Today’s real estate market remains red-hot, despite significant recent increases in interest rates.   As Coldwell Banker CEO M. Ryan Gorman points out in the video below, across the board we’re seeing multiple offers on most homes, and…importantly…many of those buyers are all cash.  If you don’t need financing, who cares what the interest rate is?

So, with the market still this hot, do you need to dress your house up? Repaint, do a little landscaping, do some updates in the kitchen?

The direct answer is NO, you don’t NEED to do any of this. But to get the highest offers on the table–especially with many buyers waving the inspection contingency–you want to present a home with no obvious needs, lots of appeal, and give more buyers more confidence in what they’re bidding on.

Keep in mind, these all-cash, waive-the-inspection-contingency buyers don’t need an appraisal and a mortgage broker to tell them they can’t pay more than $X for your house. So it’s worth spending a little money and time in the right places to make them not just like your house, but LOVE it.

A few hundred bucks on dressing up the landscaping might go a long ways; dropping $5K to $10K on quartz countertops in the kitchen might change the impression buyers have from just nice to luxury. In all markets, sellers need to trust their Realtor’s read on the market as to not only what’s going to turn a B grade house into an A grade house, and whether a particular update project is likely to return more than the investment, but also how long that project might delay the house going on the market. Whether it’s landscaping or a countertop project, it might take only one day, but in some markets (like here in Bend, Oregon), you might be 3-4 weeks out getting a day from a landscaper or a countertop installer.

And don’t forget the value that an inspection report can have for a buyer. Tony Tulich, owner of Precision Property Inspection in Redmond, OR, says “In today’s market, buyers know that the all-cash, no-inspection-contingency offers are the ones that get accepted. For those buyers to have the confidence to offer a higher dollar amount, it helps a lot for them to know that there isn’t some multi-thousand-dollar hidden problem in the house. A few hundred dollars on a pre-listing inspection can result in thousands more in their offer…they know they don’t have to reserve a few thousand dollars for the unexpected.”