We’re now moving into peak home sales season but even with the arrival of the warmer weather and the knowledge that many buyers will be hoping to have completed their home purchase with time to move on their own terms, so to speak, during the school holidays, it’s still highly recommended to put a little effort into preparing your home for sale to ensure that it looks its absolute best. The team at Indlu estate agents in Denton, have put together their top tips for preparing your home for sale.
Deal with all the basic maintenance jobs and repairs you’ve been putting off
If you’ve lived in your home for a while, the chances are that you’ve dealt with the important home-maintenance tasks, but probably ignored at least some of the minor ones on the grounds that they don’t really bother you to the point where they seem like they’re worth the energy needed to fix them.
Now is the time to fix them, because potential buyers can only go by what they see and if they see that you haven’t made the effort to make your house look its absolute best for their visit, they may come to the conclusion that you probably haven’t bothered to take care of the less visible aspects of home maintenance.
Remember you only get one chance to make a first impression
We hate to trot out cliches but this one’s not just true, it’s really important. Now, in spite of what we’ve just said, we actually think that there are two occasions a buyer gets a “first impression” of your home. The first is when they see the listing and the second is when they actually see your home. You need to take both these situations very seriously.
In particular, you need to make sure that the photos on your listing look as good as they possibly can (without misrepresenting the property through over-enthusiastic editing). You also want to give some thought to the text. (If you’re using a good estate agent, they will take care of both of those points for you). Then you need to make sure that you put as much effort as you can into making sure that a potential buyer’s first sight of your home gives them a very positive impression, even if this means spending a little money to make it look more beautiful, e.g. by updating your house number.
A fresh coat of paint can work wonders
This is a fairly well-known tip, but we’d like to add a little something to it. While you generally want to stick to neutral colours, you don’t have to stick to the same colour, for example, if you want to make a room look taller, you can use vertical stripes and to make it look broader, you can use horizontal stripes.
The trick here is to remember that stripes in contrasting colours are generally best kept for larger rooms, which can handle them, they can look busy in smaller ones, but stripes in complementary colours, say a cream which is almost white and a darker shade of cream, can give the same visual effect in a more subtle way and without overpowering a small room.