Preparing your home for sale can be a mammoth task. You need to ensure you can still live in it but also has it uncluttered and booked empty for viewing and real estate images. While talking to your reality and asking questions to find out everything you need to know about selling your house, getting it physically really can not only be a big task but hard too, especially if the place holds special memories or you have lived in for a long time.
As a seller, what do you need to do to ensure your item is listed as accurately as possible, photographed well, and in the best possible condition for sale?
Declutter and Depersonalise
As hard as this might be, you need to start the process of moving excess items from your home, ready for them to be staged for photography purposes and viewings. Potential buyers like to be able to imagine their own belongings in the house, and as such, having ours taking up every inch of space might get in the way of them visualizing themselves living there. As much as possible, remove any ornaments, knickknacks, toys, and excess items from the house completely before taking pictures and arranging a viewing.
Start decluttering room by room and then redistricting your items to other places such as charity organizations, holding sales, listing items online on used goods sites, and more. This will law you to free up some room, depersonalize the home and reduce what you need to pack to take with you too.
Repairs and Decorating
While it may seem counterintuitive to carry out repairs on a home you are selling, it can help you get a better price for your home. Those little jobs you have been overlooking, such as a creaky floorboard, a cupboard off its hinges, a missing item in the bathroom, and so on, can really detract from the quality of your home and put off buyers as well as booking shabby in pictures.No one is expecting you to carry out full repairs on you home when you are moving out but by taking care of the small jobs, you can help to improve how your home looks and help it to sell easier.
On top of this, a fresh coat of paint in areas of high traffic or where walls have been marked or scuffed can freshen up the room and make it look its best too.
Improve Lighting
Ask any photographer who can help improve your home pictures, and they will tell you it is the lighting. Having as much light in a room as possible makes the room and the home feel better and translates well onto imagery. Open the windows and blinds, replace your bulbs with brighter ones, move large objects from areas of natural light, hang mirrors opposite windows, and so on. All these small things will help you increase natural light in your home, making it appear more spacious and airy, and present it in its best light, if you will!
How Does Your Home Smell?
No one wants to think their home has a smell or isn’t pleasant, but you can become nose blind, to quote the famous Febreeze advert. This means you become used to your home smelling a certain way, and you don’t notice it anymore. Talk to family and friends, ask them how your house smells to them, and ensure you eliminate any odors before viewing starts. Fill your home with proven scents that appeal to others and make them more likely to think favorably of your home.
Neutral
Strip it all back to neutral. As we mentioned before, buyers want to be able to imagine themselves living in the property with their personal belongings, and having your items and the color scheme on their faces will detract from this ability. Opt for a more neutral look to give them a blank canvas to work with, paint over bright colors, and remove eclectic artwork and imagery, for example, to give a clean, fresh look that can help people to see past what is already living there. You can make focus points of features in the room; for example, highlight a window or dress up the fireplace with ornaments to draw attention to it. Still, generally, you want your space to be clear of clutter and anything that will impact the viewing experience.
Preparing your house to be sold isn’t an easy process; you need to think like a buyer would and ensure your home is displayed in the best possible light to increase the chances of it selling.
Published by HOLR Magazine.