When a seller sits down with Jules and me to talk about potentially selling their home, the idea of selling it as-is comes up with a good number of them — not all, maybe a third — and it doesn't always come up at the same point. Sometimes a seller raises it right at the start. Sometimes it doesn't surface until there's an offer on the table and we're working through repairs. Whenever it comes up, it usually sounds like some version of "I just want to sell it as-is." And the seller's reasoning is fair. You don't want to pour money into a house you're leaving. You don't want to get nickel-and-dimed by a buyer over every little thing. You bought the home in the condition it's in, you upgraded it yourself while you lived there, you didn't hand the previous owner a list of demands when you purchased it — so it doesn't feel right to be on the hook for all of that now. Nobody wants to spend money on a house they're about to hand to somebody else.

Listing a home as-is, though, is just about the last thing Jules and I want to do, and we'll tell a seller that directly. There's really only one situation where as-is is the right call. If a home genuinely isn't in sellable condition — if it's a property being sold as an investment and we're looking for an investor to buy it — then yes, we list it as-is, we don't put anything into it, and it's priced for exactly what it is. That's an honest use of as-is. It's also not what most sellers are actually dealing with. Most sellers have a nice home, they want to get as much for it as they reasonably can, and they'd just rather not spend anything to get there. That's understandable. That still isn't a reason to put as-is on the listing, because the word does something a seller usually isn't thinking about. As-is tells every buyer scrolling past that something is wrong with the home before they've even looked at it. Jules and I aren't going to send that signal about a home that doesn't deserve it.

There's also a timing problem with deciding on as-is up front. When a seller commits to it early, they're deciding they won't fix anything before anyone knows what each buyer is even going to care about. Different buyers care about different things, and the buyer who ends up writing the offer hasn't seen the home yet — so there's no way to know what their concerns are, and there's no reason to answer a question they haven't asked. You'd be making a firm decision with nothing behind it.

This is usually where it's our job to talk a seller off the ledge a little, and we've been down this road enough times to know how these go. What we tell them is that we are not going to let them spend more money than the house actually needs — that part we hold the line on. We're also not going to let a buyer charge you for something cosmetic, or something that's just down to the buyer's personal taste. Slamming the door before we know anything isn't the answer. What makes more sense is to find out what the real issues are, if there even are any, and decide from there. Because every buyer is different.

Different buyers walk through the same house and notice completely different things. Jules and I have worked with a number of buyers who are doctors and nurses, and they look at a home through a safety lens — they want to know the range and the refrigerator are anchored so they can't tip, they're looking at whether a stair railing or a guardrail is tall enough, they're checking the things that could actually hurt somebody. A buyer who's a car guy walks in and barely notices any of that — he's in the garage, looking at the space, the condition, whether it's set up the way he'd want it. And plenty of buyers don't really know what they're looking for, so they don't call much of anything out. You don't know which of them is going to write the offer on your home. When you list as-is from the start, you're cutting a large part of that buyer pool out before you've even met them, and you're doing it to get out ahead of a problem you haven't confirmed you actually have.

Jules and I had a seller in New Riverside who told us from the start she didn't want to do any repairs — she wanted it listed as-is, full stop. We didn't argue the point with her in the abstract, because there was nothing concrete to argue about yet. What we told her was that we'd make that call when there was real information to base it on, and we didn't advertise the home as-is in the meantime. The home went under contract. The buyer did come back asking for some repairs. But the house was a New Riverside home that had only been built about four years earlier, and the builder's warranty covered what the buyer was asking for. The thing she'd wanted the as-is label to protect her from cost her nothing in the end. If we'd done it her way and put it out as-is, we'd never have gotten there — she'd have shrunk her own buyer pool and given up negotiating room to protect herself from something that turned out not to be hers to pay for.

As-is feels like protection. Most of the time it's protection against a problem the seller hasn't confirmed is real, and it costs them buyers and makes the whole negotiation harder before anyone even knows whether there's a problem at all. Not every home is going to be perfectly up to date, and no buyer expects that — but that's what pricing the home correctly is for. A home that isn't fully current gets priced for where it actually is, and the price does that job honestly without a label that scares people off before they've looked. Unless a home truly is an investor property and we're pricing it that way on purpose, Jules and I would much rather price it right from the start, find out what's actually there, and handle it with real information.

If you're thinking about listing in Bluffton and the idea of "just selling it as-is" is sounding good to you because you don't want the repair headache, that's exactly the kind of thing Jules and I talk through with sellers early — before anything gets decided, and before the listing ever goes out.

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 figure out what's actually worth doing before a listing, and What Rushing A Listing To Market Actually Costs covers what happens when sellers try to make these decisions in a hurry instead of with a plan.

Jeff & Jules Moran

Anchor & Isle Real Estate

Bluffton & Hilton Head Island

Strategic Marketing. Experienced Negotiation. Real Results.

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