The Bozeman Home Seller's Guide
What to do in the ninety days before you list, written for a house you have been in a long time.
Start With the Number, Not the Boxes
Almost everyone starts in the wrong place. They start with the garage, or the boxes in the spare room, or a list of repairs somebody mentioned at Thanksgiving. Months go by, the work never quite finishes, and the house still has not been listed.
Start with the number instead. Not an automated estimate off a website, a real one, from somebody who has walked through the house. The number is what makes every other decision answerable. Whether a project is worth doing. Whether you can buy the next place before this one sells. Whether the timeline in your head is the right one.
Until you have it, every other question is a guess, and guessing is what turns a three month project into a two year one.
What Actually Returns Your Money
There is a narrow set of work that returns more than it costs and a much longer list that does not. The narrow set is almost always the same: paint, light, floors, and the first twelve feet a buyer sees when the door opens.
Amanda's place outside Ennis, fifteen acres with river views, had sat more than three years with two other agents. A stager, fresh white paint, new photographs and real online marketing later, she had an offer inside sixty days at $20,000 under asking, and a thirty-day close. Three years, then sixty days. The house did not change. The preparation and the marketing did.
The reason that works is not that the house became worth more in six weeks. It is that the photographs changed, so a different set of buyers came to see it.
The Things You Should Not Fix
This is the part specific to here, and it catches people from out of the area hardest. The trades in this valley are largely absorbed by Big Sky and the Yellowstone Club. Anything structural, anything needing a permit, anything needing a contractor on site for more than a few days costs more than you expect and takes longer than you are told.
The test is simple. If a job can be started and finished inside the window you actually have, and it changes a photograph, it is probably worth doing. If it cannot, then selling as-is is a real strategy rather than a defeat. It only requires the price to be exactly right for the real condition of the house, which is a pricing problem rather than a construction problem.
The worst outcome is a project that stops halfway. A kitchen torn out and not put back costs you far more than a dated kitchen that is clean.
Thirty Years of a House, and Where to Start
If you have been in the same house a long time, the hard part is rarely the listing. It is everything inside it.
The order matters more than the speed. Decide what goes to the next house first, because that is the only decision that genuinely requires you. Family pieces come next, with actual dates attached, because "I will come get that eventually" is how a garage stays full for a year. Donation, sale and haul-away follow, and all of those can be hired.
Do it before the photographs rather than after. A room that is half emptied photographs worse than a room that is still being lived in.
I keep a working list of the people here who do this: estate clearing, donation pickup, haulers, stagers. You should not have to go find them yourself, and when you work with me you do not.
Two Numbers and a Rule
You do not need to follow market statistics to read your own listing. You need two numbers and a rule.
Ten days without a showing means the price is wrong. Buyers are seeing the house online and deciding not to come. That is a price conversation and nothing else will fix it.
Ten showings without an offer means the price is not the problem. Buyers are coming and leaving, so something in the condition, the layout or the photographs is not matching what the price promised.
I call it the 10-10-0 rule, and every listing I take is measured against it. The value of a rule is that it fires on its own, before anybody has to admit anything.
Five Questions to Ask Any REALTOR® Before You Sign
Ask these whether you hire me or not. The answers tell you more than any listing presentation will.
- How did you arrive at this number? You want the comparable homes named and the adjustments explained out loud. A price with no reasoning behind it is a guess in a nice folder.
- Who, specifically, will see my home who was not already looking? Posting a listing to your own followers is not marketing. A large share of those followers are other agents.
- What happens if it has not sold in thirty days? You are listening for a rule with a trigger attached, not for optimism.
- How often will I hear from you, and about what? Ask for a number. Weekly is reasonable. Buyer-agent feedback inside 24 hours of a showing is reasonable.
- Who actually handles my sale? Find out whether the person sitting in your living room is the person who will answer the phone in six weeks.
When You Are Ready
There is no deadline on any of this. Most of the people I work with thought about it for a year before they called, and nothing bad came of the thinking.
When you want a real number, I will put one together and there is nothing attached to asking. If this is a move out of a house that has simply stopped fitting, I have written that out separately. The full seven steps are on the Simple Selling Method™.
You can also call me on (406) 606-9551 and tell me where you are.
Frequently Asked Questions
How far ahead of listing should I start?
Ninety days is comfortable for a house you have been in a long time, and most of that window is clearing rather than repairing. If you have less time than that it is still workable, it just changes which projects are worth starting.
Should I get the house appraised before I list?
Usually no. An appraisal answers a lender's question, not a seller's. What you want is a pricing analysis built from comparable homes and current buyer behavior, which is a different document and costs you nothing.
Is it worth painting before I sell?
More often than almost anything else on the list. Paint is fast, it is one of the few jobs that reliably returns more than it costs, and it changes every photograph of the room.
What if I need to buy my next home before this one sells?
That is a sequencing question and it is answerable, but only once you have a real number on this house. It is one of the main reasons to start with the valuation rather than with the work.
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