, this is from the sell side, Scott. Yeah. On the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the side, I love it when the tenant is there when I'm looking at a property because they, and this is why a seller should not want a tenant there. Because when I go to buy a property, the tenant's like, this place is a pile of crap. Look at this wall over here. Like they love to break up on how crappy their property is. And they show me everything, right?

That's true, actually, because when I was by in the last place, the tenants were a fire hose of negative information about the property, which was fantastic. And that was very helpful. Fantastic. But as a seller, you don't want anything to do with that. Good. Good. Yeah.

All right. Number 15. Number 15 is be prepared to walk away from an offer. What do you mean? The whole point of putting your house on the market is to get an offer. But not all offers are the same. So let's say you have a buyer who is just they keep nickel and diming you. They have the home inspection.

They're like, oh, the light switch is dirty. I need $10 for that. And, you know, I need $100 because the rug is crumpled. And I need like they just keep nickel and diming everything. That's going to be a pain in the butt buyer. That's going to be somebody who is going to just sit there and keep asking. and they might postpone the sale. They could decide at the very last minute to walk away.

Maybe they don't even have funding available. If you have a buyer who is nickel and diming you and you're just not comfortable with it, every day that you're under contract is a day on the market. And if the contract falls through, you now have 30, 50, 100 days on market and then you have to start over. So you want to be prepared to walk away from an offer that isn't working out. And you can't just say, oh, forget it. I'm leaving.

you have to go through and offer to let them out of the contract. But don't be afraid to offer to let them out of the contract. Another fun tip is in our market of the Denver area, prices are skyrocketing. Everything goes under a contract. Instantly, there's no contingencies, yada, yada, yada. So what some buyers have started doing, and I don't agree with this, but you should be aware as a seller that this could happen, they will give you an outlier offer. again, let's say your house is listed at $200,000.

They'll offer you $250. And everybody else is around, you know, $205, $210. You're like, oh, my goodness, I'm just going to sell this house for so much more. This is awesome. But then it doesn't appraise at $250,000. Now you have to come back down to the 205 or the 210 or whatever it appraised at or risk losing the sale. And again, you lose the sale after a property falls out of contract.

It starts to look like there's something. something really wrong with the house. So you are kind of stuck with this buyer. Again, you should be prepared to walk away. But if you're stuck with this buyer, then you're stuck with their price too. So a way to combat that is, okay, you've offered me 250. I will accept your offer of 250, but it only has to appraise at 200, which is the price that I offered it at. If it appraises at 200 or more or if it appraises for less than 250, you have to bring the remainder to closing. And that can get them to kind of back off their 250 price. Maybe you have an offer of 215 and it appraised at 215.

Those people are long gone if you're dealing with the 250 guy. So make sure that your appraisal contingent or your appraisal inspection is only at what you have offered the property at. All right. That's a great. Which goes back to pricing it right and using your agent for selling advice and, you know, all of that, these kind of all build on each other. All right.

Well, cool. Last tip. We have one last tip, I think. 16. This is number purple. This is number purple. This is number. For those of us who are accounting.

Did we do number purple already? I think this is number pink. Sorry, Scott. Number pink. Number pink. Tell everyone you know that your house is for sale. Yes, you've got an agent. Yes, it's on the market.

But you're not done selling your house until the house has closed and you have money in your pocket. So tell everybody you know that your house is for sale. The lady down the street did that. Her house was for sale. She told all of her friends, yeah, I'm going to list the house tomorrow. She had a friend make an offer on the house and win the house, simply because she told them that it was on the market. They had wanted to move. They had always admired her house. And then all of a sudden, it's available. Well, I'm going to get in there. What price do you need? I'm going to make that offer. I like it. I've actually sold a number of houses to people who just saw on Facebook. Like I shared it and then somebody else shared it. And yeah.

Facebook, Twitter, ask all of your friends to share it if you're on Instagram. Like whatever your social media is, email all your friends. Tell everybody you know that your house is for sale. Because the whole goal of putting the house on the market is to get it sold. There's, you know, there's this sometimes mentality of, oh, well, that's the agent's job. Well, it's not the agent's house. It's your house. If you want to sell it, let everybody know.

Nobody's going to call you up and be like, hey, is your house for sale? There you. All right. That's good. 16 good tips to sell your house for more. more money. And I would also add, you know, to sell faster. A lot of those tips can apply both the speed and to money. So I appreciate that, Mindy. I think I learned a lot. I always do. Every time I talk to you, Mindy, you're a smart gal. Oh, thanks, Brandon. I learned something from you

every once in a while, too. Well, good. Well, good. Well, people should pick up the book. Go to bigger pockets. Thecom slash sell your home to get a copy of how to sell your home, the essential guide to a fast, stress-free and profitable sale, or go to Amazon, go to what, Audible. Is it an audible? Did you record it? I have an audio version of this. I did record it. I recorded an audio version of this too. It'll be available on January 11th, which is today. Perfect.

