Have you been keeping up with your home’s maintenance?
The biggest challenge my team and I typically deal with when selling a home is a lack of home maintenance on behalf of the owner. Deferring home maintenance catches up with you when it comes time to sell because you may have to spend thousands of dollars to fix issues you either didn’t know about or simply got used to. A dripping sink faucet may not bother you now, but it can cause problems down the road. Keeping up with home maintenance will not only save you a lot of headaches, but it will also save you a lot of money long term.
This is why I advise every homeowner to set aside certain funds each month for home upkeep and repairs. These can be things you add to your family budget. For your heating and cooling systems, you can sign a maintenance contract with a local heating and cooling company that’ll take care of them for just a couple hundred dollars a year. Keeping these units maintained will also help with your utility costs because they’re running the way they should run. Think of it like this: If you don’t maintain your car, it stops running, right? Then you’ll either have to fix it, buy a new one, or start walking everywhere. You don’t need the state to mandate a yearly home inspection like they do with registered vehicles—you can just do it on your own.
“Catch things before they become ‘events.’”
HVAC units, water heaters, roofs, sinks, faucets, gutters, crawl spaces, downspouts, and improper landscaping are the culprits that cause the most issues among home sellers. To prevent these issues, I suggest hiring an inspection company to give your home a maintenance check every three to five years. Most homeowners only do this once—when they’re purchasing the home.
Usually, the issues they inevitably have to deal with when they sell have been ongoing for several years. If they just would’ve scheduled an inspection or two between buying and selling, they could’ve dealt with these issues. Granted, how often your home needs an inspection depends on its age. If it’s a newer home, perhaps it only needs an inspection every five years. If it’s an older home, you might be better off scheduling an inspection every three years.
A home inspection in the Triad costs between $400 and $600. Just look at it like an insurance policy. If you schedule one every five years, that only amounts to $100 per year. Catch things before they become ‘events.’ If we know anything about events, it’s that they’re expensive. That’s not a fun check to write if it involves fixing something, especially if that something that lies in an area nobody ever sees anyway.
If you’d like to know more about keeping your home well-maintained or would like the name of a great local home inspection company, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to help you.
