Selling in a down market…Part 2
Let’s continue our discussion on how to sell your home in a down market. In the previous post we discussed how cleaning up the exterior and focusing on curb appeal can give potential buyers a great first impression and help make them enter your home with a positive attitude. So lets discuss what things you can do on the inside of your home to help get the price you want and beat out the competition.
Clutter in homeselling is a bad word. You must avoid this if you want a quick sale. Buyers are very visual and emotional and you don’t want them associating your house with clutter. Clutter at the very least makes it look like your house has no storage. Even if you just have a lot of stuff and there really is a lot of storage, a buyer is not going to look at it that way. They will see the clutter and they will automatically think that there is no storage space in this house and that the closets are small. So the best thing you can do is get rid of all clutter any way you can. Have a tag sale, give things away to family, simply throw it away, or rent a storage unit so that it’s out of the house completely as potential buyers walk through.
Another easy way to help get your house sold in a down market is to depersonalize. What does this mean? Take down or replace personal family photos, pictures of your relatives and pets, etc. Keep neutral pictures and decorations up. Why? When potential buyers walk through you want them to be able to visualize THEMSELVES living in the house, and it makes it hard for them to do that if everywhere they turn they see your family and your knicknacks lying around.
Along the same lines as depersonalizing your home, is changing your paint scheme if it is very unique and bold. Paint the inside of your house with neutral colors that can basically go with anything and with any style. Nobody wants to walk into a pink bathroom or into a master bedroom that is sonic blue. Event hough it is a simple thing to paint a room after a property is bought, potential buyers will have a hard time visualizing your house the way they want it. They will think back at the properties they viewed that day and refer to yours as “that house with the lime green bedroom.” Paint is an easy and inexpensive way to help get your house sold so don’t overlook it
Another great idea to consider is staging. Staging can do wonders by having people fall in love with your house. One of the main points for staging is to decorage your house in a way that appeals the greatest number of buyers. Even though you may want to deny it, but not everybody loves a country style ktichen with cows and chickens everywhere. And even though your teenage son may not agree, but not everyone loves seeing rock n roll posters, black lights, and posters of bikini models on their bedroom walls.
There are two basic approached you could take to staging your property. Notice I am referring to your house as “property” and not your “home.” When you are trying to sell your house, you should no longer look at it as your “home” but as a “property.” As an item you invested in and are now looking to sell. Anyway, the first approach you could take is to remove all of your existing furniture and put it in storage and have a professional stager come in and stage your entire house. This will be the more expensive of the two ways but at the same time it is the more effective approach.
The second approach is to leave your existing furniture and have a professional stager come in and have him or her simply rearrange your furniture and possibly replace certain pieces here and there. You’d be amazed at what a difference a good stager can make by simply just rearranging your furniture. Just by moving some things around, a good stager can make your house look so much bigger than it is.
These are just a few ways that you could put yourself ahead of the competition when it comes to selling your home in a down market. We all know we are in a buyers market right now and by doing these simple suggestions, your house will definitely stand out more so than all the other houses out there that are simply put on the market by homeowners who put no thought into how they can make their properties more sellable or more desirable.
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