Selling your home? These 6 tips will help you get top dollar.
If you are planning on selling your home, you’re probably wondering how to best use your time and money to increase the value. The tips below will help you get the most bang for your buck.
Apply a new coat of paint
- A new coat of paint will instantly give your house a bright and fresh appearance. Experts recommend white or neutral tones, avoiding outrageous colors.
Focus on curb appeal
- The first impression is essential. How does your home look when someone first pulls up? The goal is for it to look clean, charming, and welcoming. To do this, the grass, plants, and flowers must be taken care of and the facades and glass clean. You’d be surprised how often people miss this step.
Remove objects that are too personal
- It’s a good idea to remove all family photos and other personal items. You want your potential buyers to imagine living in this home.
Remove clutter
- If at all possible, you want to clear out as much “stuff” as you can. You know how you feel when you check into a vacant house, and it seems so clean and nice. That’s a lack of clutter, and exactly the kind of feeling that will help someone fall in love with your home. Don’t forget about those “nobody looks there” kind of places like broom closets. When someone is considering a house, they tend to open every door.
Make repairs
- Before buying your home, the buyer is likely to do a home inspection. If you know that a repair is going to need to be done, it’s better to do it before trying to sell your home. Necessary repairs are a great bargaining chip or the buyer, and can eat up much of your sale price. If there are too many repairs, it might even kill the deal.
Staging
- An empty home is harder to sell, and you’ll get less money for it. Stage it so that it looks like a home and not just a house, and watch the days on market decrease and the sale price increase. You can do this on your own, and often your realtor will give you great advice; however, it’s worth asking around first. It’s often surprisingly affordable to have a professional help, and they may even save you money.
These are simple examples of an aesthetic intervention, which can be carried to the point of building a totally new space or the demolition of a dividing wall; let’s not lose sight of the fact that home improvements are not limited to aesthetic changes!