Preparing Your Home for Sale !
 
                    
In order to get the best possible price for your home, you will need to:
  1. Emotionally disconnect from your Home
  2.  Develop the Buyer perspective
  3. Make your Home attractive to a wide population
  4. Tips for Pet-Owning Sellers
Emotionally Disconnecting from your Home:
 
Disconnecting yourself emotionally from your Home is, for some, the most difficult thing to do.  You must develop the Buyers perspective to prepare your Home for the Buyer public. 
 
Timing:
 
Preparing your home is something you should do before you place it on the market.  If you place your Home on the market before it is ready,  You may get a lot of the Buyers in the Buyers-Pool to go through and develop a less than desirable opinion.  Once they have that opinion, they may not come back.  You may get greatly reduced traffic for a while until more Buyers enter the Buyer-Pool.

Things to do to your home to get it ready? 

  • Shape up your yard with trimming, etc.
  • Check the roof, chimney, gutters, siding, paint, calking
  • Inside, check paint, calking, carpet, flooring, light fixtures
  • Remove personal items such as family pictures etc.
  • De-clutter, reduce the number of "things"
  • Reduce the amount of furniture to get a larger more open look
  • Stage rooms for their primary use, not multifunction rooms
  • Reduce amount of stuff in closets and storage areas, looks like more room
  • Get all extra "stuff" out of the house, into storage if necessary
  • Get pets out of the house or assure they are contained
  • Eliminate Pet Oder and Stains
  • Complete the Seller's Disclosure Form
  • Collect Documentation about your Home, Upgrades, Neighborhood, Schools, etc.
  • Your Agent can develops a "Home Book" with the information you gathered to help Buyers get to know your house and neighborhood

See: Staging Rooms for Better Appeal.

Check out this video:  Staging Your Home to Sell for Top Dollar

Professional Help is available:
 
There are a number of commercial Home-Stagers available.  These people can do anything from consulting with you, telling you what would be appropriate, to actually preparing your home for sale.

Can you remember going a very nice new Model Home.  It looked clean, un-cluttered, minimum furniture, lots of room, rooms were decorated for primary or specific use. 

There you go ... that is what you are looking for.  The closer you get to the "Model Look" the better it will show and the quicker you will get that offer.

Properly staging your Home can significantly reduce the time to sell.  The better it looks the quicker someone will snap it up.

Visit DressYourHomeDesigns.com, a Columbia based company, for more information on preparing your Home for Sale.

Here is an article on showing off the details of your home.

Are you Ready for Tour ?
 
Ask your agent to review your work.  Is your Home is ready to be placed on Tour? 

Your Agent should announce your home at the next Board Meeting.  This is when Agents from Agencies all over town come to see your Home.  You will want these people to walk away saying "Wow, that is a really nice Home.  I know several people that I want to bring back to see this one" 

These Agents are the people that will sell your home if you prepare it properly and your Agent keeps marketing it at the board meetings,

Your Family can be a Great Help:
 
Work with your family to assure that everyone does their part to maintain the house in condition to show at any time.  Rewards come when the house is sold.

Keeping your Home Neat, and keeping pets contained, will give you the freedom to allow showings of your home at a moments notice.  This may get you many more showings.  One of those may be your Buyer.