Pittsburgh Metro Realty Check

Mr. and Mrs. “S” called me. They were fed up and angry. One year of carrying two mortgages, their big, beautiful house in the North Hills of Pittsburgh sitting vacant on the market—not a single offer in all that time!—and their Company “X” real estate agent couldn’t tell them why.

“I hear you work magic,” Mr. “S” said to me.

So, two days later, I interview them in the home they’d down-sized to, a lovely patio home with beautiful furniture, and I’m thinking, ”Wow. These people know how to create a home.” And they tell me all about their house that hasn’t sold.

It was a huge place—4,100 square feet! And it was just to die for. Custom-built gourmet kitchen with granite counters and hardwood floors, oak throughout the house, vaulted cathedral ceilings, open floor plan, big rooms, huge master bedroom, tons of windows, big sliding glass doors opening onto the tiered decking and patio—there was even a pool!

And then there were the grounds: Almost an acre of land with hundred-year-old sycamores, beautiful landscaping, flowers—Mrs. “S” had tears in her eyes as they described their former home.

By the time I’m heading over to this house the next day, I’m already in love with it, sight unseen. Then I get there. Bam. What happened. This isn’t a home. This isn’t what I heard them talk about — the kids, the Christmases and Thanksgivings in their gorgeous dining room, the entertaining, the house that all their children’s friends loved to hang out at, the big, beautiful, warm home that helped them raise a family and live a happy life—this was just a house! It was cold, dark and empty and had nothing left to show for what a gem of a house it was.

So I started making my list to bring back the magic of this home that everybody loved.

For a whole year, this place had been shown with two lights in the entire house. BRING IN LIGHTS!

For a whole year, this place had been shown without any furniture to show people that this is a HOME, not an empty box with vaulted ceilings and hardwood floors. BRING IN FURNITURE! (What we call STAGING.)

After a whole year, the grounds had lost their perfect grooming, making it look abandoned and depressing. WEED, MOW, MULCH, AND PLANT FLOWERS!

For a whole year, the elements had trashed the beautiful decking, making it look uninviting. POWER-WASH THE DECK!

And then there was the blue carpeting and the blue wallpaper. Without the furniture to complement and offset them, that blue just dominated the rooms! I’ve seen over and over how strong colors jump up and shout, especially on the web, and I didn’t want people checking out the house on the web only to get distracted by strong colors!

Well, my number one rule is Keep It Simple, Sellers, so for the carpeting, I knew that the furniture I was bringing in anyway was all that was needed to take the focus off the color. But wallpaper’s a different story: It’s as personal to every homeowner as the art that hangs on their walls. It’s always better to just remove it and paint the walls a neutral color.

So I start getting to work on my list: bringing in furniture, hanging pictures, polishing, planting flowers, power-washing the deck—and they’re amazed. They’ve never seen an agent do this kind of stuff. But what I told them, and what I tell everyone, is this: I’m as religious as the next person, but unlike many real estate agents: I don’t just put a house on the market, then pray that it sells. I work to make it sell.

And then something happened that I see over and over: They started getting excited again. Not right away, not even after the first week of me going over there almost every day to work on the house. And certainly not at our second meeting when I brought them the list of what needed to be done!

Maybe they thought I was full of hot air, maybe they thought I was half nuts. They didn’t say much, but they also didn’t disagree, which is good. That says to me they’re listening, they’re willing to work with me, they’re willing to trust me and give me a chance to make good on my promise to definitely sell their house, and to hopefully do it within my average of 60 days to contract.

Sure enough, going into the second week, they started getting excited, not just the homeowners, but the whole family. They all started pitching in. The sons came over to mow the lawn and mulch under all the trees, they brought in a professional cleaner to scrub the home from top to bottom, they brought in painters to spiff up the garage and basement, they started bringing furniture and little knick-knacks back to the house—they even brought back the beautiful teak patio furniture.

Meanwhile, I’m still hard at work getting that house ready. We’re going into the second week and I’m working inside mostly now—putting furniture into place, hanging tons of art—when Kaedi and I start hearing noises.

Now, there’s nobody there but us. Or so we thought. The noises are coming from upstairs—rustling, scraping, scratching noises. Then there’s a thump. I thought my heart would stop. Kaedi and I looked at each other, too scared to say anything. We wait. The noises stop. We go back to work, figuring it was the wind blowing the sycamore branches against the house.

Kaedi goes outside to get something from the car and on her way back, makes a circuit of the house looking for where the branches are brushing up against the house. They’re not. They’re not even close.

Half an hour later, the noises start again, only now it sounds like maybe two of them up there, rustling, scraping, and making almost like a tapping sound. “Kaedi,” I whispered, “Someone’s in the house with us.” She nods, puts her finger to her mouth and we look at each other.

