Selling Your Homes? Don't Make It Personal

Selling your home requires you to think about the potential buyers who will be coming and looking. It requires you to look at the market and ensure that your home is positioned to attract potential buyers. This is a two stage process: getting them to look, then getting them to offer.

In order for the potential buyer to even look, the house has to look good from the outside. It has to be priced competitively. You need them to pick your home out to look at among a slew of similar homes on the market, then have the view from the street good enough that they won't just drive away.

Buyers usually look at multiple homes before zeroing in on one to offer on, and you do not want yours to be the runt of the litter. If your curb appeal gets them in, then keep them in with a clean house that doesn't look like it needs any work. Sure, everybody will want to change colors in a room or put up their own decor, but you want to give them a feeling that this would be ok until they get around to making those changes.

Don't make the inside (or outside) too personal to you. If you have an extra bedroom and use it for a home office, stage it as a bedroom when you are putting it up for sale. Generally people are looking at houses with the number of bedrooms they want and most people don't put a priority on a discrete home office. If you used a fuschia and coral paint scheme that you loved because it reminds you of Cancun, repaint it in beige when the house is being sold, Grandma's old brown stove that doesn't fit in the white kitchen? Get a white one, even if you rent it.

For more tips, we'd refer you to a recent article in the Freep.

Good luck!

Link: http://www.freep.com/story/life/2015/07/04/selling-tips-homeowners/29617327/

Home Staging and Mistakes to Avoid

Properly staging a home will increase the selling price.  I will confess a little doubt whether it is always worth it, as professional staging costs money on top of your other expenses.  On the other hand, you should think about staging your house or condo for sale as a DIY project, or at least think about how the house is looking to prospective buyers when they come by for a look.

Staging can be as simple as cleaning up, getting the spots and stains out of the carpet, and painting over the mauve walls that you did thirty years ago for something more marketable.  It also means removing family photos so that prospective buyers can see themselves living in the house instead of you.  For a professional staging, furniture and accessories are brought into the house just for the showings.

It also involves de-cluttering, which will make the space look bigger to prospective buyers.

However, there are some definite things to avoid.  Here is one of them:

Nobody can see themselves living in a horrid green nightmare.

Follow the link below for more staging mistakes.  We'll talk about staging more at another time.

Link:
http://hookedonhouses.net/2010/04/26/5-things-to-avoid-when-staging-your-house-to-sell/