House what should we do to sell

[Vs123]

Hi,

We want to sell our house. We have been there 15 years and the house has lots of good memories. We now want to sell it but not getting a lot of traction. The houses in the neighbourhood have sold for similar price or more. Any suggestions of where is it We are missing the trick here?

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/159203675

Thanks
Vanya

Trim the trees and shrubbery growing up the front of the house.

Sweep the leaves in the garden. Looks very autumnal. Get a couple of pots and put some spring flowers in them.

I agree with the poster who mentioned the red in the kitchen. The two red things draws you in and distracts you.

Don’t know the area so can’t comment on price.

I absolutely agree. The photos are loads better. Even the garden looks much more appealing. It looks dreadful in that first picture
,

The photos and floorplan are better on the link @SabrinaThwaite shared and it's much easier to understand the layout.

Agree with pp though that bedroom 5 doesn't look like an actual bedroom on the floorplan and there's no photos of it. And really I'd want an en suite. So I'd expect you to to be priced at the very upper end of the 4-bed range for your area.

Given that there's a study, you could perhaps shift the desks out of the bedrooms? Desks in bedrooms always imply a lack of space.

I hate fake grass but that wouldn't be a deal breaker if I loved the house enough.

Also, does the kitchen have external
windows as it looks like it’s in the centre of your house? For a large house, that would put me off.

Front and back gardens need cleaning up. The back garden in particular looks very sad. Get the furniture out and have some pictures taken on a sunny day.

bathroom needs a good scrub?? Floor and lower wall tiles look like grout is very dirty?

You can see the kitchen windows (and the rest of the kitchen) on the photos from the other agent.

Get rid of the plastic grass. The garden looks awful.

As others have said, declutter the kitchen sides, even just for the pictures clear off all the things that are not fixed. I'd also take down the hanging cups.

The bathroom is dated and appears dirty in the photo.

The leaves need to be removed from the garden, and take the photo when the sun is actually in the garden rather than when it is in shade. The fake grass, doesn't look good, you can see the joins.

Tidy up your drive, remove the weeds etc.

I do think it might be a be overpriced with the work that would be needed to update it.

Where is the second bathroom?

Your house is no better than the one that sold for £750. You probably think yours is more modern but it's a terrible
Mishmash of 80s, 90s, cottage, antique with a really bad layout and a small garden with badly laid astroturf.

It needs to be priced as a renovation project and then it should sell. Sorry 😬, but I think you're looking at it through rise tinted glasses

I love the style/frontage of your house. With a refurb budget of 150 to 200 this could be my dream home. At present the rooms don't flow especially the kitchen. Access is weird and the sink and cooker look like they're in separate rooms. This whole area could be opened up spectacularly!
Only one bathroom upstairs when I expect similar house would have already had an en-suite installed in the large bedroom is a problem.
Not sure why people are saying the 5th bedroom is not a bedroom. It's the same size as the 4th bedroom and in many other RM listings would be deemed a double bedroom!
Agree the other EA photos are better.
Are you getting viewers and no offers or just not getting viewers?
Feel for you, our large 4/5 bed detached took 2 years to sell. In the end, someone with vision (and a good budget) saw the potential. Hope you get lucky soon.

I wouldn’t do anything other than drop the price (speaking as someone who flips houses). Your problem is a layout one, particularly downstairs - the kitchen needs relocating to the back of the house. That’s not something that’s a quick or cheap fix.

Painting things, removing things etc won’t take that away, will cost you time and money, and probably not make a blind bit of difference.

There is huge scope there to make an absolutely fabulous family home for someone with some internal adjustments and a full refurbishment.

You should look at how much a four bedroom, two bathroom house in good condition in your area would go for and then knock £150k off that price. Everything sells if it’s priced correctly.

I’ve got a 5 bed and wouldn’t have considered this as the rooms are too small and not enough bathrooms. I agree with marketing it as a 4 bed, or even a 3 tbh with dressing room and office. The layout downstairs is quite confusing and I don’t understand how to get around! Also the price. Maidenhead isn’t the nicest and I’d never pay 800 to live there!

OK so you're extremely close to a motorway and railway line - but you can't do anything about that and hopefully that's reflected in the price - but for me (and i suspect many others) there's no way I've pay close to £1m on a property that backs onto a motorway.

To me it looks like the property has been over extended. The kitchen is kind of divided into two rooms which is off putting and both the kitchen and main lounge are only getting borrowed light via other rooms. I imagine that would be very dark and would put me off booking a viewing.

