How to Get Your Home Ready to Sell

When you are selling your home, you need to be able to appeal to a potential buyer’s emotions and ideals.  No matter how unrealistic the vision is, buyers are swayed by perfectly clean, sparsely furnished, and artistically decorated homes.  Even if it won’t look that way once they move in, buyers want to see their dream home before they make an offer.

My point is, you will need to put some work into getting your home ready to sell.  Minor repairs will need to be done, the house will need to be cleaned from top to bottom, and you will need to declutter and pay attention to staging.  It may not be necessary to spend a lot of money, but a little bit of elbow grease will go a long way toward selling your home at the best possible price.

Repairs

When readying a house for sale, you really don’t want to spend too much, as it is unlikely that the repairs will increase the value enough to repay the cost of the repairs.  However, there are a number of little repairs that you can do that will improve how the house shows.  Here are some examples of repairs that you can and should make, most of which cost only a few bucks each.

• Replace cracked tiles
• Fix faucets that drip
• Re-caulk around sinks, showers, and tubs
• Patch any places in the walls that need it, and fill nail holes
• Repaint interior walls, preferably something neutral but not necessarily white
• Paint the basement if it’s not finished
• Replace or repaint the numbers on your house or mailbox if they are not clearly readable from the street

Cleaning

Cleaning is all-important when you are getting ready to sell your home.  You will literally need to clean from top to bottom, and keep it clean on a daily basis if you are still living in the home.  First there are the major things to clean:

• Vacuum and steam clean carpets
• Wax floors
• Wash the exterior of the house, porches or decks, and sidewalks with a pressure washer
• Wash windows, inside and out
• Sweep out the garage 

Just like with repairs, however, the small details can make a difference.  This often requires more labor-intensive cleaning, such as:

• Bleach dirty grout
• Scrub stained sinks, tubs, and showers
• Dust the seldom-noticed, hard-to-reach places, such as light figures, the tops of fan blades, and around interior trim
• Search for and clean out cobwebs, top to bottom, inside and out
• Clean oil-stained floors in the garage
• Polish bathroom mirrors, faucets, and other fixtures 

Obviously, if you are not living in your house while it is on the market, you will probably only have to spend a lot of time on these things once, and then come back for touch-ups periodically.  If you are still living in the home, however, be sure to vacuum, sweep, and mop every day, dust every couple of days, and check the details once a week to do touch-ups as needed.

Staging

The first thing to do when you get to this step is to remove all the personal items.  Potential buyers don’t want to see a picture of Great-Aunt Millie on the mantle, as it makes it harder for them to picture their own memories there.  Besides, the less clutter the better, and personal items are usually clutter – we just like them because of the memories they represent, but a potential buyer won’t have the same emotional connection.

Once you have removed all the personal items, keep going and remove all the clutter, too.  Pack away your knick-knacks and books – think of this as just getting a head start on something you will have to do anyway when you sell the house.  You might keep back a few unique decorative items for staging, but remember, less is better – so I really do only mean a few.

Next, your furniture gets the same treatment.  Remove everything but the essentials for each room – i.e., dining table and chairs for the dining room, desk and chair for the home office, and the bed, nightstand, and dresser for the bedroom – and put the rest in storage.  The purpose of this is not only to make it clear what the purpose of each room is, but also to make the rooms look as big as possible.  Setting up a room with a few pieces of furniture leaves a lot of open space, which makes a room feel large and airy, rather than small and crowded.

Finally, pay some special attention to the closets.  After boxing up everything you don’t need, rearrange what’s left so that if someone opens the door (and they will), they’ll see a neat, well-organized space.  Yes, this means you can’t store your packed-up clutter in the closets.  (No, you can’t shove it under the bed, either.)  In the buyer’s mind, an organized closet will reflect on how you have maintained your home,

Once you have taken everything down to the bare essentials, you can then add back a few accent items that will hint at a picture-perfect life within those walls.  This is the part that many people hire a professional to do.  The idea is to use artful understatement to capture the essence of that perfect life everyone dreams of.  A ribbon tied around a perfectly folded, fluffy bathroom towel; a pretty book and a pair of reading glasses on the bedside table; an elegant place setting at the dining room table – these are all ways to inspire interest and anticipation in a potential buyer.

If you won’t be living in the house while you are trying to sell it, you will find staging a little easier, since you won’t have to work to keep it picture perfect all the time.  Do be sure to leave some furniture, though, as a staged room shows far better than an empty room.

Landscaping

One of the most important things you can do to get your home ready for the market is to touch up the landscaping.  A potential buyer starts forming their impression of a home before they even step out of the car, so how your home looks from the outside can really set the mood for a sale.  Mow your lawn regularly, obviously, and trim your bushes; but don’t hesitate to put a few finishing touches on it, such as putting planters with flowers on the front porch, trimming the edges of the lawn nicely, and keeping sidewalks and porches swept.

A lot is riding on how you get your home ready for the market – not just whether it sells, but also how much it sells for – and a neat, clean, well-staged home tends to get better offers than one that looks dirty and lived-in.  Yes, of course it is a hassle if you are still living in the home, but if the price is right it shouldn’t be for very long.  For more suggestions on how to get your home ready to sell, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

From Michael Burke’s article as seen in the News-Press HomeFinder.com