Can I hire someone to help get my house ready to go on the market? Who? How?

[Anonymous]

We will probably be putting our house on the market next spring, and it will need some cosmetic stuff done-- we haven't repainted or anything like that since we bought it 7yrs ago. It will need new paint inside and out, a yard spruce up, some tree work, florr refinishing, deckmrepairs, window washing, all that jazz. But I don't know how we will have time to do it.

Are there people who can be hired to just deal with all that stuff, from helping figure out what really needs to be done to choosing contractors, meeting them and overseeing them, and so on? Basically i want to find some competent and reliable person and say, "here's what we need done, here's a budget for all work, figure it out, thanks!"

How would we find such a person? Do major realtors have lists of people who will do this, or is this a "put an ad on Craigslist" situation? I think we need someone who is a cross between a handyman, a cleaner and a personal assistant....

[Anonymous]

Do major realtors have lists of people who will do this?

Yes. I can recommend mine if you're looking for a recommendation, but any good realtor will have a stable of people in their corner for just this sort of thing.

[Anonymous]

I think you want to start with a good experienced realtor (not a young upstart realtor who has no perspective or contacts) with a good eye for staging. They will tell you what you really need to do to spruce the place up, and if they are good they will tell you to do the most important things and not bother with the rest. That realtor will have lists of reliable affordable contractors they can suggest. They wont be the ones to be getting estimates and overseeing work usually, but maybe they would know someone who could.

[Anonymous]

A realtor can help you figure out which improvements are worth it, but in our experience our realtor's contractors were by far the most expensive. Once you know what you want done, pick a general contractor to manage all those updates.

[Anonymous]

I agree with the pp's. We just sold our house and our realtor walked through with us and told us what to get rid of (rent a pod and have it stored off site), move and paint. We were going to do other things, but he told us not too-saving us some money and time! We used our own handyman.

[Anonymous]

I think a realtor could do this. I am note quite sure why you would need to hire someone to manage the projects, are you that busy?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A realtor can help you figure out which improvements are worth it, but in our experience our realtor's contractors were by far the most expensive. Once you know what you want done, pick a general contractor to manage all those updates.

Same here. Our realtor walked through our house and gave us her recommendations for must-dos and should-dos (and don't-bother-to-dos) but when her contractor came through and then sent us his estimate, we almost fainted. We ended up finding a handyman through friends who was able to do almost everything we needed (new powder room tile, install kitchen countertop and new floor, replace porch railing, powerwash and restain deck, paint basement floor, etc), and got a few roofer estimates to do a roof replacement. All in all it came in about $5000 below what the realtor's contractor was going to charge.