My neighbor Sally, as I probably mentioned, sold her home at what she thought was a good price but for what in reality was slightly below market.
She lived in the house for 39 years, and she and Catherine were the second owners. So…that is an OLD tract house. The only updates have been things that had to be done: more on the order of repairs than updating or remodeling. It still has the old Mediterranean brown cabinets…
Mediterranean brown…that probably predates most of our readers…
Before you were born, Dear Readers, the then-young and then-stylish developed a predilection for cabinetry stained a particularly ugly shade of dark, dark, DARK sh!t-brown. It was almost black.
It was depressing.
It was hideous.
It was the height of fashion.
Yes. So were the harvest gold appliances Sally’s house still sports. “Harvest gold” was a kind of muted mustard yellow, relatively unobtrusive, all things considered. The competing high-style colors were avocado green, Hallowe’en orange, and brit-shindle brown, each comparatively more hideous than the mustard gas.
Sally contemplated the prospect of selling for a very long time. At least a year, probably longer. She knew the house was out of date. So she took it into her head to have a guy come in and lay tile all over the utility room and kitchen.
She was proud as she showed it off. Gazing upon this decorator upgrade, I thought… Holy mackerel! Who sold these to her and WHERE did they come from? They were classic 1990s 12 x 12 ultra-bland tiles: Return of the Creature from the Cocaine-White Lagoon!
As we scribble, the new owners’ workmen are in there chipping the stuff off the floors.
It was a ridiculous waste of Sally’s money to install that stuff. If she couldn’t do a complete remodel — new cabinetry and counters and sinks in the kitchen and bathrooms, new fixtures, new appliances, new flooring throughout — then she would have been better off to do almost nothing: paint, clean, fix anything that’s obviously broken, and leave it at that.
If your parents are aging and considering a downsize move from the Old Homestead — or you are — try to get them to keep a grip. The people who bought Sally’s house claimed they were a young couple about to have a baby who were going to move right in. No: they’re transparently fix-and-flippers. These people give the old folks a line of bull to make them feel good about accepting less than the house is worth.
But whether the Homestead is bought by a genuine young family or by eager fix-and-flippers, all that old 1970s decor is gonna go! The parents should not pay to remove it or update it as they’re on the verge of moving out.
For hevvinsake, don’t let them do an expensive update like retiling the floors or installing granite counters over those fine Mediterranean brown or pickled oak cabinets! They’re not going to get top dollar from an old house that’s had one or two low-end upgrades installed.
Just paint the walls a neutral color. Clean the carpets. Repair anything that’s broken. And get the heck out of Dodge!
You are wise Funny….In the Real Estate Biz, toooo many times, I see/continue to see OP’s “play catch up”. That is, they are ready to sell and realize after looking around their home is a bit…dated. And decide to take some steps to make their home more competitive. But usually what happens is the limited “improvements” they make….make the rest of the home look REALLY dated and now the home is awkward. Like replacing the fridge with “stainless” BUT not wanting to spend the money to replace the “harvest gold” wall ovens and dishwasher.
As for the “flippers”….IMHO….it’s a crazy game and by the time you take into account settlement costs….repairs….commissions…. taxes on short term capital gains…..and bad heating plants….margins are razor thin OR non-existent. Miss Sally needs to remove herself emotionally from the house. And quit giving a “flying fig” if the new owners are a “nice young couple” OR “Flip-it and Forget-it Specialists”. You just want the check to clear…
As for me…I am a “believer” in a recurring revenue stream….that is a landlord. I love homes like Sally’s that have “good bones” that are a bit “dated”, A couple new appliances….heat/AC repair/replacement….paint, caulk, putty…..some “lick & stick” tile flooring from Home Depot for kitchens and baths….more paint, caulk, putty….Maybe a new kitchen counter top with a new set of faucets…NO GRANITE COUNTER TOPS….Re-do of existing hardwood floors….OR fresh builders grade carpet WITH heavy pad. Your in business….solid house WITH REAL WOOD. REAL WOOD is much more “forgiving” that “chip board”….
What made me smile about this blog post was that it reminded me of my first home. DW and I were engaged at the time that we found “our diamond in the rough”. And rough it was….The lady I bought it from was…. shall we say somewhat ….”thrifty”… and was the second Owner having bought the house from the original Owner who had the home built. So I’m the 3rd Owner…since 1929….yeah….Anyway bought the place despite the fact that windows were falling out of the frames and began the “epic re-build”. The funny thing… the RE agent had made a comment about the “old stove”…and how it had to go….DW loved and continues to love the stove. It is huge and was the “Cadillac” of it’s day and I just had it serviced. Yes it is still in the unit. The really crazy thing is…when you watch Rachel Ray on TV her yellow stove that she uses is the same stove that is in my house….except my Chambers is white and I’m told is worth some serious cash. In addition, being poor as “church mice” we found a neglected fridge in the basement…circa 1949. I fiddled with it and got it to work., cleaned it up painted the outside high gloss white… And we used that fridge for about 4 years and then gave it to my DFIL.
