Preaparing Your Home For Sale

Remember that mental list you’ve been drafting of things around the house that need to be repaired, re-painted, or replaced? Well, the time has come to get those projects done!

You’ve made the decision that the time has come to sell your home. After several interviews, you’ve selected the real estate agent that you want to work with and they are ready to schedule a professional photo shoot. You are excited to get the ball rolling!?

Not so fast!

First things first. Your home is now a product you are marketing to consumers. It’s time to make it sparkle for the marketing photos and for the many buyers that will be touring your home. That means you will need to:

• Deep Clean
• Declutter
• Depersonalize
• Freshen It Up
• Lighten It Up
• Fix It Up

Deep Clean

We tend to not notice, or train ourselves to ignore, the evidence of a well-lived home when we are the ones living in it. We are desensitized to the dust collecting on the baseboards, the handprints the kids have left on the walls, or the wearing down or discoloration of paint on high-touched areas. However, potential buyers are going to notice those things! You don’t want something so easily remedied to cause buyers touring your home to feel uncomfortable in it. You want buyers to love being in your space so that they will take their time on their showing and begin imagining themselves living in your home. From the cobwebs in the ceiling corners, to the floor corners behind the couch, and everything in between, it’s time for some deep cleaning!?

Use a duster on an extension pole to ensure the ceilings are free of cobwebs. Use a large, soft sponge and a bucket of water with mild soap to wash down walls, doors, cabinets, and baseboards. Clean the windows, sliding glass doors, and all of the window tracks. Dust, disinfect, and polish all surfaces and countertops. Vacuum, sweep, and mop all of the floors. Scrub bathtubs, showers, and toilets. Clean all mirrors. Dust all light fixtures (and make sure to replace any light bulbs that are not functioning). Dust all of the blinds and wash all of the curtains.

Declutter

You want potential buyers to feel that your home has plenty of room to fit their life into. That is difficult for many buyers to achieve if the home has far too many personal touches and little-to-no open spaces. You’ll want to spend time in each room of your home, imagining it from a buyers’ point of view. Remove any items that are not adding value and may be making your home look or feel cluttered. Reduce “visual noise” on bookcases by minimizing and organizing any books, decorations, and knick-knacks on display. Remove furniture that may hinder buyers from freely moving about the space. Buyers are typically understanding of sellers needing to store items in the garage in preparation for their move, so feel free to box up all of the items you’ve removed in the declutter process and store them there.?

Depersonalize

You don’t want potential buyers feeling like intruders in your personal space. When they walk into your home, you want them to be able to imagine it as their own. Provide them with a sense of what living there could look like, but not with what you look like. Remove family pictures, certificates, degrees, and any personal items that aren’t necessary to add value to your staging. This step is also very important for your privacy and your family’s safety. It is always a good idea to be more cautious than may seem necessary. It’s best not to take any chances. Your real estate agent and the buyer’s agent will be doing all that they can to make sure that only serious, qualified buyers will be given appointments to see your home. But they are limited in what they can screen a buyer for. It’s a good idea to not showcase what your children look like, what school they go to, or what their names are. Many people don’t consider this with their pets as well, but it’s another important thing to consider. It’s best if the identity and names of your family pets are also not on display.

Freshen It Up

In most cases it’s not necessary to remodel your home, but there are economical ways to help freshen your home up a bit. If it’s been more than five years since you last painted, you may need to consider repainting the interior. This of course depends on the level of wear to your walls. If repainting the entire home is not necessary, or is not feasible, make sure to look around for any obvious and unbecoming blemishes on your walls that were not remedied by the deep clean and consider repainting those areas. This can be tricky depending on the location of the blemishes. If it’s been quite a few years since you last painted, it will be difficult to do any spot painting without the possibility of making the fix even more noticeable than the blemish had been. This may require that you repaint the entire wall, or even the entire room. Whatever you decide to do, remember to not personalize the space. Pick light, neutral tones that will help to freshen up the space and help set a light, welcoming tone.

Also consider adding pops of color that coordinate with the current season. In winter you can add gold throw pillows to your couch, or crisp white towels in the kitchen. In the spring or summer you may want to switch those up with pops of yellow, orange, or red.

It’s not a comfortable topic to address, but it must be noted that home sellers need to also give attention to the smell of their home. Spend some time outside of your home and then walk back in. If you notice any odors that may not be pleasing, you will want to address them. Odors associated with pets, smoking, or lack of fresh air flow throughout a home can be very off-putting to potential buyers. Make sure that your pets, surfaces they lay on, and toys that they play with are kept clean.?

Some agents will ask that you bake cookies, burn candles, or install room fresheners for showings. Any of these can help to create a pleasing ambiance, however, it’s important to note that if there is a problem with odors in the home, it’s very probable that potential buyers will still be able to detect it. (As a side note - be cautious with any attempts of adding pleasant smells to your space. Not everyone finds the same smells to be pleasant and many people have allergies to fragrances and foods. A safer option that can be just as welcoming to people touring your home is to make sure the home is clean and has fresh air circulating.)