It’s starting to get dark, which is making me pretty nervous—here we are in a vacant house with a couple of who knows what upstairs and all we have to defend ourselves with is a broom, a hammer and a couple of scrub brushes.

Well, after a hurried, whispered consultation—and with the noises seeming to get louder—we decided to yell upstairs at the top of our lungs, “YOU’D BETTER CLEAR OUT OF THIS HOUSE OR ELSE WE’RE CALLING THE COPS!!!” Then we got the hooboy outta there as fast as we could. We figured if anyone had been camping out up there, that’d clear them out and make it safe for us to check out the upstairs in the morning.

The next day, we brought reinforcements: My grandson Michael and two more members of our team. We each grabbed our weapons of choice: a mop, a broom, a hammer, a cell phone “armed” and ready to send video, and my fearless grandson insisting on leading the charge up the stairs with his super-soaker.

Well, lucky for us, there was no band of hardened criminals camped out upstairs waiting to take on our raggedy crew of foolhardy realtors. In fact, there wasn’t anything up there. We searched high and low, searched every closet, under every bed, even checked behind the shower curtains and inside the toilets in the upstairs bathrooms! Nothing. We breathed long and slightly embarrassed sighs of relief, and went back to work.

By late afternoon, most of the others had left and it was just me and Rich. We figured we had another hour or so of work—hang the rest of the curtains, water the flowers and palms we’d brought—then we could knock off, go home to a couple of glasses of wine and polish off the yummy lasagna dinner I’d made over the weekend.

Then the noises started again. And this time, there was definitely two of them—and probably more. I don’t know if we were crazy or what, but this time, we decided not to run. We grabbed our cell phones (and the mop and broom) and yelled upstairs again. “You people’d better clear out of here!! We’re calling the cops right now!!!”

The noises stopped. We waited. After 30 minutes—only it was actually five minutes!—we slowly started working again, looking upward nervously every few minutes. And the noises started again. Rustling, scraping, whispering. Well, by now we were pretty certain it wasn’t a band of outlaws or hoboes or kids or anything living. Not after the careful inspection we’d all done that morning. So that left just one explanation.

We decided right then and there that we needed to have a talk with the homeowners about the Disclosure Form and the fact that maybe they needed to add something to section 19, Miscellaneous: “Haunted with undetermined number of ghosts.”

Now, I’m not saying I believe in ghosts, and besides, I figured a house had to be at least a hundred years old before any self-respecting ghost would take up residence, and this house was only thirty years old. But you try working in an empty house for a week listening to ghostly, whispery, rustling noises coming from an upstairs that you know is uninhabited. And especially when those noises only seemed to start around dusk. I mean, everybody knows that ghosts are nocturnal, right?

Well, it wasn’t until we started heading into week 3 that we discovered what else besides ghosts is nocturnal.

We were staging and prepping the upstairs by then, and Rich and I decided to check on the attic to see whether there was anything we needed to do up there. And that’s when we got our actual sighting of our “ghosts.” This time, I think my heart really did stop.

It was a nest of raccoons.

Lucky for us, they were sound asleep. They were even kind of cute, especially the four babies. But the fact remained, THERE WERE RACCOONS UP IN THE ATTIC!!!

Lucky for us, I was too scared to scream.

We retreated down those stairs as fast as we could going backwards, closed the door quietly, then ran for the nearest bedroom where we stripped the bed, grabbed the mattress and dragged it over to the attic door, propping it up against the door like a barricade. Then we ran downstairs, grabbed our stuff and headed out. It wasn’t until we were halfway home that we both started laughing, but I was still shaking like a leaf.

The next few days was like a crash course for me: I learned all about trapping wild animals, the different ways that different companies handle it, and I settled on a company that would monitor the animals for a week with video cameras to find out how many and how they get in and out, trap all of them humanely and release them into the nearest state game preserve, then seal up the house so no more critters can get in again.

But the saga of the furry squatters didn’t end there.

It took us one month to get the house ready for sale: cleaning, painting, furnishing—all of it. Then, as I always do, I put together the “virtual brochure” for posting the home on the web. This is how a home sells. Nobody drives around aimlessly looking for “House for Sale” signs, not with the price of gas these days! People check the web first. Today, 85% of all home sales begin with someone sitting in front of their computer checking out homes on the web.

So you need to show the house on the web, not as an empty box, but as a home. More than that, just like I did for Mr. and Mrs. “S,” you need to bring back the magic of what that home was when people lived there.

Sure enough, one week after posting the house to the web—on Realtor.com, on my site (www.homesnorthpittsburgh.com), on Coldwell’s site, (www.pittsburghmoves.com), on YouTube, and on four other sites—we had three offers. And one of those offers turned into a final sale.

Well, it was during the inspection process that we all discovered what none of us had thought about before: a nest of raccoons leaves behind a pile of nasty-poo, and I do mean nasty.

