Selling your home can be a big undertaking. You have to find the right real estate agent and set a selling price that you hope reflects your home’s value as well as appeals to buyers. You also have to clean and stage your home to make it appealing to the potential buyers who will be coming to look at it.
Whether you are thinking about selling your house online or listing it with a traditional agent, read on for some helpful tips and tricks you can use to make your home stand out among the competition.
Think About Hiring a Home Staging Company
If you are like many people, you might not have the time or the skills needed to stage your home in a way that will appeal to buyers and make it look great in photographs. This is where a professional stager comes in. Professional home stagers are sometimes trained interior designers who know how to make a home looks its best. Other stagers might have a background in real estate sales, and some have taken professional home staging courses.
Sometimes a stager will simply come into your home and give you advice about what they think needs to be removed, added or changed before your home can be put on the market. Others will actually make the changes for you by moving furniture and artwork around and decluttering.
Your real estate agent can recommend a professional home stager near you.
Place Things You Don’t Need in Storage
Part of properly staging your home involves removing many of your personal items from the premises, allowing potential buyers to imagine their own belongings in the space. This sometimes means that you will need to put some of your furniture, artwork and even dishware and books into storage for a time. Self-storage units are readily available across the country, usually on a month-to-month basis. Some “on-demand” storage companies will even come to the home you are selling, pick up your items, store them, and deliver them to your new home when you need them, eliminating a lot of the work you need to do.
One of these companies is Livible, a Bay Area storage company that provides remote pick-up and delivery storage services in and around San Francisco as well as in several other U.S. cities. According to the company, “Today, there are more options than ever when it comes to storage, whether you’re looking to store your belongings for a few days or indefinitely. The storage industry has finally upgraded from outdated self-storage options, and now offers a number of ultra-convenient, secure, and affordable on-demand storage choices at our fingertips.”
Clean, Clean, Clean
It’s hard to overemphasize how important having a clean home is when you are trying to sell it. If you’re home isn’t clean, all potential buyers will see is the dirt on your carpets and the grime in your bathroom, rather than all the great potential your home has.
When you first decide to sell your home, you should do a deep cleaning. This usually entails things like moving all of your furniture and cleaning underneath it, washing and ironing window treatments, shampooing carpets, replacing moldy shower curtains and sweeping out your basement and garage. Although deep cleaning is quite a bit of work, it will make your life easier when it comes time to move because all of the heavy cleaning tasks will already have been done.
In addition to deep cleaning, each time your real estate agent plans to bring a potential buyer to you home, you should make sure all dirty dishes are stowed away in the dishwasher, your carpets are vacuumed and the floors swept, and that there are fresh towels in all the bathrooms. Make sure, also, that you don’t leave laundry or things like newspapers and piles of mail lying around. Here is a handy cleaning routine to help you out.
Several companies offer deep cleaning services. If you don’t have time to deep clean your home yourself, your real estate agent should be able to recommend a company that can do the work for you.
Paint, Replace and Repair
You might be so used to the chipped paint on your woodwork, your burned out light bulbs, and that garage door opener that needs repairing that you don’t notice even them anymore, but potential buyers will see things like this right away. Before putting your home on the market, make sure to touch up any areas where paint might be missing, fill holes in the walls caused by hanging artwork, and replace any burned out light bulbs. If simple repairs need to be made, consider doing them yourself or hiring a handyman for an afternoon.
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