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Larry said:

Just put in the listing agreement that the dish stays with the house. No doubt a potential buyer could make you leave it anyway since it is permanently mounted to the house.

I hope you have better luck selling your house than I'm having selling mine.

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jpn said:

Been there, done that, had a dish that was visible from the street. Don't take it with you; D* will supply a new dish.

Don't make yourself nuts about it. Plan on leaving it as-is. Don't mention the dish in the listing, or say anything about it to prospective buyers, unless they directly ask about it. To a buyer, it's a cosmetic issue. If a buyer really wants it removed, they can put it in the punch-list of items-to-fix prior to closing. You can remove it, patch the roof, and sell the used dish+lnb's on eBay or craigslist, or on this forum's classifieds, or possibly to some dealer on the web.

If you remove it now and your patch leaks, it WILL impact your potential for sale. Any decent home inspector (or observant buyer) will find the water damage. OTOH, if the buyer wants it removed/patched, that probably will happen after the imspection and any potential patch problems will be theirs, not yours.

.....

Something else to consider: Not sure about your area, but I've known of cable companies who would not install service to people who could not provide 2 months' of LOCAL utility bills. For example, Comcast cable in Danbury CT. I had a neighbor who moved into the area from 45 miles away (and from NY state). They had no LOCAL utility bills, when Comcrap told them to call back in 2 months, they immediately called the sat installers. If your local cable provider has a ridiculous policy like that, then some buyers will find it a convenience to have your dish already there.

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yourbeliefs said:

Well I had absolutely NO intention of removing the dish before any deals were closed. I plan on watching D* up to until I leave the place. As far as the cable thing you mentioned, the best advertisement for D* is how much our cable system here SUCKS. We have Cox, and as I say, they REALLY live up to their name. I could definitely see using that as a selling point, but not everyone is as big on their television quality as myself, and you need to know your audience. I may tell the Realtor to not talk about it unless brought up, but that if they do to say that it is there because of the HORRIBLE cable system. I may do some promoting myself and print out a list for the realtor to give to them of Cox stuff versus D* stuff.

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jpn said:

The only reason to consider removing before a deal is struck, is if your house sits on the market a while and the realtor gives feedback that some prospects commented about it.

As for instructing the realtor: any decent realtor knows when to keep their mouth shut. If not, they should be fired. Still, a suggestion re: how to counter any dish-comments with cable-comments is a good idea.

When I sold my old house, we created a handout listing all of the improvements we made and the year they were done. We left it in the realtor folder for all buyers to see. Ours was a long list and I didn't show the dish on it, but your dish is in a prominent position. If you make a handout-list, that might be a good place to play-up the "high definition satellite dish" and to trash the cable company. A low-tech buyer may consider a "high definition" dish as a bonus feature. Don't state "HD" dish, the low-tech buyer may not understand.

Good luck with the sale, hopefully it's been a lot of discussion over a no-concern issue.

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yourbeliefs said:

I think another thing that helps is that the house is already wired for satellite in most of the rooms where it would make sense. But if the dish is already up, does that mean that all they would need is the receivers and a call to D* to activate service?

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jpn said:

If you sell to a D* subscriber, he can connect his already-active equipment on move-in day, and call to change the address on the account. If the buyer isn't a subscriber but wants D*, then he won't need to replace the dish.... although a free replacement and installation would be part of his newcomer package.

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yourbeliefs said:

What about if they are E* people? Obviously the dish and switch would need to be replaced, but surely they could use the existing wire structure, right?

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yourbeliefs said:

Well that's my fear... that people will say, "Ugh, that dish is so ugly. I don't want to have to go through removing that thing." I'm trying to turn having the big ugly dish into a selling point or a positive, but I'm not quite sure how to do that, and I need some sort of ammunition for that before I tell my dad and the Realtor that the dish is with the house, because removing that thing manually is one of the LAST things I feel like doing.

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