After having taken the decision to sell your home, you need to invest time and effort in a few more things and one of them is to make your home attractive to the potential buyers. Before the buyers start streaming into your home you should have spent a few bucks and time in making your home beautiful in many ways.
Start with a critical or impartial eye
Your home may be the most beautiful place on Earth for you but it may have some flaws or problem areas when a complete stranger views it. So you can do a few things to spot these areas of improvement:
- Ask a friend for all the inputs and get them to be critical too.
- Get a professional home improvement person or firm to give you a quote.
- Take photographs of all areas of the house including rooms, exterior views, driveway and so on.
- Scan your property with an impartial eye.
The photographs will serve as a constant visual reminder of how your house looks and you are sure to spot some areas that can be made even better.
Curbside appeal
This is the very first glimpse that home buyers get and therefore you could, logically, start with this area. Simple things can help enhance the look of your home immensely. Some of these simple things are:
- Painting your mailbox.
- Painting your front door.
- Touching up the paint on the home’s facade.
- Remove the trashcans that may add clutter to the front portion of your home.
If you have a garden, then spend some time in this as well. Trim hedges, prune dead leaves and fix broken pots, if any and so on.
The fixtures
Every home has electric fixtures of various kinds. You have to ensure that every one of those fixtures is working. In fact, this should also include your HVAC system. Even if you have left your home unoccupied for some time, you have to run a check of all the appliances and fixtures before you bring in the buyers.
Interiors
Here again, start with each room and fix things and clean things. It could be tiles in one bathroom and the window screens in another. It could be the wall paint in one room and changing the wallpaper in another but make a list of the things that need to be improved and execute the same. Here again, it could be a coat of paint or something to be replaced entirely. Do take a look at everything that the buyers are going to see and check whether it is appealing or not. If it is not, then you have to take corrective action.
Make it pretty
Fresh flowers, an open window and room freshener sprayed in other rooms – all of them go a long way in making the house look and feel good. It could be something as simple as placing a bunch of flowers in a glass jar on the dining table – but it will go a long way in making the space attractive. Of course, you can remove almost all your personal stuff too. This gives the buyer the chance to look at your home and see himself or herself in it.
Personal touch
When the home buyer turns up, take the time to give them a personal tour of the house. This will give you the chance to highlight special features of the house. Equally importantly, if there is a problem area in the house, you may like to point out the same to the potential buyers too. Of course it cannot be a critical flaw because you would have fixed that before you put your house on the market.
The kitchen
If there is one room that you should lavish a lot of attention to, it is the kitchen. In many homes, the kitchen becomes the center of activity. So if you have a kitchen that comes equipped with all the appliances then ensure that they are in sparkling condition and more importantly, they function as intended. If you want to add personal touches like leaving out a plate of cookies or a basket of fruit, then please do ensure that they are fresh and taste fabulous.
Personal stuff
Some experts will tell you to empty your house completely so the buyers get the opportunity to see themselves in the house. Others will ask you to keep some personal stuff in to promote the ‘feel good’ factor. Yet others will tell you to empty out half the contents so people get a sense of how they can utilise the same. Maybe the way to go is keep one to two personal items in each room and that’s it. Empty the storage spaces for sure because this will allow people to see the spaciousness.