Can’t Sell Your Home? Look To Your Neighbor

Neighbors. Sometimes we can’t live next to them. Sometimes we can’t sell our homes without them. When you’re selling your home, you want it to go as smoothly as possible, but you can’t control your neighbors or how they take care of their house. Or can you?

Collaboration

You can explain to your neighbors that you are in the process of selling your home, and politely suggest ways in which they can help. If your neighbor has awful yard work, you could demand that they clean it up, but that might antagonize them. Instead, offer to help them with cutting their grass and keeping the yard looking tidy. Turn it into some long past-due neighborly bonding. You could also offer to pay to have a professional lawn service come by and take care of the yard. After all, spending some money on your neighbor’s yard is for the greater good. Investing money in your neighbor’s yard, can make a major difference in your home’s asking price.

Help Clean Up

An even rougher aspect of dealing with a neighbor is when he or she is known as the neighborhood hoarder. As if selling your home isn’t stressful enough, now you have to deal with that one “collector” that every neighborhood has. The old car, that hasn’t moved since the Bush administration, just dripping oil on the driveway. Or that ghastly appliance collection out in the front yard. Unfortunately, you can’t go clean up your neighbor’s messy yard by yourself. That would border on rudeness. But you can suggest a garage sale, since they have “so much neat stuff”. Or if you are really serious about eliminating their junk, offer to buy them a shed (nothing too expensive) or buy them a storage unit. While this doesn’t sound as neighborly as helping out with a garage sale, sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.

Make Your Own Improvements

Let’s say you complete all your tasks: cleaned up your neighbor’s yard; got rid of their junk; heck, maybe you even helped give the outside of their home a fresh coat of paint. What if now the unthinkable happens? You have planted the idea of selling their home. It’s the real estate version of Inception.

The good news is whatever effort you put into helping out your neighbor, you already are or were about to, double your own efforts. You’ve got your landscaping looking the best it has looked in years. The paint job has made your home look years younger. So the exterior gives you a slight advantage in the real estate battle, but the interior is where you win the war. If your carpet or wood floors are going on in years, now is the time to replace them. New flooring can cost on average around $15,000. This, of course, depends on the size of your home and type of flooring you have installed.

It’s not uncommon for next door neighbors to put their house up for sale around the same time. More often than not, people see their neighbor’s home go up for sale and think that their own home is in better condition, and should be able to get even more money on the market. But while you might be eyeing each other’s property, the only eyes that really matter are those of a potential buyer. Most home buyers shop for their new home based on need. While the condition of the home and the price of it are determining factors, the initial search for a new home revolves around space. How many bedrooms and bathrooms? What’s the size of the living room? Is there enough room in the backyard?

You and your neighbor can try to one-up each other all you want, but a home buyer might not choose either one. There could be nine out of ten reasons why a home seller thinks their house is perfect, but the home buyer might find one reason why it isn’t perfect for them. Focus on your house and less on your neighbor’s. There’s no need to go full Hatfields & McCoys mode.