Column: Welcome to your Sherwood Real Estate resource!

By Jeff Wiren for the Sherwood Sun

SHERWOOD, Ore. — My name is Jeff Wiren.

I am the President & Managing Principal Broker of Premiere Property Group, LLC — the largest Real Estate Brokerage in Oregon and SW Washington, with over 1300 Agents. I am a Past-President of the statewide Oregon Realtor® Association, and a Director for the National Association of Realtors®. I am also a practicing Realtor® with over 21 years of experience, and my wife and I have been members of the Sherwood community since 2001.

If you are hoping to find specific market information in this article, you won’t! There’s just too much of a gap in time from when this piece needs to be drafted to the time you will be reading it. If you have market-specific questions — call me! I’ll be happy to answer them. If you have already have a great Realtor® — call them. They will be thrilled to hear from you and happy to help.

Let’s focus today on what you can do as a seller to prepare your home for the market:

• Call your Realtor® — now! If you are planning to sell your home this coming Spring or Summer, you need to begin the process early. It typically takes several weeks for you and your agent to finalize all of the steps to get your home ready for market.
• Start removing any unnecessary furniture in your home. Less is more – trust me. Think of yourself as a minimalist, and move the bulky furniture to the garage or to a storage unit – to the point that your home seems almost empty. This is the canvas that your Realtor® needs in order to paint the perfect picture of your property to a potential buyer.
• Remove personal family photos. Buyers need to be able to picture your home as THEIR home, not YOUR home.
• Deep clean your home. Let me say that again — deep clean your home. This includes cleaning the carpets, pressure washing the solid surfaces on the exterior, cleaning the grout in the kitchen and bathrooms, along with a good scrub of every surface. A clean home that smells fresh sells faster. Period.
• Freshen up the landscaping. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
• Work with your Realtor® to stage your home. This may mean that you need to remove your existing furniture and pay to have a stager bring in more modern furniture. Trust me, it’s worth it. According to the National Association of Realtors®, 83% of Buyer’s Agents said that staging a home made it easier for their buyers to envision the property as their future home.

The last and most important point — work with your Realtor® to price your home correctly. Overpriced homes take longer to sell, typically sell for a lower price, and in fact often help other homes in the area sell. If you overprice your home, and there is a comparable property for sale nearby, a buyer will tour both properties and feel that the other property is a better value. That seller will get the offer, not you. If you don’t have a relationship with a Realtor® that you trust, it's ok to get several opinions of value from multiple Realtors®. We all want to earn your business!

Relationships matter! I value the relationships that I have with my great clients. If you have a Realtor® that you trust, then you are truly blessed. Every Realtor® I know works tirelessly for their clients — nights, weekends, and every hour in between. If you DON’T have a relationship with a Realtor® you trust, call me. Let’s talk about your plans and dreams.