Preparing Your Home For Sale
Preparing for your Big Lap – SELLING your home
If selling your home suits your circumstances best, before you hit the road, you have some work cut out for you. It won’t be a breeze let me tell you from having sold our first home. However, once settlement has gone through smoothly, you’re well on your way to your new life.
There are many things you need to consider when selling a home, whether it be a lifestyle change, upgrading or downgrading, family circumstances, or whatever the reason.
You first need to start at the basics.
Choosing your agent
We have only ever gone through the process of selling a home once and thank goodness for that. We used to have trust in an agent who we had met when looking to purchase our first home. But when it came to contacting him to look after the sale, we lost confidence for a few different reasons.
While on the hunt for our new home, we met the agent we use now. And we certainly wouldn’t use anyone else. We made him aware this was the first time we had jumped into this mosh pit and right away he made us feel at ease. With his calm and patient attitude, he spent a couple of hours with us (in his own time) walking around our home and explaining how the whole process would work. It sounded simple.
Simple would be the last word I would use to describe selling a home of 17 years! From repairs, to upgrades, to manicuring the gardens, to decluttering, to signing the contract to suit our needs, tying in inspections and photographers, this was a huge job. I felt very overwhelmed at times, but our agent and his team were quick to make us feel calm.
Before the house was officially ‘on the market’ we had a lot of keen interest, and it was sold (pending settlement) within 3 days after the first open inspection, at over $50,000 more than the previous agent who we used to trust suggested we market it for.
Hints –
*Use a reputable agent who has been in the industry for some time.
*Know exactly how your agent will market your home.
*Come to an agreed sale price with your agent.
*Look in your local area for other properties for sale and note their name to see how many that agent has for sale.
*Watch to see how long that particular property is on the market – if it’s for sale for a long time, the agent may not be marketing it well enough.
*Check online for other properties locally and get a rough price guide to comparable properties
*Make sure your agent doesn’t put your most valuable asset on the market for a ‘fire sale’ price just to get it sold quickly.
Let me talk you through what worked so well for us.
Repairs
As hubby is a jack-of-all-trades kinda guy, he generally fixed, maintained and repaired things around the home as they needed. But there were just a couple of things like sealing a couple of cracked tiles, replacing a few screws in some tin sheeting and replacing a couple of dodgey taps.
Hints -
*Fix things that potential buyers will see first – leaking taps, broken windows etc
Freshen up!
We had already been in the process of painting when we had begun looking for our dream country home. The interior of the house needed a new look, and our painting journey was halfway through. We painted every bedroom, all the living areas and each wet area alike.
We only recently had new carpet laid, and the tiles that we self-installed a few years back were still looking great as we looked after them well. They were a neutral colour and blended in with the new paint.
Hints -
*Paint walls
*Retile
*New flooring
Outdoors
Buyers coming through the home don’t want to see the outside of the home as endless work. Most people prefer simple, and non-labour-intensive gardens which frees them up for the things they enjoy.
As I hadn’t worked for some time due to a previous work injury, I was able to keep on top of the gardens although they were quite small. Hubby was the master of mowing the lawns, but I kept the garden beds and fruits trees looking ‘peachy’! I had a couple of vines to trim and a bush that needed reshaping, but due to the recent rains, everything was lovely and green. The area around the pool was always in top shape as we always had visitors (in summer mostly!) and the man cave just needed some items of value locked away.
It pretty much just came down to tidying things that were often used and moving a couple of vehicles around and getting the blower vac to work to make final touches.
Hints -
*Remove any weeds from the property
*Tidy up / throw away / store elsewhere bits and pieces lying around
*Trim trees
*Mow the lawns
*Blow the leaves away
De-clutter
It’s always advised to declutter before the photography shoot and open inspections. Doing this gives prospective buyers the blank canvas to envision their own belongings in the home. And putting things away or storing them elsewhere also opens spaces in the home up, giving the idea of more room.
Our home was always kept tidy, our work was quite limited here. We always kept the kitchen and bathroom benches clear; our kitchen was built with a utensil rack to hang, and we had a built-in coffee machine put in when we installed the kitchen years back (and this was one of the selling points also). All we needed to do was to add a couple of flowerpots to add some colour to the granite bench tops and that was the kitchen done.
Hints -
*Put away items from the bench tops in the kitchen and other wet areas
*Remove excess wall art
*Move furniture around where possible to give the ‘open’ look
*Tidy the lounge including clearing TV cables and remotes
Bedrooms
Bedrooms should look as empty as possible, giving the buyer the idea of plenty of space and enable them to picture the way they would set their furniture out and personalise with their belongings.
Bedrooms in modern houses are quite small, therefore it is best to only keep the necessary furniture such as a bed and wardrobe etc.
Our home was a 4 bedroom home, built in 1986. This meant that 3 bedrooms were large, and the 4th was more the size of a study, which we in fact used for an office. The bedrooms owned by the kids had a lot of stuff, so we spent quite some time clearing unused items out before we started painting. And once they knew we were moving house they had already started packing most belongings left into boxes, leaving less that needed to be ‘hidden’ away.
Hint -
*Put away kids shoes, bags and other small items
*Make the bed
*Open the window on nice weather days
Dust, de cobweb and add lighting
First impressions really do count here. A dark, dull home that has cobwebs and dust is less likely to gain positive interest as opposed to a home with bright lighting and free from dust and signs of spiders and creepy crawlies.
Our home had raked ceilings, so there were always a couple of cobwebs that even my extendable cobweb broom couldn’t reach. And of course they were always in the entry of the home. There wasn’t a lot of dust about as we were in the suburbs surrounded by homes that helped keep dust to a minimum.
We initially had the ‘warm’ type light globes, but upon the beginning of our preparation exercise, we changed over to higher wattage ‘cool’ light globes, which really helped to make the home shine.
Hint -
*Change light globes to brighter wattage
*Get a new door mat if the old one looks tacky
*Clear away cobwebs, dust and hose down concrete (use a pressure washer if you have access to one)
In this download you'll receive:
*10 pages with comprehensive lists
*28 categories
*over 800 items already filled
*customise to suit your own items
*printable and check off in the tick box or use on the computer
Small things
It’s the things you wouldn’t normally consider when preparing your home to be viewed by prospective buyers that change the scale. Little things we did were things like:
*Colour coordinate both bathroom towels and bathmats
*Tidy up junk drawers and cupboards
*Change the front door mat
*Add in a couple of flowerpots and rugs
*Store unused vehicles elsewhere
*Turning the built in spa on
*Playing soft background music
*Adding the smell of fresh coffee to the home
*Baking fresh banana bread (the smell was a big hit!)
*Open all curtains and blinds
*Putting away family photos
*Hiding toothbrushes, shavers etc
*Open windows when the weather was on our side to get rid of any stale air
Once finished, it gave the home a new lease on life and was ready for a new family.
It’s a known fact, that the longer you stay in a home, the more ‘stuff’ you seem to acquire. Dealing with this is going to take a mammoth effort. But when things seem tough, always keep in mind why you’re doing this and what your end goal is. It is more than worth the effort.
Note: We are not real estate agents, nor are we employed by any. We are just the average Joe, sharing hints on how we made the best out of selling our home for a larger than expected return.
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