Many things are different when trying to sell a vacant house vs selling an occupied house. Let’s go over some of these issues to help you get your vacant house sold.
- The first thing to consider is making sure no on can get into the house unless you want someone to go into the house. Access for authorized people needs to be there, but security of the home is important to.
- You should keep the electricity and gas on so that you can light up the exterior of the house. Maybe even keep a light or two on inside the house. If the house is vacant during the cold months, make sure to keep the heat on to prevent frozen pipes.
- In the summer, do some quick lawn mowing and clean up and keep the water going. You want the house to look lived in.
- Try and figure out how much repairs will cost for the house. Even if selling your house as-is, it is a good to know how much the repairs for the house will be. This help you to know better how to proceed with the sale of your house.
- Have a house appraiser tell you how much your house is worth as-is and how much it would be worth after you do some repairs. This will help when negotiating with house buyers.
More About Selling a Vacant House Below
Video Transcription
Hello. This is Gary with Gary Buys Houses. Are you thinking of selling a vacant house? Are you trying to decide between selling the house with a real estate agent or are you thinking of just selling the house as-is to an investor or maybe selling the house for sale by owner ?
We are here at a vacant house we recently purchased to give you some tips on selling the house on your own. So, let’s go through these tips. There’s five of them here. One, secure the house. Make sure all the windows and doors are locked. If there are broken windows or kicked-in doors, get those all boarded up. The last thing you want are squatters inside the house. Number two, utilities. You got to leave them on, especially in the wintertime. You don’t want any frozen pipes. And in the summer or winter, you want to make sure that all those exterior lights are on. Three, clean up the yard if necessary. It’s really important that the house looks lived in and taken care of. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just make it look like someone’s in and out of the house once in a while. Four, estimate the repairs. Estimating the repairs will help you when you’re making a decision of how to proceed with the house. Five, get an appraiser. Ask the appraiser to appraise the house as-is and then ask the appraiser to appraise the house to give you an estimate of what the house value will be after the repairs. This, again, will help you move forward in making the best decision for you.
Let’s take a look around this house just so you can see a few things that are a little bit interesting about this vacant house. So, you may notice as we walk through here that there are little square things on the wall and on the floor. This house was contaminated with meth and so the meth remediation company had to come in and they basically just scrubbed the entire house. It does do damage. All these cabinets. Sometimes we try to save cabinets, sometimes we don’t. These are going to all have to come out and new cabinets because when they clean it you can see right there the cabinets expand if they’re made out of particle board. Not very good for a brand new house that somebody’s going to own. Well, I hope you found that interesting what a house looks like after it’s had the meth cleaned out of it.
If you’re interested in skipping all the steps that we talked about earlier and you want to sell your empty house quickly, give us a call at Gary Buys Houses. We can provide you with a fair cash offer and be done with the sale in as little as two days. I look forward to hearing from you and just like always, there’s never an obligation to call us and ask questions so you can make the right decision for you.