Quote Originally Posted by cindycindy View Post
These were exactly my thoughts. My heart & wallet are not into doing these renovations. However, our house has been on the market. We've had at least 40 showings. We lowered the price very much below market to entice buyers, but it seems buyers want the house to be in move in condition, and don't want to do any work when they move in. Which is why we're considering doing the updates and then wait a few more years to sell. Boy, things are different than the last time I bought a house. Anyway, thanks for the feedback.
I sold two homes in the past decade and I agree that these days homeowners don't want "fixer-uppers." Our realtor told us that when we sold MILs house, which was on the market for 3 years until we put about $15,000 into it (refinished wood floors, basic painting of the whole house, a few other minor cosmetic fixes).

My other example of this is:

I live in a neighborhood in which there are 5 basic home models. My BIL lives in one and there is cookie cutter version 4 doors down. The other house has the original bathroom/kitchen, but has nice curb appeal and a two-car garage. BIL's house only has a one-car garage, so-so curb appeal, but we redid the bathrooms and kitchen, and replaced vinyl floors with bamboo and replaced the aluminum sliding doors with wood French doors.

The other house has been on the market for months and has decreased the price twice. My BILs house had two solid offers within a month.

If you don't care how long your house is on the market, just offer a few bucks at closing. But in my experience, a) people buy with their emotions, and b) very few have imaginations--so they need to see the vision. You'll sell your house quicker if you make those improvements, IMHO.

If it were me, I would try to come up with a few thousand to update as much as you can. I wholeheartedly agree with consulting with a GOOD realtor to find out exactly which improvements are going to give you the best bang for the buck. Our realtor is great--she gave us a checklist of improvements to consider and what to expect if we a) did nothing, b) put in some cosmetic improvements, c) went all in and fixed everything. We went with "B" (although we had already updated the kitchen when MIL moved in in 2007) and we achieved the top of the range of her projection.

People are busy today. They just want to move in.