I’ve blogged before about why you need to sell your house four times to get one closing. The Realtor has to  “buy” it, then the actual buyer, then the inspector, then the appraiser. Those four different humans — made up primarily of emotions and affected by the home’s presentation — have to be emotionally “sold” on the house to keep the sale moving forward. Disappoint any one of them and you won’t get top dollar for your home.

Yesterday I showed a house to a buyer client of mine for the second time. We’d seen it once before, about a month and a half ago, at a time it was tenant-occupied. That experience couldn’t have gone much worse.

• The tenants were there during that showing, all 9 or 10 of them!
• They were all crammed in one room with a giant-screen TV blaring away a cage-fighting match.
• Two little yappy dogs were at our heals, yap-yapping, the entire time.
• The house was an utter disaster in a house-cleaning sense, with laundry, dishes and “stuff” strewn everywhere.
• It was dark, dark, dark. Every curtain was drawn and a piece of black plastic garbage bag material hung over the doorway from the kitchen into the TV room.
• The dad/husband who let us in followed directly behind us with every step — which, in the end, wasn’t long because we left after about 3 minutes.

I — professional Realtor, former home inspector, former builder/contractor, having gutted my own frst home to the studs while living there with my wife and remodeling every square inch of it — could not see past the “experience” the tenants created for us. The “experience” of seeing that house under those conditions made me want to rate it practically a tear-down. The buyers felt the same way, and when we drove off we never looked back or even remotely considered that house a possibility.

Until yesterday. A friend of the buyer’s was looking at listings with her on the internet and pointed out the brightly-lit interior photos of a particular house. They scrolled through the photos noticing newer, light-colored carpet, new appliances, new roof, huge lot, beautiful mature trees, a studio out back… it looked like just the place they’d been looking for.

It was the very same house! Only now it was vacant, the tenants having moved on, and the owner having merely cleaned the place top to bottom, opening up the windows and getting it “show-ready.” It had NOT been painted or remodeled in any way. Just vacated, cleaned, and opened up. And now it’s very likely these buyers are going to write an offer on it.

Buyers want to be “pleasantly surprised” when they see a house. They don’t want to feel like they’ve just walked into a dark alley and should have a can of mace in one hand and a stun gun in the other.

If you, the seller, can’t control the buyer experience in this regard because your tenants are staying put and will live the way they live, that’s ok… just lower your price dramatically from where you’d like it to be.