Disclosures, what to disclose. This is vital to ensure that you are safe during and after the sale. I highly suggest going over disclosures with your agent prior to the home going on the MRS, or prior to buyers seeing the home. We want the buyer to have previously reviewed the disclosures prior to making an offer. This will help ensure the buyer doesn’t back out from things they should have already known before going into contract. In California, a massive amount of disclosures that are needing to be filled out and disclosed to the buyer. Hi, I’m Krista Mashore with Homes By Krista.

Properly filling out disclosures is not only a safety net for the buyer, but it also is for the seller. Anything from whether or not you live on a golf course, or you have a sex offender at living in the area, the surrounding area, that you know about, would have to be disclosed. I’m happy to say that after selling over 2000 homes in the past 17 years, I have never had a lawsuit. So this is important not only to me but the people that I work with. So we understand how to properly disclose on homes.

So when you’re selling and thinking about what to disclose, anything that’s ever been repaired, replaced, modified, added, fixed or changed, needs to be disclosed. So if you painted the walls, or cleaned and changed the carpets, you’ve added new lighting, or fixed the water heater, you need to disclose it. One of my common sayings to my clients is, if you have to ask me, Krista, whether or not you should disclose something, the answer, chances are, is always going to be yes. You should disclose it. So over-disclosure is always better than under-disclosure in keeping both you and I out of the courtroom.

You want the buyer to know anything and everything that you know about the home, the area, et cetera, that could have a negative impact or a negative effect on the desirability of the home, or that could have a negative impact on the price or the home value. When you disclose properly, you don’t have to worry about the buyer coming back to you later telling you that they want to go to court, or they want to try to extract more money out of you. Obviously, you can only disclose what you know about. If there are issues with the property that you don’t know about, then the buyer would have to prove that you actually intentionally knew about them and kept them from them on purpose in order to win in court.

So disclose, disclose, disclose. This helps both you, and myself, and the buyer. And as always, to find more about ways that we can help you in the selling process, please reach out to Homes By Krista, and make it a great home selling and buying day.

— Krista Mashore