Once again, I took a crash course, only this time it was how to handle waste removal—specifically raccoon waste!—and then fumigating to make the house 100% safe. We treated the waste as if it was toxic, right down to hiring professionals to handle the removal and remediation. And I was right in there with them on the remediation, Tyvek suit and all!

We removed all the pink fiberglass insulation, then scrubbed the walls, attic rafters and beams with boiling water—I lost track of all the buckets of boiling water the men hauled up to the attic for me! After that, we still had to make sure that none of the nasty-poo had dropped down into the 4-inch space between the studs and the walls.

So, being the smallest, there I was crawling around the entire perimeter of the attic with a flashlight, sticking my head down below the floor joists trying to avoid getting punctured by the roofing nails, looking for raccoon reminders.

Finally, when everything had been scrubbed, checked and double-checked, the attic was sealed off and fumigated.

When all was said and done, the amount of work I put into selling that house was definitely more than most—though a lot less than some!—but the story of those furry squatters was certainly one of the more interesting experiences I’ve had as a realtor.

Why the house hadn’t sold for a year wasn’t really complicated, but it wasn’t simple, either. One of the first things Mr. “S” asked me was whether I thought the house wasn’t selling because of the price they’d had on it, $309,900. After I looked over the house, I told him no, I didn’t think that was the problem.

Most of the time, assuming you’re not asking for something outrageously unrealistic, price merely determines how long it will take for a house to sell, not whether a house will sell. In their case, the house wasn’t getting any interest because it was dark, it was empty—it wasn’t a home anymore.

And there was no virtual brochure. Its web presence was as unenticing as its “street” presence. It was just big box in competition with thousands of other homes that had furniture, warmth, color, personality, pizzazz.

My job was to bring back that personality and pizzazz, to bring back the magic of their home and establish a presence that could successfully compete with all the other houses on the market. That’s what the real estate commission pays for—the staging, the work, the virtual brochure, the online video, the marketing, all of that. What they have to do is decide on a balance that works for them between how much they want for the house and how long they want it on the market.

If they keep the house at $309,900, it’ll take 3 to 6 months to sell. And only they can decide how much longer they want to keep carrying two mortgages. If they lower the price to $299,000, then two things will happen: Showings will double and the house will sell in 2 to 3 months.

The fact is that there are twice as many showings for houses under $300,000 than for those that are over $300,000. And twice as many showings will cut the time a house is on the market in half!

And then, there’s the client factor. A client who’s willing to work with the agent is as important as a client who’s done their homework.

Too many people spend less time picking a real estate agent than they spend deciding where to eat lunch! Real estate agents are like belly buttons: Everybody has one! Everybody knows or works with or is related to, plays tennis or softball with, goes to the movies, lives with, even sleeps with, a real estate agent! So what?

The first cousin of a friend of the lady who does your hair or your uncle’s boss’s daughter of his golf buddy or your kid’s teacher’s husband is not someone to hire just because of those relationships. Your home, or the home you’re planning on buying, might be the biggest asset you have, and the person you hire to entrust that asset to should be interviewed and carefully selected.

How many people would hand over $200,000 to a co-worker’s cousin or a friend of a friend to handle for up to a year? Would you? But how many people have you heard complain that they’re unhappy with their real estate agent, but they can’t change because it’s their friend or a family member or their boss’s family member?

Don’t hand your home over to someone just because you “know” them. Do your homework. Interview them, get references. Do they produce virtual brochures? Do they have their own website? Have you checked out the website and their brochures? What’s their average time to sell a house? What’s their marketing strategy? How often do they hold open houses? How often do they replenish the info box outside the home? How well did they represent former clients who bought homes through them?

And then there’s the reality of today’s market. Is the agent you’re considering web-savvy and high-tech enough for marketing in this time of rapidly changing technology? Can they get you that out-of-town buyer? Can they attract enough traffic via the web to sell your home quickly?

Finally, the other side of the client factor is how willing you are to work with an agent who you’re satisfied is capable of handling the job of representing you.

In the case of Mr. and Mrs. “S,” they were willing to let me do everything on the work list, and they even pitched in to help. They were willing to go down to $299,000 once they saw how serious I was and how hard I worked. And they trusted me to put my experience to work.

After I’d furnished the house and after I’d brought in a ton of lamps, I asked them, “May I ask you for a month’s electricity bill? May I leave a few lights on at night so people can peek in and see how beautiful this home is?” Well, Mr. “S” said to me, “A month?! What if it’s another year? How do I know you’ll sell this house at all? It didn’t sell for the last twelve months!”

“Do you trust me?” I asked him. “Look, after one month, I’ll pay the electric bill.”

They trusted me to leave the lights on. But it didn’t take a month; it just took a week. And a little bit of firm “negotiating” with some furry squatters.