BUT sadly….it appears to me buyers today don’t have the ability or inclination to do as DW and I did….which is kinda sad……They’re missing out on quite the adventure!
You’d be surprised how many do buy and renovate to live in the place. It depends on where the houses are and the relative horridness of the commute from a mid-town job to a styrofoam-&-stick pile in the far-flung suburbs.
In Phoenix, a LOT of people will pay a lot of money for old fixer-uppers in the central city, just to avoid a commute and a ticky-tacky, look-alike house.
Now that the lightrail is about to open, this neighborhood is beginning to attract affluent, energetic young urban professionals whose new families make those lofts look less attractive — just as the old Encanto neighborhood did in the 1970s. Residents now have a choice to send their kids to any public school they please, which means people who move into the ‘hood are not forced to put them in private schools, as we were. That’s a huge savings, which they can and cheerfully do put into their housing.
AAAAHHH….Schools….Real hot button topic in this neck of the woods. We have a “small-dog” in this fight as our “prodigies” have outgrown the local public schools….BUT a large portion of our RE taxes goes toward schools. The BIG ELEPHANT in the room that folks are just starting to talk about….declining enrollment. And our school board has come up with a “way forward” which includes but is not limited to school closures and consolidations to meet the impending education deficit. Watched this all unfold on local cable access channel and I swear you would have thought someone told these folks there was no Santa OR Easter Bunny. I tell you when these administrators from the Board of Ed start throwing around a million here…a million there….Before you know it we’re talking serious money….and the student population is shrinking…And if I hear one more whining teacher I’m gonna throw up. I rent a unit to a teacher who has her Master’s and has taught for over 20 years…She’ll make $80K this year BEFORE benefits. And works 9 months of the year!
One would feel a great deal better about that (my county — i.e., school — taxes were $2200 this year, up from $1800) if somehow they managed to get more than 47% of their K-12 graduates prepared for college. Thirteen YEARS of schooling, and more than half of Arizona kids don’t have basic skills in language, math, and science…and believe me, on the freshman level all that’s required are basic skills.
The taxes on my personal property approach $4K and I won’t tell you what I pay in total RE taxes…It would make you sick. What I have had a problem with is the constant whining from Education A dvocates. My DW volunteered at our schools for over 20 years with NO pay and didn’t see a lot to complain about from a teacher’s perspective. We live in a fairly effluent area….the kids come to school with all the tools they need….with parental support from home and excellent working conditions. Last audit I saw we have around 30 folks in the system making over $100K. And all this done for less cost per student with better results then neighboring Baltimore City who spends almost twice as much per student with dismal results. City officials recently blamed poor student results on “old buildings” …. BOLOGNEY… For the record both of my children attended an elementary school built in the 1940’s….But also bear in mind parking was a problem on student/teacher night as there was massive turnouts and heavy parent involvement. When the money wasn’t available for a “computer lab” at this school due to “strapped budgets” the PTA stepped in and spent over $20K to have one installed in the library as a gift to the School…
As a practical matter, though, states that have historically shorted education tend to have poorer performing schools and students who are more poorly prepared for college or careers than those that have funded education adequately or generously.
Augh! Blaming their incompetence on the age of the buildings??? Har har har, say I. THE single best school I attended was in a decrepit fire-trap. It was a good school because it had excellent teachers, excellent course offerings, and excellent curricula…in California back when Californians funded their public school system well.
Classes with too many students per teacher, curricula that do not support a full array of liberal arts, fine arts, science, and life-skills courses, ill-prepared graduates of colleges of education, underpaid teachers with low morale: all those things contribute to substandard student performance. In education, as in everything else, you get what you pay for.
A few years before we sold my mom’s house, we watched the neighbors down the street have brand new carpet installed throughout the entire house. The For Sale sign popped up, the movers showed up and the next thing we saw was contractors ripping up the brand new carpet and removing it all as the new owners remodeled to suit themselves!
When it came time to sell my mom’s house, she had done a bit of work to update the front rooms – ripped out some carpet and replaced with hardwood floors – but that was done because she was using those rooms for her business and needed hardwoods for the office chairs – couldn’t roll on the carpet!