If - as others have seen you've been trying to sell for years it might be worth considering spending a good amount of money on sorting out your layout. and also adding an ensuite upstairs. I think for £800k most people would expect one.

Either that or you'll have to reduce the price to allow the buyer to invest in the layout improvements.

Edited to add this link. If I had £800k to spend I'd be buying this property instead - just round the corner from yours. It has less bedrooms - but has an ensuite and layout works. Plus it's brand new so I could just unpack and get on with my life instead of spend a year renovating yours. Sorry. 4 bedroom semi-detached house for sale in Altwood Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire, SL6

Lovely house OP, things seem v slow atm.

Marketed as 5 bed with one modest bathroom could be an issue. If I was a buyer I would factor in changing the tiny bedroom into a good shower room and WC

What I presume is the ground floor extension across the back has led to some odd layout features. Is the kitchen / breakfast room really a self contained area with no way in except the side door?? Do you really have to go through all the rooms to get to the top left Reception? Or is the plan missing some doors?

The kitchen layout, two long areas not quite aligned, is unusual. As a buyer I would consider remodelling the kitchen into the ‘extra’ reception room, or something.

So quite an expense on a nicely finished house.

Can you hear the motorway?

Immediate thoughts would be to power wash the drive, and sweep the back garden and brush the plastic grass to refresh it. The rear garden especially looks untidy.

To be honest though, I think it's overpriced. Realistically it's a 4.5 bed and 1 bath - looks like you have a small shower room downstairs by the front door. Most people buying a house of that size and price would want to redecorate pretty much every room, recarpet the whole of the ground floor, and install a new kitchen and bathroom.

What it needs is £200k spent to remodel the inside and fully landscape the rear garden.

Your decor is very individual and will be a lot of work to undo. That will put quite a lot of people off. Agree with others that your layout seems very odd but I suspect that's a EA error. Garden looks like house has been empty for a year! I think you need to do an extreme declutter - weights by the sofa don't exactly scream homely...

The kitchen and bathroom are very dated, and the kitchen is small for a house of that size. The artex ceilings will put a lot of people off. People will be discounting the property because it will need immediate and costly work to sort those things out.
The back garden is so unloved. Can you get rid of the trampoline? Put some plantrd areas in and generally tidy it up?
I think this one will come down to price. You either need to fix those things yourself, or drop your asking price to make it more attractive to others to do the work.

Personally I would not buy a house with an astroturf garden. I appreciate that others see it as positive but it cuts down your buyers.

And who wants a shower right by the front door?

It’s an attractive house (IMO) with loads of space but very inexpert decisions made when it was extended. Which many buyers would now want to sort out.

I would take down some of your curtains. They really drew my eye and not in a good way.

Is it possible to store some of your furniture? The bulky ornate chairs really distracted me from looking at the bones of the house.

It’s a nice house OP with a great layout but the two things that put me off are the linoleum in your kitchen and the awful patches of astroturf in your garden.

Have you got budget to dress it up a bit? (Others have commented on the bathroom as well). Otherwise I think you need to knock a bit off the price to allow for changes. The garden is also very small for a 5 bed house.

The kitchen seems tiny so I'd want to convert one of the reception rooms, which would cost £££, so I'd want the starting price to be quite a lot lower.

Plastic grass is the last thing you need living next to a polluted motorway. You need real grass and lots of trees and plants that purifies the air and absorbs pollution.

It’s your kitchen and bathroom , but particularly the kitchen , unless you wanted to use a room for a downstairs bedroom, people would want a large open kitchen diner on the ground floor on a house that size .

This is your competition- £20k cheaper, large kitchen that leads into the dining room one way and a large utility the other way. 2 bathrooms upstairs, including an en suite for the master bedroom.

I found this property on the Rightmove Android app and wanted you to see it: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/159701273

It costs a few K though to relay a garden. Once you put astroturf down it isn't rooted to the spot.

Moving a motorway out the back, that is a lot more tricky (impossible).

I think this house has some strange internal features and is unlikely to appeal to a premium buyer, more to someone who wants to do a renovation or someone with little cash who needs a big house and doesn't care that much about the state of it or strange layout. Neither of these buyer types are likely to drive the price high. I see the price was lowered in March so you've had a couple of months to see the effect of the price reduction.

The agent feedback should be telling the OP what they need to know.