Are you preparing to put your home on the market? Before listing your house, there are many things to do, so it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work!
After all, if you want to get the most money, selling a property requires much more than simply placing a “For Sale” sign on your front yard and uploading a few random pictures of your home.
11 Steps to Preparing Your Home for a Showing
Check out this list of things to do before selling your home and putting it on the market. Some of these suggestions are surprisingly simple, while others could need a little more work —they’re bound to pay off.
1. Get a Home Inspection
A home inspection will be required before any offer is made. Knowing potential problems is essential, particularly if you wish to cross off any fixes to make your house more appealing to buyers.
Fixing the following common issues before listing your home is recommended:
- Water stains,
- Window seals with breaks,
- Uncapped live wires and electrical problems,
- Incorrectly installed siding, flashing, or shingles,
- Faulty heating and cooling systems in homes,
- Severe cracks or uneven driveway and walkway surfaces.
2. Begin Speaking with Real Estate Agents
Wait until you’ve finished your home repair tasks before officially listing, but start interviewing agents while you’re prepping your property for sale. Use potential agents as a reference to learn what needs to be modified to enhance the wealth of your transaction.
Necessary Inquiries for a Realtor:
- What are the latest trends in real estate?
- What features of your house would you emphasize?
- How much of an impact will significant house renovations have?
- How long does it typically take a house to sell during this season?
3. Increase Curb Appeal for a Positive First Impression
To create a unified image from the outside in, think about painting your home and updating your landscaping. Plant flowers, trim the margins of overgrown hedges, remove them, and add a fresh coat of mulch.
Then, before hiring a professional photographer to take images of your property and before an open house, be sure to power wash the exterior of your home to blast off dirt and filth.
Customers want to feel at home when they enter a property immediately. You want prospective buyers to approach your house and envision living on the other side of the front door.
4. Perform Minor Repairs
Even though these things might not seem important to you, a buyer might care about the tiny drywall scratch or the hole made by a rebellious holiday decoration. Patch any gaps in the walls and replace any excessively damaged drywall. Prioritize cleaning the sections of your home with the most traffic.
5. Reduce Bold Paint Colors
You can paint your home’s interior to disguise flaws and increase its appeal to potential purchasers. Consistently use neutral hues to appeal to a broad spectrum of buyers.
6. Organize and Declutter
Anything you don’t need right now has to leave. Making your home’s rooms appear larger and giving purchasers the impression that all of their stuff will fit requires decluttering. Buyers may open closet doors and drawers in built-ins, the kitchen, and the bathroom to get a sense of the space.
7. Make the Junk Room Useful
Instead of displaying your mess, the junk room can help show potential purchasers how they might use the area. Rent a bedroom set to show off how much furniture the space can contain, or try relocating the additional desk from the basement into the spare room to turn it into an office.
8. Engage Qualified Cleaners
Weekend vacuuming and the occasional dusting won’t help you sell your house. You can make your house sparkle by hiring expert cleaners who will methodically remove dust from the top of your window sills and scrape scuff marks off baseboards.
9. Stage Your Home to Sell
Staging is frequently the final step buyers require to see your old property as their new one. Keep the features that give this house a lived-in character while keeping it spotless enough to appeal to buyers. When staging a property, you should emphasize appealing features for potential buyers while providing suggestions for making the most of the space.
Tips for staging your home to sell:
- Suspend new towels
- Install fresh rugs
- Set the table and press the placemats
- Clusters of furniture should be positioned away from the walls
- Incorporate new throw pillows and blankets in the living room
10 Reduce Personalization in Your Home
It is related to selling your home by staging it. Prospective buyers need to picture their possessions in the room, not yours.
11. Remove Unpleasant Odors
Pay attention to how the house smells. You want to make sure the house smells good and that no one can smell where the cat peed on the carpet, but you also don’t want to overpower potential buyers with various odors, from candles to air fresheners and wall plug-ins.
Final touches to Prepare Your Home for Sale
Don’t overlook anything by conducting a potential buyer’s walk-through of your house. Watch out for anything that can make a visitor leave your home feeling unsatisfied, such as scratches on the baseboards, loose doorknobs, furniture blocking a hallway, or scuffed baseboards. After that, give it one more polish, and you’re ready to sell.