Sell That House: Appearance is Everything

SELL THAT HOUSE: APPEARANCE IS EVERYTHING

Salability is directly related to appearance. If you want to buy a car, but it has a dented door, then you will probably pass on the car rather than pay $1000 for a new door, even if the seller discounts the price by $1,000. So a car that would be worth $20,000 suddenly becomes worth nothing if it has a defect. Likewise with a house, if it were worth $300,000 in good condition, it may suddenly be worth nothing if it needed carpet and paint that may only cost $10,000. You could suggest an allowance, but typically that is not enough. The Buyers decision has already been "emotionally" made. On the surface, this makes no sense, but in practice, believe me, this is what happens. A home that only needs carpet and paint, and hence shows poorly, will sit on the market for days, but with a couple of thousands invested in paint and carpet to spiff it up, it sells in a week. Further discounting the price may be an alternative; however the discount would generally need to include the cost of the fix-up plus another 30%. Why should the Buyer deal with your problem, if they are going to get nothing out of it? I noticed that this concept is true with the people market too. What? That's right. Just consider the following experience of mine.

I was looking around on the internet and came across some dating web sites. It was legitimate stuff, not porn or any crap like that. With some of the sites you could look through the people, who were signed up to it, but you could only get limited information about any given individual without also signing up yourself, so, I signed up. But then you could not contact anybody, unless you were a paying member, so, I subscribed. But then you could not expect anybody to reply to you if you did not have a picture posted with your profile, so I posted a picture. I actually did have some people respond to me and I did email back and forth a few times and I even went out with a couple of people, but I found that I was getting insufficient interest. I looked at other guys profiles to see how I stacked up. Nobody seemed to be especially interesting, or, at least in my mind, no more interesting than I thought my profile made me out to be. Nobody seemed to be especially good looking, or, at least in my mind, no better looking than my picture made my average looks appear. Then I decided to experiment. What would happen if I was the best looking guy around? So, I searched the internet until I found "Joe Cool", yes that's right some prig who happened to have good looks, but was otherwise just a shit like me. I put the picture of Mister GQ on my profile, but to properly control the experiment, I changed nothing else in my profile; everything else was the same. BOOOOM!!!! An explosion of emails hit my profile; women from as far away as Alaska, not just local women, were sending me emails, and these guinea pigs all thought that I was so witty with what I had to say in my profile. Some of the women were good looking and some were hideous; it did not matter; they all thought they deserved the best looking guy on the site. All the great stuff that I wrote actually meant nothing; they were only looking for a face; fantasizing they were, the clueless bitches. In fairness to these simpletons, I did not respond to any of their emails. Remember, it was just an experiment. As you may have guessed, I do not subscribe to any of these sites anymore.

So, if you do not want to paint and carpet your average house nor sufficiently lower the price, then get a picture of somebody else's house.