When you’re planning on selling your home, your top priority will be to sell it at the highest possible price. You’ll want to receive the highest amount of cash possible to invest in your new home, which means using every trick in the book to encourage buyers to part with more of their cash. This guide is about how you’ll get there, using tried and tested methods to increase your home’s value.
Table of Contents
Two Stages
Before we go into detail about what you should do to increase your home’s value, it’s worth highlighting that these tips fall into two stages: pre-viewing and viewing. Before anyone has visited your home to take a look around, there’s a lot you can do to make your property seem like somewhere people will want to live. That means more people interested in looking at your home, more organized viewings, and more bids on your property.
Once you have viewings organized, you’ll also have another opportunity to impress on those taking a look at your home the high value of your property. Again, the more you’re able to impress viewers at this stage, the more you’ll be able to ask of them when it comes to nailing down a price. We’ll start this guide with pre-viewing tips.
Preparation
The way that you prepare your home means everything to a prospective buyer. Here, some of the tricks of the trade are well known, which means your competition in the housing market will be using them. If your home has a few scuffs and repairs that need to be attended to, this is the time to make sure your home is looking as fresh and as new as possible. If you’ve been considering replacing your old couch, this might be the best time to do so.
The list goes on. Painting tired walls with a fresh coat of white will help rooms feel more spacious, light, and comfortable. Cleaning windows will let in more natural light. Fixing that dodgy cupboard in the kitchen will make for a more attractive photograph, and finally, addressing that crack in the plaster will help your home feel like new.
Presentation
Once you’ve prepared your home, you’ll be ready to create documentary evidence that your home is a fantastic, comfortable, stylish place to live. Take light, airy, professional photographs, and include a steady, slow video tour on a sunny day to give online viewers a brilliant impression of your home’s interior. With everything prepared to look stunning, the photos should speak for themselves.
One extra step that few sellers of properties take is creating a site or floor plan of their home. This will show off the dimensions of your property from an aerial view, giving buyers an important perspective on the layout of your home. Look into the site plan vs floor plan benefits to decide which to create, and find software that’ll help you make an attractive plan for your home.
More Maintenance
Once you’ve secured a handful of viewings of your home, you’ll want to go back to the maintenance stage that you were at when you were preparing your home for photographs. That’s because you were initially preparing your home cosmetically, taking care to make it look fantastic. But when people actually come to your property, you’ll want them to feel that the photos live up to their expectations. That means thinking about further maintenance to make your home feel perfect.
What wasn’t captured in your photographs? Perhaps there’s a creaking floorboard that you should pull up and replace or a scruffy skirting board that you should give an extra lick of paint. Are there stains on some upholstery that you should give a deep clean, or unpleasant odors coming from your garden? All these additional factors should be considered before you welcome prospective buyers to your home.
On the Day
When people are due to arrive in your home, you can also use a handful of tricks to help them feel like your home will match their hopes and aspirations. A common trick is to fill your home with a smell that makes people think of comfort and coziness – here, cooked bread is often the example that people choose to act on. Lighting a couple of scented candles across your home can also achieve the same effect.
Open your windows for two or three hours before viewers come to your property to give your home as much fresh air as possible, closing them just before your guests arrive. This will help your home feel airy and spacious. Finally, try to avoid making your home feel like a show home. Ultimately, viewers want to imagine themselves in your home, living their lives. If you have a dish in the oven or signs of life dotted around your home, that’ll help them imagine themselves living on your property.
Being Present
Some sellers choose to leave the sales pattern to a real estate agent. These agents can be persuasive and charming, but you should expect that many viewers of your home have already spoken to several of these professionals and therefore aren’t impressed by their sales pattern. Instead, being present in your home yourself for the viewings, and being both hospitable and trustworthy, can really help your viewers feel comfortable.
Prepare yourself for the questions they might ask about your home, such as questions regarding the upkeep, the bills, the neighborhood, or the neighbors. Be pleasant and welcoming, offering drinks to those viewing your home. Offer to answer any questions that they might have to give them a feeling of security and to make you seem open. All of these little tips can help add up to make you seem like the sort of person that buyers can trust to place a bid with, helping you amass more bids and eventually selling your home at a higher price.
Getting your home sold for the highest possible price means pulling out several of the tricks that sellers have used for years. If you want to sell your house quickly without the hassle of listing it on multiple sites, you may consider SoCal Home Buyers. This guide contains some of the most important ones to help you charm and convince prospective buyers.
