What Does Carfaxing Your Home Mean?

By Frank Valente

Associate Broker at eXp realty of California. Active agent and broker since 2003 in the Sacramento Region. Retired from the Navy in 2002 after 24 years as a Commander. Former Surface Warfare Officer.

Today I want to talk about preparing your home for sale. This is part two of my series on this topic, so if you haven’t seen the first video, watch it here. Last time, we talked about “Carfaxing” your home so that you can make your buyer more comfortable. I wanted to dig into exactly what this process means.

We start with inspections. That means we should get house, pest, sewer, roof, and well inspections. You should check with your local agent and talk about which inspections make sense for your area.

I also recommend that you have your agent open up a pre-escrow account and get a title report ahead of time. That way, you can review them early and deal with any surprises.

“These items are sure to make potential buyers more comfortable buying your home.”

You should also prepare your disclosures. The two important ones are the transfer disclosure statement (TDS) and the star property questionnaire (SPQ). These forms might only take you a couple of hours to fill out, and they’ll list everything the buyer might want to know about a home. That includes noise issues, repair issues, or problems with the building.

You can also go a step further with the inspections and provide estimates on the problems that came up in the report. You could also provide a timeline of when you made repairs and what they were.

If you share all of this with potential buyers, they will feel more confident about buying your home. If you have any questions, feel free to call or email me. I would love to hear from you.