How to Prepare Your House to Sell

To increase your chances of a quick sale, you need to prepare yourself and use a professional approach for the whole process.

This involves careful planning and learning how to spruce up your house so that you’ll convince homebuyers to scurry for their checkbooks.

Wondering how to prepare your house to sell? Check our professional tips below!

Depersonalize

Pack up all your family heirlooms and personal photographs. You’ll have to do it anyway when you move, and buyers tend to have a hard time seeing past personal effects.

Go through your home and take down personal paintings, images or photos hanging on walls or set on countertops. You want your potential buyers to be able to imagine their own family photos on the walls, and this is not possible if yours are there.

This goes for your furniture items as well. Not everyone will share your taste, so if you have a bright blue sofa that screams, “I’m unique!” you will probably want to remove it temporarily.

Besides that, having too much furniture crammed into a room can make the whole space look much smaller, something you should definitely avoid when showing your home. Try to stick with your more understated and simple pieces, which will make the rooms looks more spacious.

Don’t forget to depersonalize your bathroom too. Most of the items there will likely be personal; makeup, bathrobe, toothbrushes, etc. The best you can do is to remove everything from your bathroom counters, showers, and bathtubs first. Then you can put back a few decorative items like a hand towel, candle or bath salts but remember, no personal products.

Declutter

Go through your home, spending time organizing and decluttering spaces.

Big bathrooms, kitchens, and storage tend to be important selling points. So it can help to make these rooms look as spacious as possible, by removing at least 50% of your items.

Don’t forget that decluttering also includes furniture. The scale of your pieces should be an exact match to the size of the room, allowing buyers to easily walk around spaces without bumping into furniture. Additionally, make sure furnishings don’t block architectural features, doors or windows.

In order to maximize the space in your home and keep your belongings offsite, you might need to rent a storage unit during the home-selling process.

The costs of storage units can range in price from $30 to $300 per month, depending on location, size and features like climate control and security.

You may also want to consider hiring a professional organizer to help you in the decluttering process and identifying which items to store, discard or donate. Organizers usually charge hourly fees ranging from $30 to $80.

Clean

After decluttering comes deep cleaning. Of course, you can DIY or hire a professional. Hiring a professional may prove the most effective way to do the job thoroughly and quickly. The average costs of cleaning service are around $167.

If you decide to do it yourself, don’t forget to clean your floors, windows, counters, bathrooms, bedrooms, fans etc.

You will also have to clean the carpets to bring the fibers and colors back to life. You can again hire a professional or rent a machine from a home improvement store for about $50.

A house that is cluttered and dirty is really hard to look past when a prospective buyer walks through.
It is crucial to maintain a clean home to show the full potential of the property.

Repair, Restore, Revamp

The devil is in the details, and closing the deal on your home could be hampered by very simple things that you didn’t pay attention to.

Try to put you in the buyer’s shoes, and think about the details that would impress or dismay you if you were in that position. Then take care of those details immediately.

You should ideally replace broken light bulbs, fix leaky taps, doors, drawers that don’t open or close properly and repair cracks in the walls.

Along with that, don’t forget to get a new shower curtain and bathmat in neutral shades, hang up some fresh towels in the bathroom and replace cushion covers, bedspreads, and curtains that are worn or have garish colors and patterns.

Repaint Walls

A fresh coat of paint can give your home a completely new appearance. In fact, painting is one of the first steps, recommended by the real estate agents, before listing your home for a sale. It can highlight architectural details and help small rooms appear larger.

When you start painting, use neutral tones like beige, tan, gold, gray and white which will allow buyers to focus on the spaces themselves, not the color of the walls.

If you don’t have time to paint your entire home, concentrate on the kitchen, bathrooms, entryway, and foyer. If you have had your home painted in the past two-three years, you can just repaint scuff marks or stains on the walls.

If you decide to hire a professional painter, you will have to pay from $380 to $790 per room, not including ceilings, paint costs and trim. Going for a DIY approach will probably cost you between $200 and $300 per room.

Get Out

When you live in a home for a long time, it’s easy to overlook the things that can make or break an offer.

Selling your home is about taking an objective look from a buyer’s perspective. Remove yourself and your memories from the equation, and imagine that you are seeing your place for the first time.

You can also ask friends or family for their honest feedback so you can be sure you’ve done everything possible to make your home look its best before you put it on the market.

You’ll impress buyers, who will in turn, impress you with valuable offers.