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Selling your house can be stressful. Selling your house with a pet can be even more nerve-wracking. Do you know how to handle your pets when you sell without ending up in the doghouse? Everybody loves animals, but not everybody is comfortable with a stranger’s pet. Here are four tips that will help you sell your house when you have pets:

1. Eliminate pet odors. Bad odors deter buyers. There’s a strong connection between your sense of smell, emotion, and perception. If a buyer walks through the door and smells something bad, they may not even finish the showing. Have your carpets and even your upholstery professionally cleaned and consider putting an air purifier where your pet spends the most time. I use clumping litter and a doggy waste bag to make this easy. Your buyers and your pets will thank you.

Buyers are distracted by stressed animals and nervous barking.

2. Repair any pet-related damage. As much as we love them, our pets do create a lot of wear and tear on our homes and yard. If you have a canine ‘gardener,’ fill in holes they’ve excavated and be sure to repair the grass with lawn patch. If there are severe scratches on your flooring, consider having those professionally repaired.

3. Remove pets from all showings. If it’s not possible, make sure they’re at least crated. This is for the safety of both pets and people.

4. Reduce animal stress. Buyers are distracted by stressed animals and nervous barking. If your dog has to be there during showings, talk to your vet about plug-ins that release odor-free stress-reducing pheromones; they only work on animals, not your kids or your spouse (unfortunately).

Our animals are our family and handling them the right way puts less stress on them and helps you help sell faster and for more money.

If you have any questions for us about buying or selling a home or about anything else related to real estate, don’t hesitate to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

To ensure your pet’s safety in the event of a natural disaster, here are four tips you can follow.

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In the event of a natural disaster, our primary goal is to keep our loved ones safe, and that includes our pets. Here are four tips that will help you do just that.

First, make sure you know where your pet likes to hide because that’s likely where you’ll find them if a natural disaster strikes. In our house, we like to make sure our pets are trained to reliably come to us when we call them, and we do this with high-value treats. Sugar and Zelda love freeze-dried chicken (and they love to practice this drill).

Second, decide in advance where you’ll take your pet in a disaster. Floods, fires, and storms may require different evacuation routes, and not every hotel or public shelter will take pets during an evacuation.

Don’t wait for a disaster to occur—develop your plan now.

Third, make sure your pet is easy to identify. If you get separated from your pet or you have to leave them in a shelter, make it easy to identify them and know how to care for them. Try having them microchipped, or at least have a tag on their collar.

Lastly, don’t forget about them when preparing your own personal disaster kit. You may need things like collapsible bowls for food and water or a manual can opener.

The bottom line is this: Don’t wait for a disaster to occur—develop your plan now. If you’d like to receive a starter checklist to help you get started, call or text us and we’d be happy to send you one.

As always, if you have any other real estate-related questions, feel free to reach out to us as well. We’d love to help you.

Appraisals are an important part of most real estate transactions. Here’s why.

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All of a sudden, our clients have been seeing a number of appraisal issues pop up, so I wanted to do a series of videos that explains the process, the problems, and some common solutions.

An appraisal is a formal valuation of a home’s current market value. When a buyer sends a sales contract to a lender, the lender orders an appraisal.

How does the appraiser know what current market value is? Their most important tools are sold comps. Those are recently sold homes in the same neighborhood of a similar age, size, and quality of the home in question.

An appraisal is ordered by a lender.

Appraisers then compare each of the sold comps with the property that’s under contract by making price adjustments based on different characteristics. If the contract house has a bigger lot or better location, they can adjust upwards, or the other way around if it needs maintenance.

Appraisers must use Fannie Mae guidelines for the values of the adjustments they take and lenders are not allowed to contact appraisers. Agents can speak to them only when the appraiser calls to ask questions.

Once the report is complete, it’s sent to the buyer’s lender, who makes a lending decision based on the report. To learn how an appraisal can affect your sales contract, stay tuned for our next video on the outcomes of appraisal reports.

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