[Music] Hello You Beautiful People Welcome to Selling Greenville a wonderful real estate podcast here in lovely Greenville South Carolina I am your host as always Stan McCune real realtor here in Greenville I don't know what I was about to say there realtor realtor actually the way we're supposed to pronounce it is realtor but nobody does that because that sounds really weird realtor here in Greenville South Carolina all of my contact information like always is in the show notes and I always ask you guys to do this but just a reminder because I really would like for as many of you as possible to do this please leave me a rating or review for the show I need as many of those as possible and and if you get any tangible benefit from the show that is giving me back a little bit of something even if you know never use me as a realtor and make sure that you subscribe as well downloading episodes apparently helps the algorithm in some way as well so any of those things that you do that helps the show that encourages me to keep going so I appreciate that today we are going to be talking about turning a real estate weakness into a strength now that can go in a whole lot of different directions so I want to be very clear I'm talking about from the standpoint of an actual piece of real estate not necessarily you as a real estate mind or you as a real estate investor turning a weakness into a strength that might be something that we can discuss in a future episode but I'm talking specifically from the standpoint of updating a property and turning a weakness into a strength within a very specific property and I think this will be very practical for anyone no matter who you are what properties you have or may have in the future I think that this will help you for starters here we know that every house has some sort of weakness on a very basic level a home might just have a floor plan that doesn't really have great flow it doesn't flow very well that's a weakness maybe the closets are too small that's that's a weakness maybe the bathrooms there's not enough bathrooms or or there could be more bathrooms or or maybe the the location of the house isn't very good there's all sorts of different things when you're looking at homes you're processing this in in the back of your mind right if you're looking to move you're thinking through all of the potential pros and cons of a house now a lot of the weaknesses in a house are correctable if if the location is bad that's not an easily correctable thing now now there are ways that you can potentially correct it but it's not easily correctable I'm not going to even discuss that in this show I'll leave that perhaps for another episode but others of those things that I mentioned before floor plan bathrooms closet space etc etc those are things that can potentially be corrected and what I want you to think about is that some of the greatest opportunities for a house for adding value to a house and for making a house more marketable or a property more marketable or more valuable some of the greatest opportunities for that lie in those weaknesses those weaknesses should be seen as opportunities potential opportunities and you might be asking hopefully you're asking okay how how how are there opportunities in those weaknesses well for one thing those are are not those weaknesses typically those those obvious weaknesses they're not subjective those are weaknesses that perhaps won't be as important to some people as others but will be things that the majority of people notice and are bothered by and that's important right because a lot of people they don't know what updates they need to do in order to make a property more valuable and and one of the things that I do frequently as a realtor is I'll give consultations for people looking to sell their house they'll ask me hey what do you think about this should I spend money doing this or should I spend money doing this what what is a space that you think that I need to focus on to bring up the value of the home etc etc and I always think about it in terms of will you get that money back at the end of the day that that's what people are really asking if I spend $500 I I got this question recently should I upgrade the dishwasher in the kitchen all the other appliances have been upgraded should the dishwasher be upgraded and I simply approached it okay dishwasher it's going to cost what 5 600 bucks will you get that money back when you sell the home I came to the conclusion no the dishwasher was was functioning fine it looked fine in the kitchen I told that homeowner no you're you're not going to get that5 or $600 back and that's how I always approach it but those are those are questions that are always going in people's minds is what do I need to do in order to update a home to make it more valuable well these things that are weaknesses these are are things that are really obvious so there's not that subjectivity and as well because it's not subjective to you it's also not going to be as subjective to other people looking at it these are going to be weaknesses that by and large I'm talking about things by and large when you go into a house what are the things that you that frustrate you the most about the house or that practically on a day-by-day basis you are frustrated about one one of those things that I've run into is there are a lot of homes that don't have very big pantries big pantries really make a big difference if you have a really Slim Pantry being able to go from a very small pantry to a very big Pantry that's something that provides value to a lot of people and so the point being is that these weaknesses when you go into a house and you see these weaknesses they're not subjective cosmetic things these are things that if they are updated in some way they will provide tangible objective value to the bulk of the market and your personal preference even though it might be different on some other things on something like this your personal preference is probably going to align with the with the Market's preference with the average buyer's preference so so weaknesses clear straightforward weaknesses of a of a home that can be updated there's opportunity there because a my first point here I feel like I'm preaching a sermon my first point is that they they're very clear-cut and you update it it will immediately provide value I I have an example of this from my previous home that I used to live in that I now rent out as a as a short-term rental on on Airbnb and whatnot we had a very choppy floor plan in that house it was a split level try level home and the main level of the home just had walls everywhere I mean there were all sorts