10 Cleaning Mistakes That Waste Money When Selling Your Home

A dirty home quietly kills buyer confidence and can slash perceived value fast. In this episode, Tim breaks down 10 cleaning mistakes that make buyers discount your home before they even make an offer.

You’ll learn:

• Why covering smells with candles makes buyers suspicious
• How dirty grout makes an entire bathroom feel neglected
• Why dust above eye level ruins your “well-kept home” story
• The window-track grime buyers notice when they test windows
• Why bleach can destroy stainless steel
• When to clean your oven so it doesn’t stink during showings
• Why HVAC filters and vents affect how fresh your home feels
• How pet hair silently lowers perceived value
• The touch points buyers notice: switches, handles, and remotes
• The #1 mistake: not airing out your home before showings

Bottom line: the best showing smell is nothing. Clean beats covered-up every time.

Intro

Outro

Transcript

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Nobody's going to tell you this, but one of the easiest ways to make sure that you lose money during your home sale is to make sure that it's not clean because a dirty home loses about 5% of perceived value right when buyers walk in. And on a $500,000 home, that's a $25,000 mistake. And look, I know how tough it can be to keep a home clean. I've seen some really dark things. Two months ago, you were you were pure, you were unblemished, you were you were beautiful. I tried scrubbing, I tried bleaching, I tried asking you nicely. And now I'm threatening you. And I swear on everything I love. I will fix you or I will put you in the ground. Honey, who are you talking to in there? Why is the door locked? I'll be right out. Today we're walking through the top 10 things that sellers neglect that quietly cost them the most money, starting with the very easy fixes and ending with the one mistake that is single-handedly the biggest deal killer in the entire sale process. Let's get to it. Number 10, this is when you try to cover up smells instead of removing the source. You can use candles, plugins, sprays, simmering pots of cinnamon on the stove. Every seller thinks this is the move, but it usually isn't. And I'll be honest, this cinnamon thing drives me up a wall. If I walk into a house and smell cinnamon or vanilla cupcake at 10 in the morning, my brain immediately goes into detective mode, wondering what they're trying to hide. The white move is to eliminate the source rather than try to cover it up. Take out the trash, wash the dog bed, put it in the garage, clean the garbage disposal. And my favorite is just to air out the house for a couple of hours before showings. When you think you've nailed it, have an honest friend walk through and let them tell you what they smell. If they give you the all clear, you're another step toward being ready. At number nine, this is ignoring the grout. And as you can tell, I have very strong feelings about this one because it's especially sneaky. Your tile might look clean from five feet away. The grout, on the other hand, is going to tell the whole story. And if you're watching this from the toilet right now, I'm not going to judge you. We've all been there. But while you're in there, do me a favor and take a look at the grout because that's usually the first thing a buyer's eyes land on. And if those lines are dark or stained, the entire room is going to feel dirty, no matter how sparkling the tiles around them are. Now, thankfully, the fix is embarrassingly cheap. Get a bottle of grout cleaner, an old toothbrush, and an hour of your time. Now, if the stains are beyond cleaning, spend another $20 on a grout pen and just be happy you knocked another hurdle off the list. At number eight, this is neglecting everything above eye level. And this gets me every time because I'm I'm 6'3, so I'm not a giant, but I am tall enough to see all of the choices that you're ignoring. Cobwebs in the ceiling corners or dust kicked on top of the ceiling fan blades, that gray fuzz on top of every door frame. Buyers like me are going to look up when they walk into a room. It's just instinct. And they're checking ceiling height and window size, light fixtures. And while their eyes are up there, they're going to see everything that you stopped noticing six years ago. That dusty fan blade and a wide angle shot of your living room is going to stand out like a stin on a white shirt. So if you're like fun size, you can still do this job. Grab a swiffer with the extension rod and a stepladder. Spend 20 minutes going from room to room. Get all the corners and the fan blades, the top of the door frames, the vent covers near the ceiling. It's all the details like this that will make buyers feel that your home is well kept. Number seven, skipping the window tracks. Window tracks are the bug graveyard of any home. Dead flies, dust bunnies, weird black gunk that nobody can name. Buyers absolutely open windows during showings, especially in nicer homes because they want to feel the sash and make sure everything works. So when they slide that window open and see a quarter inch of dirt and filth in the track, they just learned everything they didn't want to know about how you maintain your entire house. So vacuum the tracks with a crevice tool, wipe it with a damp cloth, and even Q-tip the corners if you're feeling froggy. Five minutes per window, boom, done. Number six, using bleach on stainless steel. Do not do this. I cannot stress this enough. This is the single dumbest cleaning move you can make during showing prep, and it is somehow everywhere on TikTok right now. I don't get it. It all begins when sellers panic clean in the kitchen and they just grab the bleach and wipe down everything in the kitchen, including the stainless fridge and the dishwasher and the range. Now, for the two of you in this audience who didn't watch Breaking Bad, there's a chemistry angle behind this. Bleach attacks the chromium layer, which is why stainless steel doesn't rust in the first place. So when you attack that protective layer, you end up with pitting and rust spots that are a nightmare to fix. And actually, sometimes they don't even come out. The right products here are either a dedicated stainless cleaner or a microfiber cloth with a drop of olive oil. Heck, I've I've even used WD40 in the past as well. It works great. Just wipe in the direction of the grain and then polish it dry. Done. Never put bleach anywhere near stainless ever. Or Heisenberg may come knocking. Hey, real quick, if you've ever thought about putting your home on the market but didn't know