Ways to Maximize Your Home’s Marketability
It’s time to sell your home because you are ready to move on, move up, or move out of state and relocate. Since real estate has been on the steady track to recovery, chances are good that your home will sell relatively fast in this emerging market. However, there are ways to maximize your home’s marketability to be able to compete against all of the other home owners who are having the exact same hopeful thoughts as yourself. Take note of the concepts below when you are preparing your home for sale.
Keep it Simple:
The way to sell a home successfully to a potential home buyer is to help them imagine their furniture, children, pets, friends, and life in your currently occupied space. You may want to consider going ahead and packing away the items in your home that make you “uniquely you,” which could include African animal heads on the wall, an extensive doll or teddy bear collection, or a series of books from a particular author alphabetized on your bookshelves. You never know what people may find strange or offensive, so you want to minimize their exposure to these types of personal belongings. In the kitchen, living room, and even your master bedroom, get rid of the clutter and clean up the surfaces to allow buyers to “fill up” the spaces with their imaginary lives.
Keep it Clean:
This may be a common sense concept for many home sellers, but your definition of clean and a potential home buyer’s concept of clean may be totally different. Don’t take any chances: go from the outside in and the floor up. You don’t necessarily have to hire someone to pressure wash the exterior of your home to clean it up, although, here in Louisiana, homes can accumulate mildew in less than 2 year’s time, so it might be time for a thorough
cleaning. If you want to put some elbow grease into it, you can actually just mix up buckets of lightly bleached water and using a long-handled scrubbing tool for those stubbornly stuck-on spots, you can “wash” the exterior of your home to make the paint look fresh and almost new. More work can be done by washing your windows both on the outside and the inside, making your floorplan more light and airy while also making the glass sparkle. Vacuum and MOP your floors on the inside of the home – this will make your home smell fresh as well. You can either rent a steam cleaner with a scented deodorizer in it or use a powder deodorizer in your vacuum cleaner for your carpets. Once you have scrubbed every inch of every surface in your home, cover up any remaining odors and put your best foot forward by buying plug-in’s for each room. They are very powerful and will probably last for the hopefully 30 – 45 days it will take to sell your home. You never get a second chance to make an excellent first impression.
Keep it Maintenanced
There is a good chance that it will rain in Louisiana while you are trying to sell your home – a chance that it may even rain very hard. You will want to make sure that your home is kept in good repair throughout the entire selling process. Before you even start the cleaning process, make sure you REPLACE damaged parts of your home – this includes dents in the walls, water leaks, cracked door or window frames, broken windows, and chipped formica or granite. If you are not selling your home as a KNOWN, as-is renovation project, you don’t want a buyer to bypass purchasing your home because they see that work will have to be done as soon as they move in. When selling a previously-owned home, there may be an understanding that it has already been lived in by other people, but you want to give them the illusion that they are buying a home that is in superior condition and will need little to no work at all.
Keep it Exposed
If you use the Internet for professional or personal use, you know that there are websites out there which maximize your home’s marketability through the use of social media. You can be your own online agent for your home by taking excellent pictures (or having your really talented photographer friend take pictures) of your home and then posting to your personal social media pages. If you do not yet have an online presence, ask one of your tech-savvy friends to help you by posting the listing for your. In addition to social media, you can also sign up for real estate websites for free such as trulia.com, zillow.com, activerain.com, and redfin.com to post just your house for sale on the Internet. Remember, the more pictures and descriptive information that you add, the more your listing will show up in the search results.
After all of your hard work, and your new home sells; you may be interested in building a new custom home on a lot in one of the excellent subdivisions in St. Tammany Parish. You can Contact Ron Lee Homes at 985-626-7619 or E-mail Info@RonLeeHomes.com to get started on building your new home.