And then, of course, get all that stuff. And again, if you buy it from BiggerPockets, you get all those cool bonus stuff. So go to BiggerPockets.com slash sell your home. I would recommend getting in there. Now, before we get out of here, let's get to today's fire round. It's time for the Fire Round.

All right, today's Fire Round. Let's get to these questions come direct out of the Bigger Pockets forums, which Mindy is the queen of the forums. Number one, after taking initiative, landing a deal and successfully completing renovations, how can you be sure that your property is going to sell? You can't. Next. No. You can't be sure that your house is going to sell. You have to, there are things you can do to encourage it to sell, have a pre-listing inspection, clean up your home, make it smell nice, take good pictures of your house, and price it right.

I mean, really, if you have a good property that is presented well, but is priced within the market constraints, it's going to sell. If you're having a problem selling your house, nine times out of nine, it's the price. Awesome. Well, question number two here is straight from the forms as well. I'm considering selling my rental property

to the tenants that I know and trust who currently live there. I mentioned I would offer them the discount of 5% based on agent fees. As I don't have the slightest idea of how to actually sell the house, are there any fees or people I should consider getting involved to complete the necessary paperwork, etc? etc. As I mentioned, I trust the tenants. I don't expect them to have any funny business, but is selling the home as simple as having them secure a loan and heading to an escrow company? No. I think that as a, I've recommended that you use an agent in my 16 tips,

but if you don't have to find a buyer, you should, you can absolutely skip the agent. I would absolutely recommend getting an attorney, a real estate attorney involved because the document, the contract to buy and sell real estate in the state of Colorado is six. pages long currently. And actually it's now 2018. I'm sure it's longer. I haven't seen the new contract yet. I probably should have done that before I recorded this. Anyway, it's a really long document. And words that means one thing in the English language will mean something entirely different in legalese. So you need somebody to help you sell the property to the person who's buying it. You already, you don't need somebody to match you up, but you need to make sure that you're conveying the property to them

in its entirety as you own it. You know, if you convey a different property, you can screw up the whole public records and you need an attorney to help you out. You need a title company to help you out. Title company in Colorado handles pretty much the entire closing documents. So if you've got a buyer already,

talk to a title company, talk to a real estate attorney, and that'll help your whole transaction go smoothly. Very cool. All right, number three, I'm looking to buy another house and I'll be looking to sell my current home. How do people work the time? timing of selling and buying a home. I'd rather have a home I'm going to buy, at least in contract,

with a good idea of the closing date before I commit to selling my current home. Are there issues with this? Yes. So I recommend, well, it depends on your market. So in the Colorado market, it is extremely hot. I've said this before. I'll continue to say it because it just keeps going crazy. It is not uncommon in our current market to see post-closing occupancy agreements where I will sell my house to you. You will buy it for me and then I will rent it back from you until I can find another property to buy because nobody in this market is going to accept a contingency for a home sale, meaning when you write an offer for a property, you say, well, this offer is contingent on me being able to sell my house. Nobody's going to accept that because they've got nine other

offers that are not contingent on a home sale. And you never know how long it's going to take to sell a home. Maybe they have some weird geodesic dome house that's never going to sell even in this hot market. So in depending on your market, in a slower market, you absolutely want to sell your house before you start looking for another house. In this current hot market that we have, you want to start your home buying process even before you start selling your house because your house will sell instantly, but your home, you know, you might go through six or eight contracts before you get a house under contract that actually closes. Now, quick, quick additional question here.

So if I'm trying to, I assume that this person's problem in terms of buying the next home is they don't have any money with which to buy the next home until after they've sold their first home. So how do you get around that problem? Do you just use a home equity line of credit or something like that to bridge the gap or what's your advice there? My advice, so you don't want to be stuck with two house payments. I don't care what the market is like. You don't want to be stuck with two house payments unless you can afford them both. what happens if some fluke and your house doesn't sell, but now you've got this other house to buy? I would recommend looking into the helock.

There's something called a bridge loan, which is a loan that bridges the gap between the home sale and the home purchase. I'm sorry, bridges the gap between the home purchase and the home sale. But I would also look at short-term rentals where you sell your house, you get it completely done, you're on the way to buying the new house and you move out of your current house into a rental for a couple of weeks, a couple of months until you find a new property or doing the post-closing occupancy agreement where you work it into the contract at the time that it's being signed that you will be renting the house back. This happened with the last house I sold in the area. The buyers knew that this was happening. They offered it before we even asked.

