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Ways to Prepare Your Home Before Listing it for Sale

By: ROS Team

Are you selling your home soon but don’t know how to prepare it for the market? Listing a property in a competitive market can be an uphill task, even for the most experienced realtors. However, with adequate preparation and an in-depth understanding of your target market, you can record remarkable success with your selling efforts. Below, we’ll examine some of the top ways to prepare your home for sale, from heavy touches like plumbing work to lighter ones like painting.

Call in the Plumber

If you or someone else has been staying in your home before now, you might want to have the drainage and plumbing systems checked. These could include kitchen faucets, sinks, drainages, bathroom hot tubs, and shower heads. A good plumber, like these Tucson Plumbers, can diagnose underlying problems and replace old, worn-out features that might degrade your home’s value. Plumbing work is crucial to the success of your sales because the state of kitchens and bathrooms is a significant decision-shaper for many home buyers.

Organize a Deep Clean

Whether you’re selling a newly constructed or used house, keeping everything clean is crucial for a perfect first impression. A great house with excellent features is best complemented by clean walls, floors and dusted surfaces if buyers are to choose it. You can have people clean the toilets, wipe surfaces, scrub bathrooms and rug floors regularly before listing the house and during the entire selling period.

Declutter

Effective decluttering is all about creating an ambient space so your target customers can imagine the space with their furniture and family pictures once they settle in. Potential buyers might find the home disinteresting when you leave rooms looking too busy with unmatching furniture or excessive display of personal details.

Potential buyers will surely check inside kitchen cabinets and cupboards. You might want to empty them and throw away the unnecessary items you’re not using. If you find important things you want to keep, you can pack and store them elsewhere to give room for cleaner cabinets.

Stage Your House

Staging a home helps it sell faster and sometimes earns you more money. However, you must know how to do it right within a minimum budget for optimal return on investment. Effective staging involves investing in pre-inspection and updating your property’s old or outdated elements.

While many homeowners assume staging isn’t important since incoming buyers will update the home’s features based on their preferences, this presumption is often wrong than it’s right. Many buyers readily appreciate a staged home as it saves them the time and money needed to make the improvements themselves.

Paint the Walls

Everyone has a different color preference, especially when it comes to the color of their home’s interior space. If you or the previous tenant preferred warm, bright colors like yellow or orange, an incoming tenant or homeowner might prefer the contrast.

Since you don’t know your potential customer’s color preference, it’s best to repaint the walls with a neutral color. These colors can be anything from white to light gray and beige, and they should be done professionally so the walls appear uniformly painted with high-quality paint.

Painting before selling will also help conceal your wall’s small imperfections and showcase a blank slate to potential buyers. Additionally, when done professionally, neutral-colored walls can make your home appear bigger, brighter and more accommodating.

Incorporate Enough Lighting

A well-lit home is a perfect property for any home buyer. When natural light fades out, your home should have enough lighting fixtures strategically installed to light up all sections of the house effectively. You should buy enough light bulbs so that anytime your potential clients come to view the house, they can confirm that all light fixtures are working effectively.

Ensure all curtains and blinds are opened during the day for maximum natural light penetration so potential buyers can know what to expect when they finally settle in. Also, if you have plenty of evening viewers or are selling during winter, it’s best to add a lot of floor or table lamps to add some extra brightness.

Attend to the Smells

Both good and bad smells are significant factors in a home-buying decision. Bad smells are naturally the ones you’d want to eliminate first, so make sure they’re not perceived anywhere near your home. If you’re unsure whether a lousy smell has left your home, you might ask a neighbor to help perceive.

As for the good smells, you might not be sure what works or doesn’t with each of your viewers. Like colors, it’s safer working with neutral scents like unscented air fresheners than going for what only works for you.

Depersonalize

Just like you declutter your home to make it a plain space for the next owner, depersonalizing helps viewers immediately create their ideal home picture from a blank space. Failing to depersonalize restricts the potential owners’ ability to imagine and create a perfect space for their liking.

You can put away framed photos, personal items and room bulletin boards that express your personal interests. However, you can leave a few nice-looking framed photos in strategic locations around the house to make the home more inviting.

Avoid Mentioning Pets

You love pets, and the majority of us do, too. However, not everyone feels the same way about owning or keeping pets, so you might want to keep the pet issue lowkey when listing your home. If there are a few revealing signs that pets lived there, like pet food or toys, you might want to keep them off sight during the viewing.

Some prospective buyers may back down when they spot pet items like litter trays and beds, and it could be even worse if they trip over a pet bone or toy! Ensure you keep away any pet stuff in a safe location before you open up the home for viewing.

Preparing a home for sale can be daunting for many, especially if it’s your first time trying. However, with these tips, you should easily crack your way into a successful home listing and selling journey. The applicability of these tips can vary based on location and trends in customer preferences. So, take the time to master your local market trends and apply the relevant tips as needed.