Curb Appeal: the Difference Between 'For Sale' and 'Sold'

Sept. 21, 2006 — -- When driving around looking for a house to buy, do you ever judge a home by its cover?

As the housing market has cooled off, making sure that picketfence is freshly painted white and those shrubs are trimmed now can mean the difference between a sale and a potential buyer driving on by.

"We have a saying in real estate: 'If you can't see it you can't sell it,'" said Joanna Radecki, a real estate agent who advises clients on how to spruce up their homes for sale.

Roberta Baldwin, a real estate agent in South Orange, N.J., who is also proactive about fixing up her client's homes, described how she helped one family make their home more saleable.

"I noticed how huge these fir trees were. They were gigantic," Baldwin said. "One was crawling up the house and the other one was obscuring the front door. And I said it was time to trim them down."

Paying attention to cosmetic details wasn't so important three years ago when Baldwin sold a house to Alice Marie and David Bergman. The market was so hot that buyers knew they had to bid instantly and high on a house, warts and all, to have a chance -- even if they were just considering buying.

"The first day the house was on the market we put in a bid," David Bergen said.

Real estate agents say there are enough houses sitting on the market, that now it's the sellers who have to grab the buyers' attention instantly. They can afford to be picky even before they set foot in the house.

"I've had people drive up and say I don't want to even go in the door," Baldwin said.

That's why Baldwin decided to turn to a real estate industry technique called "staging" to spruce up the front of Alice Marie and David Bergman's house before she put it on the market. As for what needed to be done to the Bergman home -- Baldwin was pretty brutal about it.

"We are going to have the tree in the front of the house trimmed so that when you are driving down here you get to see the house," she said. "We're going to move all the bushes forward and then I have about 12 or 15 small perennials and bushes in my car which we are going to fit around in an appealing matter and I think that at the end of the day the house is going to look younger and more fresh."