It's great. All right. Number four? Question number four. I have rehabed my first property. The problem is that I had my G.C. hire a foundation company, which was not reputable and did not do the foundation work with an engineering evaluation. The house is rehabed really nice and the buyers have no issue with the rehab. However, most of the interested buyers are asking about this engineering evaluation report, which I cannot produce. Any advice would be appreciated. I'm having difficulty selling the property. Go get another engineering report. Go and I mean, if the, I can understand, especially in Colorado, we have

shifting soils and like a whole lot of wampiness. You want to get a licensed engineer out there to inspect the property and then you can present that report to people. So the the current, the original guy wasn't licensed. Just go get somebody who is. That's funny. That wasn't actually, you mean like, remember earlier I told that story that almost the exact same thing happened in mind.

It wasn't the report necessarily, but it was the non-reputable contractor didn't have the thing. So I just had to go get another contractor to go in there and verify the work was correct. Not satisfied the lender and the buyer wanted. So anyway, very cool. All right. Well, that was the end of the fire round. And I don't think we need to do a famous four today since we've obviously done this. But maybe we should. Mindy, other than your own. We'll do it anyway. It's time for the famous four. All right, Mindy, what is your favorite real estate related book? Besides your own. Come on. Besides my own. Scott's, you know. Everyone's got a book. You get a book. You get a book. I can't say the book on rental property investing. I mean, that's a really great book. It's not even like. It's not even like. over Scott. That's amazing. Hey, Scott's book is a real estate. So dejected. Now, the millionaire real estate investor. All right. That's, that's, uh, whatever. Don't say mine. I don't care. Don't say mine.

I don't. I don't like your book. Whatever. I love your book. Number two. Favorite. Oh, you're saying, Scott. You ask it. What is your favorite business related? Okay. So I don't know if I said this. I can't remember what my answers were on show 129, but my favorite business book lately is the richest man in Babylon. It was written in the 20s by George S. Clayson. And it just tells this story from, like, it's written in like Shakespearean English, which I love. And it tells a story about this kid who was like, oh, how do I become rich? He's like, be frugal, trust people that you're investing, like invest with people you trust. Don't be so quick to spend money that you don't have. And it's just, it's all these basic concepts that ring true today. And it's just, I'm a sucker for Shakespearean.

language. Awesome. All righty. Well, what do you do for fun? What are your hobbies? I have two girls. So I do a lot of stuff with color pink. Um, no. I like to ride my bike. I like to do long distance cycling. I like to snowboard. I love to snowboard. Wow. I did not know you were a snowboarder. That's cool. I am a snowboarder. I'm an amazing snowboarder. Almost made the Olympic team. Are you lying? That's not true. Okay. I was like, really? All right. Number four. I was made the Olympic team.

It was amazing. That's funny. Mindy actually comes in and some days just starts her day off with a standing backflip. She just comes in just to kind of get ready for the slopes. That's not a lie at all. All right. Number four. What do you think sets apart successful investors, especially when it comes to selling properties from those who struggle, give up, fail, never get started.

Education. They learn. If you are going to be, this is a successful investor. If you are going to be a successful investor, you have to know what you do. doing. I love it. Very succinctly put. All right. Well, we don't, we don't ever come into that enough enough. The successful part of that. Anybody can become a investor. You just have enough cash. You buy property. It could be a bad property and you get started, right? But I'm an investor. Look at me. But yeah, in order to be successful for longer, you got to know what you're doing and have the

resources to do it. All right. Well, I like it. Good deal, Mindy. Scott, you want to close us out? Last question of the day. Last question. Where can people find out more about you, Mindy? They can give me a call at I am all over biggerpockets.com. I am in the forums. I am in the podcast, the Bigger Pockets podcast, the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. You can reach me at Mindy at BiggerPockets.com or you can send me a private message. I am probably your colleague on Bigger Pockets because I am the first colleague for anybody who was signed up after, I think like February of 2016.

I have 400,000 colleagues. So she knows you on a very personal level already. We're all best friends. All right. All right. All right. All right. By Mindy Jensen is called How to Sell Your Home.

Go pick it up at BiggerPockets.com slash sell your home. And with that, let's get out of here, guys. We don't need to do a long intro because, you know, we just did a long show. So Mindy, thank you so much for writing that book. It's going to help a ton of people be able to sell their properties for more money. And thank you, Scott, for hanging out with us today. Thank you very much for having me. This is a lot of fun.

I like being on this side of the microphone sometimes. Well, good. All right, guys. Thanks so much. Take it easy. For BiggerPockets.com, this is Mindy, Scott, and Brandon. Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio,

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