When Does A Smoke Alarm Battery Cost $10,000?

When it’s in a multi million dollar house for sale, and it’s beeping and no one cares enough to change it.

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This is not an uncommon thing.

It’s a $2 fix. But no one has the attention to detail to take initiative and fix it. The owners are out of town and the selling agent just doesn’t consider it to be important. But it is important. Very important and could potentially costs $1,000’s off a buyer offer price. This is why attention to detail is so important.

Brown M & M’s

Van Halen were famous for sending out a detailed and crazy rider to venues before playing a gig. The most diva looking provision being no brown m&m’s. The reson though was not about quirkiness but all about attention to detail.

From Eddie Van Halen’s Biography.

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors, whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.

So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say ‘Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes…’ This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: ‘There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.’

So I would walk backstage, if I saw brown M&M’s in that bowl…..well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

Make Small Fixes

In real estate are those small fixes that if unattended to could raise red flags with buyers. Red flags that beeping smoke alarms is indicative of neglect in other areas of maintenance. Areas that cost more than $3 to rectify.

Bottom line. To get the most money from your home sale there must be extreme attention to detail.


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