Appraisers use six levels to describe the condition of a home, explains Jonathan Montgomery, president of the Real Estate Appraisal Group in Washington. The first level (known as C1) is reserved for houses that are brand new and haven’t been lived in, and the sixth level (C6) signals that a house is basically uninhabitable. Those are set in stone, but it’s in between those two ends of the spectrum that people can level up or down, sometimes based on very simple things like how messy their house is. “If your house is cluttered,” Montgomery says, “then the buyer is going to have the perception that there may be repairs or something that they need to do to improve that home once they buy it.” Clutter also typically makes a space look smaller than it is.