The rest of the house had ZERO updates to it – and we looked at the 3000 square feet of carpet that would need to be replaced with something…not to mention the laminate countertops, the maple cabinets that are no longer “cool”, the gorgeous, yet unfashionable cedar planking along the wall and ceiling in the great room…the real wood staircase railings, closet doors, and interior doors – everything is white now – and decided to list it basically as-is – after all we were selling a “used” house – not a new one!
We did end up getting every room painted and we did pull down the wallpaper that was in the stairwell and master bedroom – and we cleaned the carpets.
The family that bought our house, apparently put something like $150k of renovations into it – I saw photos of the “after” and it didn’t look like the same house at all! And then the guy apparently had a heart attack and died within a few months of completing the upgrades – the house was back on the market!
Seems to me painting, wallpaper removal, and carpet cleaning are well within reason. But really: there’s no accounting for taste, and no predicting. Rather than second-guess what a buyer would want, it’s probably best to leave the out-of-date stuff for someone else to change, especially since they’re likely to change out whatever you put in.
Jeez… The idiot took out the solid wood doors and railings and all that…? Are houses able to exact revenge by inflicting heart attacks on the residents? How awful.
Our gorgeous old 1929 house in central Phx had 18-foot ceilings spanned by huge SOLID WOOD beams — these were not those stupid box things, but real hewn wooden beams. About 20 years after we moved, I went back to look at the place when it was on the market. Some moron had PAINTED THE DAMN BEAMS WHITE!
You wonder what gets into people.
Well, I hope the folks who are moving in to Sally’s aren’t fix & flippers, and maybe they’re merrily updating a place the hope to raise their kids in. That’s certainly what I’d want to do: the whole house, inside and out, is desperately out of date. It’s not AWFUL…it’s just old-fashioned in a non-historic, non-“charming” way. In, shall we say, a Harvest Gold way. Maybe they just have plenty of money and can afford to fix the place up the way they want it.
The thing is, though, if you’re going to throw 40 or 50 grand into a place, there are plenty of houses in North Central that you could get for the total price (Sally’s selling price + cost of upgrades) that are turnkey renovated and require a great deal less headache and hassle.
Heh. On the other hand, often a young couple has yet to learn the meaning of “Contractor Standard Time.” 😀
I never specifically thought of my parents as flippers, but I guess they were, in a way. Wherever the military moved us Stateside, they bought a house for us to live in. Nights, weekends, and vacations were spent working on it.
In New Mexico, they bought a piece of land and put a pre-fab house on it. They added interior walls, wired, plumbed, installed heat (and maybe AC), painted, decorated, you name it. We didn’t actually live in that one, just spent a lot of weekends there.
In Massachusetts, they bought a newly-built house on a sizeable chunk of land. When we moved in, the house had been decorated by someone with, shall we say questionable taste, and the front and back yards were a jumble of dirt, branches, and roots from the trees that had been felled to make room for the house. By the time we left, the inside was tastefully decorated, the front yard was landscaped and the backyard had a nice vegetable garden. There was a smooth gravel driveway, as well as a garage and breezeway.
I don’t recall them doing a lot with our first house in Michigan, other than putting in a garden and redecorating the hideous upstairs bathroom. Oh, and I think Dad finished the basement. Honestly, that house didn’t need a lot of improvement.
When they moved into my grandparents’ old farmhouse, they actually tore out walls and relocated the kitchen, as well as adding an upstairs bathroom. And boy, did they redecorate! I was living in North Carolina by then, so I didn’t get to see much of the process, but I saw the results. Amazing!
I don’t think my parents were into remodeling to make a buck, but they did consider each piece of property an investment, and put in a lot of sweat equity to improve it. I wasn’t privy to their financials, but I doubt they did badly on any of them.
It’s something I’d have loved to do, but my husband and I never quite had the money.
I hope your new neighbors, if they’re flippers, are the kind who will stay a few years and become a part of the neighborhood while they’re there.
That’s interesting. My father never bought a house until he was ready to retire — we always rented. But the son- and daughter-in-sin (career Army) usually do buy in their new surroundings. But then, he’s usually stationed at a place for a good long time. I don’t know how long they were in Texas — gosh, at least six or eight years, probably longer — before they were shipped to Germany. It looks like they may retire there on the local economy. 🙂 They’ve had interesting lives together!
Heh. At one point I figured out that on average — if you divided the number of moves into the number of years they were married — my mother moved house every 18 months! It didn’t work out like that in real life, of course. But when they were young they moved so many times — and the company moved us once while we were in Arabia — that it looked like they never came to light! 😀
It sounds like in addition to hoping they could increase value, they probably enjoyed remodeling. Some people do love it! IMHO if you’re going to live in the place for a year or two (or longer), you’re not exactly fixing & flipping. At least around here, a fix-and-flipper is a person or company that buys a house, shovels it out as fast as possible, installs attractive but relatively inexpensive improvements, often purchased with a contractor’s discount, and then puts the house right back on the market.
