How do you tell your sellers that their house is filthy when they don't think it is?
Here's an idea that could help that I heard from a Realtor a few years ago.
Offer to send out your cleaning people to clean their house that are trained with some things that you have taught them to do over the years. You could have them take care of things that need attention in the yard too.
This could be a good way to get the house in better shape for showings for your sellers without offending anybody's house-cleaning skills. AND, you can educate your cleaning people on the little things they can do for you to make sure the house pops and that it smells great too!
It is seen as a nice gesture and and shows that you are on top of things from the sellers point of view.
This seems like a wonderful way to navigate a touchy subject with our seller clients! I will definitely remember this for the future if I need it!
Very great idea! I tell all of my clients that their homes are too dirty to put on the market, because the vast majority of times they are. Buyers give a house the "white glove" test, with or without the gloves! So I often do exactly what you suggested - hire a cleaning service to come in and clean the home. Helps me justify a full commission, and helps me get my seller to price his home correctly!
That is a very generous & costly gesture to pay for house cleaning on listings rather than just tell them what needs to be done. The only problem is that it may look pretty for the pictures but if they don't keep up with the house work over the months to come when the house is being shown it is still going to be an issue. I usually will help them with staging & make them a housekeeping to do list for each room if necessary. I usually advise them to wait until it is ready for showing before listing the property. It saves me a lot time and wasted advertising dollars on an unsaleable property.
Who is going to pay for it? That is a great comment and I did not get into that. Obviously, if you can afford it, it would be great to offer that as one of your services and if you have a good cleaner you should be able to get the work done reasonably priced. But, I don't think the sellers really expect that you do that. I would think that you should have some prices nailed down ahead of time from your cleaners so you can tell them what it would cost them. Since you are explaining that their ROI would be well worth the investment, I am sure that they would go along with your recommendation. You could offer to pay for it for them and then collect for their bill during the closing too.