Well, before you go doing anything, watch this video because I want to share with you how much it costs to sell a home in Knoxville. And we're going to get started.

Welcome back to All Things Knoxville with me, Ben Barredo, your local real estate pro and relocation expert for East Tennessee. Before you jump into the video, I just want to share with you that I make videos like this every single week. So if you like it, and you'd like to see more, definitely go to my YouTube Channel and hit the like button, subscribe, and share this video. I would definitely appreciate it. 

As a Knoxville Real Estate Agent, I also make a living by helping people get into the home-ownership game. So if you're thinking of buying a house, if you're thinking of selling a house, if you're thinking of relocating to Knoxville Tennessee, or if you're thinking about investing in real estate, whatever the case may be, please give me a call. I'd love to help you out. You can reach me at the contact information below.

Okay so, let's get into the costs that you're going to face if you're thinking about selling a home. But, before we talk numbers, let me remind you that not every home is the same. There are different steps involved with selling a home, and depending on your home's condition, and depending on your motivation, and depending on your honesty with yourself, the levels and the monetary need to prep a home for sale, they're going to be really different. So I'm going to treat this video as if we're getting a house ready that fits the following profile so that we're all on the same page.

The home we're going to sell is located at 123 Knoxville Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's a three-bedroom, two bathrooms, a traditional style, two-story home with a... It's sitting on a crawl space, and it's about 2000 square feet. The family wants to sell fast. They just had some extra kids, they're wanting to upgrade to a bigger home, and they want to get top dollar. And the home needs a little bit of work and they're selling the furniture and they're going to buy new stuff. So they're going to clean the house out.

In order to sell fast, they need to price their home fairly. They can't gamble with the whole, "Let's price it high and negotiate down." They want to get buyers in there from day one, and they'd like to get offers that same night. Still, they want to get maximum value. So they will have to do some work to make the house look fresh, look new. And they also want to avoid a bunch of repairs and negotiating over the inspections that are going to come up later on. That's going to be more money loss right?

Off the bat, market expenses fall on the agent. Photos, ads, flyers, video, open houses, all of those expenses they will handle. So if an agent ever tries to charge you for those things, find a new agent. Now, before we can go to the market as an active listing, which means a house is for sale and it's open for buyers to schedule tours, we need to prep the house. So the first thing we should do is stage the home for photos and video. 

Before I get into staging a home, you can download my free home prep guide by clicking on the link in the description. This guide walks you through exactly how to prep a home and stage a home. And it breaks all the areas down into segments and sections, and by room, exterior, and interior. And the outline is basically a checklist, so it's idiot-proof. It has to be because I made it. You can download that now and get top dollar for your home. Just Click Here.

Okay, so staging a home. And this can be free, it can also cost you a lot of money. The first thing you want to do is declutter the house, get it clean. Do this yourself, or you can hire a cleaner. Let's say the family wants to hire a cleaner, that's normally going to cost around $25 to $50 here in Knoxville. $25, $50 an hour depending on the size of the home and the level of a good cleaning. If you have a lot of decluttering to do, you might need to hire movers, and you also might need to get storage. Movers might cost you around $500 to $1000 dollars, depending on how much stuff you move, and storage is going to cost you anywhere from $75 to $100 dollars a month for a large unit, $20 for a small unit.

Let's average all those costs out and say, our family, they're going to spend $850 total because they gave a lot of their furniture away, but they still have a lot of toys and electronics and things that mean a lot to them that they want to keep. They're also leaving the bedrooms intact since they're still going to be living in the houses while they look for another house. They will need a large unit, and they're going to pay for two months because it takes at least 30 days to close on a home, and they are going to have to close on two houses. Our family also decided to use a stager because, the fact is, staged homes get at least 17% more money than unstaged homes. Most stagers charge anywhere from $100 to $600 for a consultation. But, and then they'll charge around $600 per room to stage it with their own furniture and stuff.

Luckily, if they do stage the home, then you can get the consultation feedback or you don't pay it at all. Additionally, if you're going to stage, you need the paint and repair things around the house. Because there's no point in staging the home if you're not going to make everything look good. So we put replace the light fixtures if they're broken, drippy faucets, loose toilets, et cetera.

Now contractors are going to be widely different in price, and maybe you don't even know what needs to be fixed. So since our family wants to avoid a lot of repairs and negotiations, they decided to get a pre-listing inspection from a licensed home inspector. That inspection is going to cost them $400. And they're going to hire a contractor to fix the issues that came up. Luckily, there wasn't a ton of big-ticket items, nothing that was seriously wrong. So the contractor's going to cost them $1000 to do a bunch of minor stuff.

Then painting the house is going to them around $1.50 per square foot, on the conservative side here in Knoxville. They're going to put a fresh coat of paint on the entire house. So that's going to cost them about $3,000 for the 2000 square feet house. The stagers are staging the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room. And they're putting some decorative stuff in other parts of the house. So this is going to cost our family $600 per room, three rooms, $1,800. Once all this is done, they're ready to sell.

Overall, our family is spending $6,050 to prepare their home for sale. Now, if it's a $200,000 house at 17% more, they're easily going to make that money back. With the agent getting them a ton of exposure, they're probably going to make more than that. Now...

Typically this isn't necessary. Most homeowners I work with spend no more than a few hundred dollars to prepare a home, and some even sped nothing. There's a trade-off though because you only have to do what you feel like doing. You don't have to do any of these things. However, you are trading off value in the eyes of a buyer, depending on what needs to be done, which is going to cost you some money in the long run.

Lastly, the one cost as a homeowner you can't avoid if you're listing your home is commission. This is of course negotiable. Knoxville has an average commission rate of 6%, and that's typical across the country. 6% for Knoxville, the average sales price of $290,000, it's going to be around $8,850. Now the agent doesn't get all of that, but we'll talk about that in a different video. 

I hope this video was helpful. Remember to download my prep guide, you can get that below, and I hope you have a great day.