The #1 Investment You Can Make To Sell Your Home
It’s a conversation heard over and over again. “We need to sell our house, but we just have too many repairs and upgrades to do, and there just isn’t any time to do it. Maybe next year we’ll try to sell.” There are also those homeowners who seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum and list their house without doing any kind of work or seeming to care how their house looks to potential buyers. The fact of the matter is, selling a house isn’t easy, even with the best agents and marketing team behind you. Selling the house is one thing, preparing the house to be sold is something entirely different, and the more preparation you put into your home, the better off you’ll be.
Why Prepare?
As mentioned before, many homeowners will go into overdrive and start throwing money at their house in hopes of getting a better price or enticing buyers. Houses will receive extensive landscaping, a new bathroom, new flooring, light fixtures, plumbing, paint and whatever else homeowners can think to do to make the house more appealing to buyers. While some of those repairs and upgrades may be necessary, that isn’t all the preparation you need to do to get your home ready to list. After all, homes that are prematurely listed don’t show well, spend more time on the market, see multiple price reductions and ultimately go for less than others. Don’t be in this boat.
What Kinds of Preparations do you Mean?
Since you’ve already decided you want to move, start packing up your house. You don’t want sellers to come in and look at your stuff, you want them to see the house and fall in love. Pre-pack your off season clothes and unnecessary accessories to make you closets look bigger, pack your extra dishes and glassware to make your cabinets look more spacious. Pack any collections that can distract buyers, and put away your family pictures. If potential buyers see your pictures they have a harder time picturing themselves living in your house. Also, pack away your valuables to keep items from getting damaged or stolen. A potential home buyer needs to see your house, not your stuff. Sometimes your stuff can distract buyers from seeing how great your house can really be.
Not only does pre-packing help get your house ready to be listed, it stages your house for sale as well. Staged homes show better, get offers faster and make the home selling process much less stressful. But the other great advantage to taking the time to pack up your house? You have so much less to do when your house finally sells and you can move into your new home. Moving for anyone is never fun, but if you can do it in stages, as discussed above, it gives you less to do in the last weeks of your house and makes the whole home selling process not such a headache.
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By Jeffry Evans – I enjoy writing about real estate and helping people with homes and professionals in the industry. If you’re looking to become a real estate agent check out my site http://www.realestatelicense.org/how-to-get-a-real-estate-license.html to see the requirements and resources your state has.