By: Paul Wolfert

Selling your Michigan house is a lot easier when you have an experienced professional relieving you of the lion’s share of the work. I spend full time dealing with the ins and outs of marketing, dealing with qualified prospective buyers, and making sure the Michigan technical requirements are met to the letter. That means that the lion’s share of what you need to deal with are the finishing touches of showings and open house presentations.

But long before any marketing can get under way; before an eye-pleasing Michigan listing can be created—and even before a final choice the right Realtor® is made—two formidable opponents have to be met and conquered. Taken individually, neither is nearly as imposing as when they team up. But when they work together, they can stall the initiation of any Michigan house selling initiative for months—even years. Unfortunately, they’re always hanging around the house, waiting to cause trouble.

The villains are inertia and its helpmate, clutter.

Inertia is the force that pushes you back in your seat when your jetliner takes off. It’s the force that keeps the car moving after you’ve taken your foot off the gas. It’s the physical property of a body at rest (or in motion) that opposes a change in what is happening at the moment.

In the realm of homeownership, real estate inertia is the natural tendency to stay put in your familiar home setting. Rather than upsetting the applecart by striking out in a new direction, it’s the understandable propensity to leave well enough alone—even when the familiar home base is no longer as suitable a venue as it used to be.

This despite the fact that as our family or work or financial situations evolve, sooner or later most everyone will overcome house-related inertia and start thinking about selling and finding a better fit. That might be larger or smaller, grander or simpler, or simply more conveniently located. That’s when inertia’s partner comes into play to stop everything.

Clutter is all the stuff we’ve built up to make our lives more comfortable—and there is a lot of it we could do without. But the idea of actually addressing which things are disposable, and then actually disposing of them? Well, nobody in his or her right mind wants to tackle that (at least not right now).   

To make a mathematical formula for this common phenomenon:

inertia + clutter = later

The foolproof strategy for overcoming the two scoundrels is to cut the clutter part down to size. Tackle one room at a time. It works. True, this involves overcoming a certain amount of inertia—but nothing like the mountain of the stuff that thinking about the whole household full of the stuff involves.

My i + c = l formula probably might not be included in any physics textbooks, but it’s a good one to remember as soon as you begin to think about selling your own Michigan house.

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