When Your Home is Listed For Sale, What’s Left For You To Do?
There’s a great deal to do when selling your home. Fortunately, you can entrust a lot of it to your real estate agent. Professional real estate agents are just that; professionals. They have the experience, the resources, and the connections necessary to sell your home for the best price possible as quickly as possible.
So that’s their job, what’s yours? Well, your agent can only sell what you give them to work with, so your job is to make your house as appealing as you feasibly can and there are several things you can do to improve the appeal of your home.
First impressions are lasting impressions and you only get to make one, so make it count. “Curb appeal” is a term you’ve probably heard before and is how attractive your house looks from the curb. Potential buyers start forming their opinion of your house from the moment they park and if the first impression leaves a bad taste in their mouth, it’s going to be an uphill battle to sell.
How can you make a better first impression? Take care of the lawn, for starters, if you have one. Make sure the grass is cut and, whether you have grass or a rock lawn, pull up any weeds, including those that pop up in the cracks of the sidewalk and driveway. Add a little color to your yard or porch by planting some inexpensive perennial flowers. If you have a mailbox, give it a good scrubbing and repaint the numbers on it or replace it completely with a brand new mailbox.
Stand on your porch and take stock of what you see. Is the doormat dirty and faded? If the front door itself dingy from years of knocking and handling? Are the house numbers worn or damaged? These are all easy, inexpensive fixes which can all be addressed at your local hardware store for minimal investment and will go a long way toward improving your house’s curb appeal.
Now we can move inside and take a look. You’ve swept and mopped, cleaned the countertops, dusted the ceiling fans, but what else could you do? Do the rooms seem a little smaller and darker than you remember, maybe a little dirtier but you can’t quite put your finger on the reason? That’s because the subconscious eye picks up on things your conscious mind doesn’t.
Wash the windows to let in more light, scrub the baseboards along the floor and the frames of the doors and windows to get rid of that grungy feeling at the corner of the eye, and replace the lightswitch and outlet plates. These are tiny details that most people won’t notice if you address them, but will almost certainly notice if you don’t. Worse yet, they probably won’t even realize why they were turned off from your house, just that they were. Like the curb appeal solutions, these are simple, inexpensive investments that can really help your house stand apart from the competition on the market.
Whether your home is in Cave Creek, Carefree, Fountain Hills, Scottsdale or Phoenix, now is a great time to sell! View other homes in your area that are for sale! Want more information about selling your home, contact Steve Valkenaar today!