how to get started and you're not interested in paying an agent 30 grand to give you the plan, I do strategy calls with my audience to help them find the most efficient path forward. Now, if that sounds like something you would benefit from, go ahead and grab that link in the description below. Number five, oven cleaning right before showing. Now, having a clean oven is awesome. Don't get me wrong, it gives you that full hotel clean energy, and I am all about it. But timing is important here because the last thing you want is for a potential buyer to show up at your home and the whole place reeks like a Denny's kitchen fire. Self-cleaning cycles take four hours and they produce so much heat and a burning smell that your house should be off limits for at least the rest of the day. And I know a lot of you already know what I'm talking about here. And not to mention that chemical cleaner that leaves a smell that lingers for even a couple of days. So, yes, by all means, do a deep clean on that oven, but make sure it's at least three days before listing it or having anybody over to walk through. There's nothing wrong with doing a no-heat spot clean, by the way, between showings because buyers do open ovens. I don't know why, but they just do. And while nobody's ever bought a house just because the oven is clean, a filthy oven conveys a message that we just do not want anywhere near your home sale. Number four, this is not replacing or cleaning the air filters around your air returns and vents. And this is because your air returns are some of the dustiest surfaces in your house. Every time that your HVAC runs, it blows a little bit of that dust right back into the room. And buyers with allergies can feel it within two minutes of walking in. And even though they can't pinpoint exactly what's wrong, they do know that this house makes them uncomfortable. So the strategy here is to do a deep clean, unscrew the vent covers, vacuum them, wash them in the sink, dry them, and then put them back. Do the same for the return vents, replace all of the HVAC filters. And doing this is the greatest step you can make toward making the very air in your home feel fresh and clean. Number three, pet hair you stopped noticing six months ago. Here is something a little uncomfortable. If you love your pet, you have made peace with the pet hair. I've seen it. It's on the couch, it's in the quarters, it's tumbling across the hardwood, and you genuinely don't care because you love that furry little monster who sheds it. I understand. This is sort of like how you stop noticing the annoying way your spouse's jaw clicks when they eat. But when an outsider who is immune to the charms of cuddles with your furry friend walks into your home, they see everything. They see the hair coating the baseboards and the hair woven into the carpet, the tumbleweed of fur rolling across the hardware like a sad little tribute to Mr. Boots. And I make a big deal of this because roughly 70% of American households don't even own a dog or a cat, which it means most of your buyer pool walks in already sensitized to all of this. The embedded fur they see everywhere makes them stop looking at your home and start mentally adding up the cost of new carpet or professional cleaning on move-in day. And that number is automatically deducted from the perceived value of your home. You don't have to get rid of your pets, of course not. But before showing, make sure you lint roll every fabric surface. Vacuum the corners and the stair edges and underneath the furniture that you haven't moved in a year. And here's a bonus hack grab a rubber dishcloth, get it damp, and run your hand across a couch. You're going to fill that glove with an embarrassing amount of pet hair before you even know it. Try it now. It's disgusting, but it also works. Number two, neglecting the light switches, the door handles, and the fan remotes. These are the touch points, right? These are the things that every person walking through your home physically touches. They turn on lights, they check to make sure the fans work. And I'm going to gross you out for a second. The remotes that you have around the house probably have more bacteria on them than your toilet seat. Buyers don't know that consciously, but people's hands pick up sensations like grease and grime. Now, because you touch these surfaces a thousand times a day yourself, you can get desensitized as to how dirty they really are. So make sure that you take a clean cloth and a gentle cleaner, wipe every light switch, every door handle, every cabinet pole, every fan remote. You will be absolutely shocked how much dirt came off. And here we are at number one. This is not airing out your home. You see, humans are creatures of adaptation. It's one of our superpowers. And one of the things that we adapt to fastest is smell. This means that you literally cannot smell what a stranger smells the moment they walk through your door. Pets, cooking, mildew, dust, laundry, a teenage son, whatever it is, your brain has filed it under normal years ago and it stops bothering you about it. I learned this firsthand by running my vacation rentals. Guests would show up with whatever they had just been smoking clinging to their clothing, and they would never actually light up inside. But even after they left, I could still smell it every single time I would walk in before we could air the place out. My nose could tell that a stranger had been there. And if I didn't do a great job of having an air out protocol in there, the next guest nose would know it too. And that is exactly what happens every time a buyer walks into your home if you haven't neutralized the air. Now, thankfully, the fix on this one is free. Just bring an honest friend over and have them walk through like a buyer would. Whatever they smell in the first five seconds is exactly what your buyer would smell. If you don't want your home to take a hit, the best thing it could smell like is absolutely nothing. It could smell neutral. The best way to get there is to air it out. So leave the doors and windows open if you can for about an hour before the showing. It will do far more good than a million air fresheners could ever cover up. Now, of course, a clean home isn't the entire battle. There's a whole lot more that goes into what is waiting for the buyers when they step out the back door. And that's why I made this video about it right here. These are the 10 backyard features that quietly waste your money. And number one is the cheapest fix on the list, but unfortunately, it's the one that sellers ignore the longest. We'll see you there.