of walls there was a living room a dining room and the kitchen and this is all within like a 600 square ft piece of space so it's not a it's not a huge area I mean that's only a little bit bigger than a than your average two-car garage but there were walls everywhere and that made the dining room small that made the living room small that made the kitchen small that gave it poor sight lines poor lighting it impacted so many different things and anyone who who went into that house would feel that way again that was an objective weakness with the house anyone would feel that way and the solution not easy but simple there's a difference there's a difference between a simple solution and an easy and an easy one I would actually prefer a solution that's simple over one that's easy because an easy solution can sometimes be very difficult to come to I'd rather a simple one that's that's difficult to accomplish because at least you know what to do all right that's a whole another topic for a whole another day and the solution was simple remove the walls add a kitchen island because the kitchen was small it didn't have a lot of counter space it didn't have a lot of cabinet room and voila the main level that's all we did now now we went ahead and and as part of that we renovated the kitchen but the main level went from being the black eye of the house to becoming the focal point of the house we turned it from a weakness to now you go in that house and that main level is just gorgeous it's perfect it's functional it is everything has been updated we even had there there's another small little example there as we were doing that we had to put a big LVL beam across the the center of the ceiling because it was a a loadbearing wall was one of the walls that we had to remove well unfortunately the way the home was framed there was no way to completely remove one small little section of the wall up against where basically the dining room and the living room were juxtaposed were were next to each other so there was going to be I can't remember exactly how much but maybe like a foot of wall that was going to come out from the back wall well that was kind of lame we were we were disappointed for that we wanted that to all be flush and so I started thinking okay well what can we do with this how can again here's another weakness anyone that walks in here is going to see that and is going to going to be like oh man what that's random why is there a little piece of wall sticking out there like that doesn't make sense so what we did was we actually Incorporated cabinets into there and the the wall was centered on that wall on that big back wall the the part that was sticking out and so we were able to put a big cabinet almost like a small pantry cabinet but we we used it as a cleaning cabinet and it actually was perfect I I can't imagine that living room without that that little cleaning cabinet closet whatever you want to call it because it actually completed the room and if it wasn't for us just kind of locking into that honestly we would have never even done that and so we were able to even take that to take that weakness and to make it functional and to and to turn that into an opportunity and into a strength of that little renovation that we did there as well so so that's an example now there are other reasons though why weaknesses are some of your best opportunities and that is simply because a lot of homes in the area in a neighborhood or in an area are going to be built the same way so what does that mean if your home if if a home that you're looking at has certain weaknesses let's say the the small closets or whatever the case may be odds are the other homes in that neighborhood have the same weakness because they were built by the same Builder or built at the same time period where that where people you know didn't have as many clothes or or their clothes weren't as bulky or whatever the case may be they didn't need as much closet space and so your weakness that you're identifying here is going to be a weakness that anyone looking to move in that area are going to find with finded with a lot of the homes in that area and so by addressing that weakness and by mitigating that weakness now you have just improved that house in a way that's going to differentiate it from all the neighbors the neighbors are going to have homes potentially that do have choppy floor plans that do have the small closets whatever the case may be and yours won't now that might be that might seem like a silly way to think about it on the surface but when you sell your house or when you rent it out or whatever the case may be whatever you you do with a house you won't be competing with other homes that are 25 miles away right people that are looking at your house at least in this market in the Greenville Market they'll be you'll be competing with homes that are close to your house whether you're competing with rentals whether you're competing with other homes for sale that's what people will look at they're not going to look in you know if you're in Greer you're not really going to be competing with homes in pedmont that's just not how this local market works you'll be competing with your immediate neighbors buyers will be looking at your neighbors homes as they look at your home and if you have a way like that where to to to take the weaknesses that are prevalent in that area area and you mitigate that and then you turn that into a strength then you have just created a ton of value for your home relative to that micro Market relative to the micro Market of that neighborhood you're you're going to blow the competition out of the water you're going to when you go to sell or to rent that house or whatever you're going to have something that nobody else likely will end up having and this is one of the things when I'm listing a house that I try to do I try to find those little differentiators I try to think through okay people that are looking to move potentially into this area or potentially into this property what are the things that are going to to stand out in their mind that are going to pop as like wow this is what differentiates this home from other similar ones that I am looking at right now or that I have looked at and then I I take those things and I make that a big focus of my marketing I want to not just make people impressed with this house but I also want to sew that seed in the mind of potential buyers that that this unique feature is here because then that might help them also as they look at other homes to see that those homes don't have that so if I focus my marketing for instance let's say that a home has had small closets and the