A walk-through with your REALTOR® is a must before throwing an open house to bring in prospective buyers. You’ll have to prep your home to make it look as good as new when they arrive on your front door step. To make that happen, your agent will take a walk through your house and see what needs to be done.
What REALTORS® look for in a walk-through
The goal of a walk-through is to work with your REALTOR® to determine what you need to do or address to sell your home fast and for top dollar. Typically, this means guiding your REALTOR® through a tour of your home, looking into every nook and cranny, and coming up with several ways you can improve the space before your open house. Agents are trained to view a property with a buyer’s eyes.
During the real estate walk-through, your REALTOR® will be looking for all the little things that can turn off a buyer. Those can include everything from major repairs to how you have arranged your furniture or what the inside of your pantry looks like.
What needs work
After the initial real estate walk-through, your REALTOR® will be ready to discuss what you need to do to make your home open-house ready.
As you can imagine, some homes are perfect, some are disasters but most are in between.
Some homes will need major repairs, such as upgrading the flooring, fixing a leaking roof, or addressing structural damages. For homes in need of big repairs, REALTORS® typically recommends taking the house off the market to give the seller enough time to finish the job.
If you have the average house, you may need to spend a week or two making small repairs and upgrades. A loose railing or banister costs only a few dollars to fix, but a first-time buyer might conclude the home was poorly built and unsafe and needs $5,000 of work.
You will also discuss functional obsolescence — something that works but is out of date. There’s the example of a home that had the original push-button electric stove and a giant floating exhaust vent. While the stove still worked, modern buyers would replace it. So, you will need to decide if you have anything in your home that is in need of an upgrade.
Finally, you will discuss what cleaning needs to be done. Kitchens and bathrooms are critical areas” for buyers. Your REALTOR® may have suggestions for which areas of your home need serious cleaning.
Developing a marketing strategy
Once you know what work needs to be done, your REALTOR® will devise a marketing strategy to sell your home and promote your open house. After a REALTOR® does a walk-through with a seller, if there are particular characteristics of the home that would appeal to a particular type of buyer, they’ll discuss those and how to target your marketing to include that buyer profile.
Since your home is unique, your REALTOR® will likely use a similar strategy by determining your target market and staging your home to attract that type of buyer. This process can take several days and your REALTOR® will work on marketing up until the moment of your open house.
— realtor.com