People always tell me, you get the best houses.
Even my photographer says it.
What he does not see is what those houses looked like three weeks earlier.
He sees them the day they hit the market. Cleaned, cleared, styled, sometimes freshly painted. Of course they look beautiful. We made them that way.
Preparation is not glamorous. It is work.
I bring in a stager that I pay for. She walks room to room with my sellers and makes them write down a list of what needs to be done. We call it the honey do list.
And yes, most of the time the husband ends up holding that list.
But here is what I love. They have a plan. They are not overwhelmed. They are checking things off and seeing progress.
Declutter this. Remove that chair. Paint that wall. Fix that trim.
Sometimes they do not complete every single item. But they do most of it. And the difference is dramatic.
By the time the photographer walks in, it truly is one of the best houses on the market. Not because it started that way, but because we treated it that way.
There is no shortcut for preparation.
The houses that win are not lucky.
They are ready.