owners were able to either had closets in order to mitigate the smallness of the ones that are there or they were able to to expand their closets in some way well I'm going to focus on how much storage the home has and that the the owners have actually upgraded that storage and then what's going to happen is when people read that they're going to go look at other homes in that area and they're going to be like wow you know that home that we went to it talked a lot about storage and now I'm looking at this home this home doesn't a lot of storage like that's that's honestly kind of a big deal that was that was a big point with that house and that's what I want to do I want to sew that seed of Doubt for the other properties and also making this house that has had that weakness mitigated make it even more desirable even more differentiated from from the rest of the market from the rest of the competition now of course the the tricky part in all of this as we've already said often times these are simple ideas but not necessarily easy to do finding ways to increase closet sizes or figuring out what to do once you take down walls for instance you take down a wall now you've got ceilings that have to be somehow tied in you got flooring that has to be tied in there's a lot of different things that go into something like that it it's not necessarily easy and there's some of this that me as a realtor I can help with again I I provide a lot of consultation I have a lot of experience rehabbing houses I'm not necessarily the most handy guy so I'm not going to be the one that's going to actually be doing the work but I understand what needs to be done and I understand the different approaches and so I can provide you know a good voice in the room on that and as well I know experts who can help contractors Structural Engineers people like that that can can step in and can do some of that work as well if you don't in in fact when going back to to me Consulting when we actually did that that remodel of our old home I actually designed the kitchen myself I designed the kitchen myself online I'd never done anything like that and it turned out really well and and by the way going back to that and talking about that that differentiating from your neighbors I saw a home in that neighborhood that sold recently that had the exact same floor plan as my old house which again I still own it's an Airbnb right now someone sold their home in the same neighborhood for a really fantastic price and they had not done any of that work they had not done any of that opening out the the opening up the floor plan and taking down walls and whatnot so I'm really happy about that that the amount of value that I added the fact that that home that hadn't done all of that and honestly hadn't done very many updates at all sold really high in the market let's just say I was very excited to see that and it made me even more happy that that we did that work when we did it and and shows that other people in that neighborhood they're not doing it so it really would if I ever do decide to sell that property which is always a possibility it will be differentiated from the competition it it will it would definitely shine online and It Shines on Airbnb it's it's a it's a great property that we get a lot of good feedback on that's pretty much all that I have to say on all of that except that I'll say this I would encourage you guys if if you're doing this to your own home do it don't wait until you're about to move or about to sell to to do these updates do this while you're living in the home it might be tricky financially some people just don't have the money to do it but you want to be able if you can you want to be able to enjoy these updates not just in order to enjoy it but also you may discover other simple updates that you can do off of those other updates for instance if I were getting my old house ready to sell if I had done those updates with opening up the floor plan simply because I was trying to to rehab the house to sell it I probably wouldn't have added that cleaning closet on the end off that wall I probably would have just been like you know whatever people are just going to have to to deal with a little bit of a wall you know sticking out here but the fact that I was living there I was more invested in it and it didn't cost hardly anything to add that cabinet there but I was more plugged in and more focused on it and then having lived in it for several more years after we did that it just showed just how more Val how much more valuable that was and we did a whole lot of other updates as well that after we had opened up that floor plan now it revealed okay we need to do this we need to do that and it just really when you're living in it you're just a lot more aware of things that can be done that improve the property and again all of those things do add value and and it gives you you something again more things that you can Market more marketing ability with the property more value it makes the property shine in the eye of a potential renter in the eye of a potential buyer whatever the case may be and so that's how you can turn a weakness into a strength and and this applies to Investments as well you can consider the weakness of an investment property and try to figure out how you can turn that into a strength I'm I'm not planning in this episode to go down that road but now that you have kind of gotten your your mind thinking about that start thinking through okay if I'm buying an investment property what are some weaknesses of an investment property that can be turned into a strength what are some of those things and again you're adding value you're you're increasing your rents you're doing things you're you're by improving a property by converting weakness into strengths as an investor that allows you to make that property more valuable and it allows you to potentially increase your rents to a different type of renter or whatever the case may be it gives you a property that is more valuable and can do more for you because it's doing more for the renters I'm not going to go too far down that road I'm not going to go any further down that road I'm just going to leave you with that maybe we'll do a separate episode where we discuss that at some point but for now that's it that's how you turn a real estate weakness into a strength I hope you guys have enjoyed that I hope you guys are staying staying warm out there we're still here in the doldrums of of the winter buying large it's been a relatively warm winter but it's still chilly out there stay warm stay safe and until next time let's buy and sell some houses here in Greenville [Music]