🙂 I do hope the new neighbors are here for the duration. It’s so wonderful to have these young people moving in!!! We love the grown-ups’ energy, and everybody likes to have little kids running around. It’s just transforming the neighborhood, much for the better.
We were always in place for about three years. A year longer than that in MA, I think, as that was his last assignment. And my dad was one of those people who could not stand to sit still. If he wasn’t fixing up our houses, he was fixing cars.
After he retired, he rebuilt an old truck (can’t remember, maybe a ’58 Mercury?) he found in pieces in someone’s barn and rebuilt several VWs. Of course, he kept all our regular cars running, too, if not all at the same time. Often in high school, I had no idea which car I’d be driving any given week. It was *usually* the Civic, but you just never knew.
😀 I hadn’t thought about that in ages. I really should write a memoir or something, in my copious spare time!
@ SherryH: He and my father would’ve been fishing buddies, if they could’ve known each other!! 😀
Unless you’re going full hardwood flooring, I think that doing any type of improvements that are flooring related are a giant waste of time and money if it’s tied directly to trying to get the place sold. That just seems to be one area that many people take care of themselves anyway, and they’re most certainly not going to raise their bid for something that they plan to rip out anyway.
Hear, hear!!
It’s SO much a matter of “different strokes for different folks,” that unless you ARE fixing & flipping for fun(?) and profit, it doesn’t make sense to install an expensive improvement just because you’re planning to sell. Flooring is a prime example. People’s tastes are wildly different.
I personally prefer hard floors because they’re so much easier to keep clean. All things being equal, if I were presented with two well maintained houses in the same neighborhood, same general price range, if one were carpeted and one had wood or tile floors, I’d choose the latter. But some people really dislike tile throughout — it’s hard, it’s tough on your feet and back, and a lot of people think it looks and feels cold. And they may perceive of wood as a lot more maintenance trouble than it really is. Any of those folks would grab the carpeted place — whose flooring likely would’ve been a lot cheaper and easier to install.
But give a choice of two houses, same floor plan, well maintained, safe neighborhood: one with old carpet at, say, $225,000 and one with wood(oid) or tile floor at $250,000, I’d take the cheaper house and have my guy install the tile of my choice (approx. $10,000 for, say, 2,000 s.f.: a $15,000 saving and a capital improvement for future reference). Some people would probably take the tiled house (especially if they didn’t care one way or the other what was on the floors) so as to evade the Workman Waltz.
Y’know, I’d suggest the same is probably true of landscaping: who’s to say whether the next owner wants a lime tree dropping fruit all over the ground, dearly loves roses, or would prefer xeric to lawn? That’s another thing that I’d just tidy up and leave alone, come selling time.
In “another life” as Real Estate Agent the best “bang” for the buck when selling a home that was dated or had “short-coming” was a….”flooring credit” of say $3K. Buyers would view the house and then see that the place needed work BUT they were gonna get $3K toward new carpet or flooring….It set the property apart from the other listings and put the buyers “in a position of control”…
In addition, when I was doing “bank work” I would often put a “bounty” on my more “challenging properties”. That is a “bonus” to the “procuring cause” agent for a sale AT LIST PRICE. Usually the bonus was for between $1-2K and was in addition to the regular commission. It worked well as many agents who turned some numbers did not have to split their “bonuses” with their brokers. This brought tremendous traffic to the properties and made for Happy Bankers…
Very smart! Fits in with the “give-give-give-right hook” model of marketing.
It makes a lot of sense to offer something toward remodeling, since many people might buy an aging house if you pointed out that X or Y would improve it hugely and then offered them a little cash toward the project.
Probably works better for some places than others. The houses in this neighborhood are built of slump block and are very solidly constructed. The hailstorm that came through five years ago meant that EVERYBODY got a new roof, so not only are there no sagging walls or cracked stucco, but the whole neighborhood looks pretty spiffy with all the new roofing. If the owner has kept the eaves painted and the interior clean and in good repair, the houses are pretty desirable.
The newer construction we see in the suburbs is regarded as “old” at ten years(!!). And indeed, after about ten years, the places are already beginning to look pretty sad: the header beams spanning the garage doors often sag, those fake tile roofs need expensive repair, the stucco is cracked and peeling, walls have slipped out of alignment (if they were ever square to begin with, which many of them were not)… Add to that the normal wear & tear on flooring and interior walls, the tired cabinetry and out-of-date counters and lime-encrusted plumbing fixtures…and voila! Our 45-year-old houses look pretty good by comparison. And you don’t have to drive half your life and spend as much on gas as your mortgage payment to get to work! 😉