Problem:
Unexpectedly, the owner of a large colonial in Newton had to move into a nursing home and her siblings were tasked with selling her home. She had lived in the house for many decades and it was packed to the gills with possessions.  The whole place needed brightening up, including the furnishings — which were dated and didn’t show off the home’s excellent bones. The owner’s brother, who took charge of the process, lived in another state, which added another layer of complexity to the sale.

Solution:  
Over the years, Marie Presti has put together a network of top-notch, trusted professionals to assist her with every aspect of preparing clients’ homes for sale. She hired a downsizing expert who helped the Presti team clear out the home — donating to charities and gifting to neighbors those things with value, while filling several dumpsters with the rest. Presti hired painters to refresh the rooms, a cleaner to do a top-to-bottom scrub and shine, and landscapers to lend the property curb appeal.  Presti also enlisted a stager to give the interior a fresh, up-to-date, tasteful look, using some of the homeowner’s furniture and bringing in the rest.

Result:
The home showed beautifully and the cost of the spruce paid off many times over. The home had several offers and sold for considerably above the asking price.

Helping a contractor make design adjustments to boost home’s appeal

Problem: A contractor building a new home in Natick was not getting any bites for the property. Typically, contractors try to pre-sell a home before it is completed to avoid the cost of owning it post-construction. This one asked several agents, including me, to view the property and help him figure out why the home was not attracting much interest.

Solution: After a walk-through and study of the plans, I knew what was wrong.

As designed:

• the first floor lacked good flow because the kitchen was too cut off from the other rooms
• the laundry room wasn’t near the bedrooms
• the master bathroom would have only one sink and no high-end shower

These are all fundamental no-nos — especially for homes in this price range — about $800,000. Thanks to many years of experience, I’m able to visualize how a home will function based on architectural plans so I often have contractors and buyers soliciting my advice before ground has even been broken. I also know the bottom-line features homeowners in different price ranges are looking for.

The Result. The contractor redid the plans and within a week, the home was under agreement.

Winter is thawing but left our client with a to-do list of weather-related repairs. If she does the repairs, will the spring market be over by the time her home is in shape? Should she just forgo the fixes and sell now at a lower price? 

Problem: When my client made the decision to sell, it was the dead of winter and she was unable to find a plumber with the time to take on a fairly minor plumbing job we urged her to do to increase the value of her home. And like many homeowners in Massachusetts, she was left with significant damage from ice dams on her roof that needed to be fixed. She questioned whether she should just go ahead and list her home at a reduced price without fixing the problems. With the spring market already in full swing, she feared that delaying too long would push her into the fall market or even next spring’s.

Solution: Some Realtors may have advised our client to list her home right away— to suit their own agendas— but we knew that the repairs were important. And our assessment of the market is that the “spring” season will probably go well into July this year because of its late start.

Result: Our client is eager to get going on the repairs and we are confident she will be be able to sell her home for a good price this season.

With a few inexpensive alterations, a Watertown condominium fetches a much higher price than our client ever thought possible.

Problem: Anticipating that she would be putting her condominium on the market, our client had rehabbed her kitchen with new stainless steel appliances, recessed lighting, new curtains and fresh coat of paint. But she had not touched the Formica® countertops or the dated sink and faucet. The room looked good, but we knew we could do better with a few additional changes. An unheated office also had untapped potential.

Solution: For better of for worse, buyers today want granite countertops and that doesn’t necessarily mean big bucks; there is less costly granite that looks great and is just a little more expensive than Formica. For $3,500, our client installed granite countertops and a stainless steel sink and faucet. We also recommended that our client install electric baseboard heat, at a cost of $350, to create an all-year-round office that she currently used only in warmer weather.

Result: The kitchen and office alterations enabled us to bump up the asking price by $10,000 to $489,900 and the buyer ultimately paid $500,000! We and our client were thrilled.

Three siblings are at odds about the sale of a home they inherited from their grandmother, whose lack of advance planning has made the situation even stickier

Problem: A home in northern Massachusetts was co-owned and co-inhabited by an elderly woman and her granddaughter. When the grandmother died rather unexpectedly, the granddaughter’s older brother and sister, who live in a different part of the country, agreed that it was financially necessary to sell their grandmother’s half of the home. This meant that the granddaughter would have to sell her half as well, which she was unhappy about. 

And because the grandmother had not set up a living trust—a will-like document that eases some of the red tape for your heirs when you die — the home would have to go through probate court, a process that is expensive – in this case about four times as costly as setting up a living trust. Probate is also an arduous process and will likely delay the sale of the house for six to nine months, dragging on an emotionally charged situation. 
 

Solution: For these clients, I have been not only their realtor, but their "therapist” and move coordinator as well. The out-of-state grandkids enlisted me to manage the packing and shipping of their grandmother’s possessions to them. I’m also working with the youngest granddaughter on a punch list of what needs to be done to make the house more appealing for a sale. And emotions are raw among the siblings, because everyone is still mourning the death of their grandmother.
 

Result: Stay tuned for how this all works out.