Lighten It Up

One way to accelerate a decrease in a buyer’s interest in your home is to have them feeling like they are walking into a dark cave. A popular aspect of homes that you will frequently hear real estate agents boast about, and buyers asking about, is “natural light”. As reported in NeuroscienceNews.com, a study conducted by Monash University found that increased exposure to natural light not only reduced the likelihood of depression and low moods in the 400,000 UK participants, but it also increased the likelihood for greater happiness. Generally, people are positively affected by natural light and tend to feel more happy with greater exposure. So, take advantage of your access to natural light! Open the curtains, pull up the blinds, and in rooms that don’t have access to natural light, make sure you have sufficient artificial lighting. Also, spend time in each room of your home and consider opportunities to lighten up the space. If you have dark furniture, consider adding light colored throw pillows. If you have dark cabinets, consider adding a light colored accessory or two to the countertop.?

Fix It Up

Here is where decisions can get tricky. You may not want to, or be able to, fix the things around the house that need fixing. Here are some things that you will need to consider:

• In most states, you must inform the buyer of any material facts about your home.
• Knowledgeable buyers and buyer agents are going to be taking all of the things that they see will need fixing into account when they are calculating how much they are willing to offer to pay for your home. So, each item left unfixed will potentially be at a cost to you, whether it’s to fix it, or as a devaluation of your home’s sale price.?
• Once you accept an offer, the buyer, their agent, and any inspectors they hire are going to be looking into everything in your home. Any item that they call out to have fixed as a condition of the sale will need to be addressed. So, even if you choose not to fix it before you put your home on the market, be aware that there is a chance that you will need to before the sale of your home is closed.

Don’t forget your curb appeal!

Remember, every task that you choose to leave undone before you put your home on the market becomes a potential devaluation item on your property’s market value through the buyer’s lens. This includes the landscaping! A property with dead or overgrown lawns, dirt yards, untamed trees, etc. are all seen as future, necessary projects to potential homebuyers. They will immediately begin calculating how much time, effort, and money will be necessary to get the landscaping in order. Of course, the exterior paint and the fencing will also be of note to potential homebuyers. If their calculations of comparable homes inform them that the seller has not taken any of the items in need of repair or replacement into account when pricing the home, the buyer will certainly make the deductions when determining the price at which they will offer to purchase the property. Again, in most cases, it is not necessary to do a complete overhaul of the exterior of your home. Do what you can to clean up the space and make it as presentable as possible to potential buyers. At the very least, if you can, mow overgrown lawns, seed and water dead lawns, pull weeds, trim the trees, and clear debris.?

An Important Additional Note

Don’t make more improvements to your property than the market will allow you to recuperate! Some improvements simply do not pay off when your goal is to sell a property. In general, whether your buyer is a cash buyer or someone using a lender, well informed buyers are not going to be willing to pay more for a home than the value of a comparably sized home in that same area. Of course, as with most things, there are exceptions. There may be a buyer that falls in love with a home, sees it’s value, regardless of the value of the community, is not concerned with the likelihood that they will not be able to recoup their money should they sell in the future, and that have the cash to pay the list price, or to cover the gap from the list price to the amount the lender is willing to provide. As you might notice, that is a long list of exceptions. It is rare to find a buyer that has the desire and the means to purchase under those circumstances.?

As a general rule, if you know that you do not plan to own a home for the rest of your life, then you have to consider resell values whenever you are looking to make improvements. You may very well remodel a home and its standalone worth may, as a result of cost and luxury, be very high. However, if the neighborhood the home is in does not also reflect the same high-level value, high-end homebuyers are not going to be willing to purchase in that area, nor are homebuyers in that area going to be willing (or possibly able) to purchase at the high-end price.??

Bottom Line

In order for sellers to position themselves to maximize potential profit, whenever possible, it’s best to have a desirable, move-in ready home than to have a project piece that consumers are immediately calculating discounts on based on the work that they will need to do once they buy the home. So, for those fixes or improvements that you can afford to take care of - take care of them now before you list your home for sale. For those things that you can not afford to handle, don’t have the time to handle, or simply don’t wish to, be prepared to adjust your home’s market value accordingly. If you don’t, rest assured, buyers will.? Work with your real estate agent to identify which potential fixes will be most beneficial considering the type of market you are selling in and the type of loans buyers in your area most usually have.

What does the loan type have to do with it?

VA and FHA loans have more strict requirements for the livability of a home. That means that whatever issues a VA or FHA loan appraiser identifies as necessary, must be resolved and verified as resolved by their appraiser in order for the loan to close and the sale to be finalized. Your real estate agent may be able to help you identify whether or not there are any obvious issues with your home that will require improvements. You could choose to fix them before your home is listed on the market, or wait to see if the buyer requests them down the line.

Don’t be overwhelmed! You only have to take the steps you choose to take to prepare your home for sale. The more steps you take to make your home more marketable, the greater the possibility that you attract more buyers at higher price points. But, of course, you always have the option to do less. Just know that it may take longer to sell your home and buyers may offer less money than they would have. If you do nothing else, just make sure to deep clean and declutter!