Selling your house is going to be one of the biggest transitions you make in your life. There are many important things that you have to keep in mind when it comes to making that sale, and the first thing is that you need to make your house look its best inside and out.
If you want people making offers on your property, then it’s going to win if you are focused on how it looks. You need the right professionals who can also work with you to make sure that the sale goes through with all the necessary paperwork. There is a lot to get done if you want your home to be sale ready, so let’s take a look at 10 tips for getting it ready for sale so that the first buyers that come through are the first to put in an offer.
- Focus on the problem areas and start a refresh. If the curb around your home and the beginning of your lawn is starting to look overgrown, then you need to get the edger out and start making nice straight lines. Before you take your home to a market and start taking pictures of it to advertise to others, it needs to look good. So you’ve got to get the paintwork patched and the fly screens replaced at the beginning. If your door handles are overdue for an upgrade or your windows need a good scrub, then you can call in the experts to come and do it for you.
- Start the decluttering process. Putting your house on the market with a home full of your belongings is not actually as easy as you think. Most places will tell you that you need to make the house look more like a show home, which means stripping it down of any of your personal clutter and belongings. You can hire a storage unit to move things into while you transition from selling your house to moving to a new one, but it’s important to declutter the space and get it looking as neat as possible.
- Bring in the cleaners. Giving it a thorough clean both inside and out is vital. Whether you are putting on the rubber gloves and filling up the mop bucket yourself or you want to call in a team to help, you need to give your house a scrub from top to bottom. Buyers are going to notice if the floors haven’t been cleaned properly and the beds not made. They’re also going to notice if your house smells of pets. Messy floors and dirty surfaces are not going to help.
- Decorating. It may seem convoluted to invest in home renovations or decoration when you know you are selling the property. The thing is, if you don’t decorate, you’re not going to be able to give it the proper refresher that it needs. Sometimes investing a little bit of cash into your home is what’s going to make a difference and help you to get that sale. Calling in professional stylists to tell you what to renovate or decorate before you sell the house is going to help you to make the necessary changes. It’s OK to invest a few thousand dollars into freshening the place up if you know that that’s going to push the value of the house up.
- Get the experts to help you. Real estate agents are there to help you to sell a house. They know how to sell houses because that is literally what they do for their profession. By bringing in a real estate agent, you can ensure that your home is sold quickly and easily and they will be able to run the gamut for you with a campaign for selling and an agent backing you up. A great real estate agent is going to help you to list your home for sale on a range of various real estate websites, and you could even run your own DIY marketing campaigns if you want to.
- Go outside and take a look. What do the other homes on your street list for when they are being sold? This is something that you have to look up because you need to know that you aren’t going to be pricing yourself out of the market by going too high or undercutting yourself and losing out. Stand outside your home and the homes on your street and take a look at what they look like. Does everybody have neatly manicured lawns? Is there anybody dealing with overgrown wildflowers or dirty driveways? The way that other people’s homes look is going to make a difference as to whether or not you even sell your house. People will judge your home by the way that it looks on the outside, and they will judge the neighborhood by the way the neighborhood looks, too. You can’t fix up other people’s houses.But you can make sure that your home stands out for a good reason.
- Bring in more people. Having a second set of eyes take a look over your house will help to point out anything that you’ve missed. Objective outside feedback can help you to understand whether or not you’ve done a good job, and that’s why we recommended a real estate agent earlier on.
- Store your valuables. If you’re going to be having buyers who are literal strangers walking through your home, then you need to make sure that your valuables are stored away. That’s not to say that people are going to start helping themselves when they walk through your house, but why risk it? If you have a photographer come through to document the home file online listing, you may also want to ask them to pixelate or obscure any elements of the shots. This avoids anything valuable being put in the picture and making your home look like a target.
- Be open-home ready. There’s every chance that you’re going to have more than one open home when it comes to selling your house. You need to be ready for this because when you’re opening your home to the public, you need to have pets squared away and kids shipped off to grandparents for the day. Your house should be a serene, calm, and beautiful place for buyers to envision themselves living there.
- Don’t forget to get the help of a solicitor. In preparation for selling your home as well as purchasing and the next one that you live in. It’s important to engage a solicitor to help. They’ll be able to assist you with any legalities and formalities that need to be done. There are several things that you need to keep in mind, from the contract of sale to whether you have recently undertaken any building. A solicitor can give you the advice that you need.
