So you’ve listed your property for sale and you’re getting some all important exposure for it so that people know it’s available. What else can you do to ensure that it sells and that you get as much for it as you should?
Well obviously if the listing is sorted, the rest is about the house itself – how you present it and how tempting it is to those who look around it. What can you do to make sure your house looks like a good buy and lets you reel in the buyers once you’ve caught your viewers’ attention?
First of all the house needs to be clean – you should ensure that you’ve got your house tidier than it normally would be and that everything is polished and dusted. While anyone who buys the house won’t be inheriting your clutter and dust (and while they’ll know this) it’s still just common sense to ensure your house is looking its best when people are looking around it as it will make it seem more appealing and make it easier for other people to imagine themselves living there. The idea is that they’re going to ‘project’ their ideal home onto the four walls you’re providing so you want it to look like a blank slate. It’s somehow hard to get excited about a room with dirty glass and stained carpets and it can ruin that image.
This means not only cleaning the inside of your home either, but also the outside – washing down the walls, adding more paint where necessary and brushing the leaves off the drive. All of this will help to improve their first impressions of your home, so that when they come down the road and pull up on your drive they’ll be impressed. This way they’ll start looking around your home already in a positive frame of mind and are thus more likely to be impressed and make a purchase.
For this same reason you should try not to clutter your house too much with your own things. This means works of art, collectables, ornaments, rugs and anything else that’s too ‘you’. The reason for this is again that it can stand in the way of them imagining the home the way they’d like it to look. For example, a young professional might be put off by lots of granny pattern or frilly curtains and will have a harder time imagining it as their own ‘pad’ or home office.
As well as cleaning and tidying you might also fix and renovate areas of your house where you think it will improve the value of your property to the extent that it’s worth the extra expense. For example, you might find that by adding an extra window in a particularly dark room you can increase the value by considerably more than the cost of the window and the installation. A smaller change might for example be to replace your door knobs with shiny new ones which can make a big impact on the whole house.