Bluffton has an older population, and a lot of the families that Jules and I work with have to sell their parent's home at some point. In a lot of cases their parent has been in the home a really long time, and the adult kids actually grew up in the same house. The part of the process that takes the longest isn't the marketing of the home itself or the time on the market. It's the cleanout that has to happen before we can start.

A home that someone has lived in for decades is full. The cabinets, the closets, the attic, especially the garage, the storage shed out back — all of it has to be sorted through and emptied before the home can be photographed, listed, and shown. It can be a serious amount of work, and it’s usually the adult children that have to take care of it all. In Bluffton it's common for those adult kids to be spread across multiple states, which means coordinating who can come down, who can take time off, and who handles what stretches out the whole process. A cleanout that would take a couple of weekends if everyone were local can take months when nobody is.

The other thing that makes the cleanout take longer is that most of what's in a home that's been lived in for that long is literally just stuff. Not valuables or heirlooms — just stuff. Decades of receipts, old phone books, magazines, boxes that were set aside at some point and never opened again. A lot of it has no real resale value, and most of it nobody is going to want. But it won’t just go away on its own. Somebody has to move it out, and the longer the family waits to start, the more it piles up and has to be dealt with at a time that’s tough on the family.

That is the part of the listing process that Jules and I see slow down a sale most often, and it's almost always the part the family didn't account for when they were estimating how long it is going to take. The actual listing of the home — once the home is empty enough for us to get in there with our crew and pretty it up for photos and marketing — moves fast. The cleanout is the part that's hard to predict, because it depends entirely on how much is in the house and how many people are available to handle it.

There are also plenty of times where the kids simply don't have the ability to handle all of it themselves, especially when they're spread across multiple states. They'll come down, take the personal items and the things they want to keep, hand us the keys, and Jules will coordinate the rest of the cleanout from there.

The best and most obvious thing to do is to handle some of this ahead of time, while they're still living in the home and not in any rush. The boxes nobody's opened in years, the things in the garage that aren't being used, the old paperwork — can be handled in normal-life mode, over months or years, instead of in crisis mode by adult kids flying in from out of state. And, yes, a lot of parents still feel like they might use some of this stuff again someday, or they just aren't ready to deal with getting rid of it yet, which is completely understandable. It's the same work either way. The difference is who does it and under what circumstances. A homeowner in their own home, on their own schedule, can clear out a garage in a few weekends spread across a year. The same garage cleared out by adult children after a parent has passed turns into a logistics project on top of everything else they're managing.

When a family is spread thin, when they’re not all here in the area, Jules is the one running the cleanout side of it. Getting junk removal scheduled, hauling out the big items that nobody is going to want, donation pickups for the things that can go to a good cause, and clearing enough of the extra stuff that the family can actually see what they're working with. The personal items, the photos, the things that have meaning — those stay for the family to go through. The point is to take the parts of the cleanout that don't need a family member off their plate, so they can spend their time on the parts that do.

What the home is worth, what the market is doing, how to price it, all of the normal home-sale questions, Jules and I work through with every family we help on a sale like this. The part of the conversation that has to be sorted out is who is going to take care of what and when? Who is going to be in charge of the cleanout, it's the part nobody plans for until it's suddenly in front of them. The families who start thinking about it before it is urgent have a much easier time with it and avoid a lot of stress later.

If you have aging parents in Bluffton and a home that's been lived in for a long time, or you're a homeowner thinking ahead about what selling the home would look like one day, that's a conversation Jules and I are always glad to have early. The home sale itself is the part we handle. The part that goes better with time on its side is everything that has to happen before the home is ready to list.

A couple of other reads that go along with this one — our earlier piece on Spending Money In The Right Places Before Listing A Home covers how Jules and I help sellers decide what's worth doing before a home goes on the market, and What Rushing A Listing To Market Actually Costs covers why giving this kind of process real time tends to go better than forcing it.

Jeff & Jules Moran

Anchor & Isle Real Estate

Bluffton & Hilton Head Island

Strategic Marketing. Experienced Negotiation. Real Results.

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