Preparing Your House for Showings
1. Inspect Your House.
Make sure that your house is safe. Fix any loose rails, steps, etc.
Check electrical items, faucets, toilets and windows for correct operation. Make certain that all built-in appliances are functioning properly. Consider a professional whole house inspection, which will indicate to buyers that you are a responsible seller and uncover any major defects before they can cause trouble.
2. Know What You Can Change about Your House.
Discuss with your agent about what is necessary to change in order to sell the house. Keep a record of all home improvements you have made.
3. Get Rid of Clutter.
If an item is not necessary for your everyday life, then store, sell, donate or toss it. Have a garage/yard sale before you list your home.
This will encourage you to go through and get rid of all the things you don’t need. If curio cabinets, shelves and tables are overflowing with books and knick-knacks, remove some of them.
4. Remove Your Imprint.
It is acceptable to have a few personal pictures around the house.
However, if your home is a shrine of your loved ones, take steps to depersonalize it. Buyers must be able to envision themselves in the house, which is impossible if everywhere they turn they are staring at you.
5. Have a Plan.
Give each family member assigned jobs that will go into action when a short-notice showing is scheduled.
Checklist for Showings
1. Make the House Spotless.
Pay particular attention to the bathrooms and kitchen. Scrub baths, showers and sinks. Towels should be washed. Make sure all dishes are put away and counters are freshly cleaned.
2. Make the House Light and Bright.
Open window coverings, such as blinds, curtains, drapes and shutters, to let in maximum sunlight. Turn on lights.
3. Make the House Smell Good.
Air out the house to get rid pet and cooking odors. Light candles or bake cookies to make the house smell yummy just before the buyers arrive. (Make sure you turn off the oven and blow out the candles before you leave!)
4. Set the Thermostat to a Comfortable Temperature.
Make certain the house is not too hot or too cold. A home that is too hot or too cold can make for a bad experience and the protential buyer may leave prematurely.
5. Keep Fact Sheets Easily Accessible.
Ask your agent where to place the flyers for showings and who will be responsible for restocking them.
6. Keep Pets Out-of-Sight.
Remove pets from the house or keep them outside. If your pet must stay at home, put them in a particular room and shut the door. Make sure the agent knows where the animals are.
7. Leave.
It is best for the sellers to be away from the house during a showing so that the potential buyers can cruise through the house at their own pace and talk openly about their feelings with each other and the agent. Take the opportunity to get out of the house and enjoy the day. Do errands or take pleasure in a favorite pastime.
Staging your home
For the average real estate investor, selling a home can be a difficult task at best. Even when the home to be sold is aesthetically pleasing, everything that needed to be fixed and repaired is now working properly. Still, there is a desire to make the real estate even more appealing. Some homeowners do this by actually staging their home for an open house or for other showings.
One company in Arizona recently even resorted to hiring actors to portray the all-American family enjoying the comforts of their new home by that company. While the results are not yet in on how well the experiment worked as far as new home sales, it does exemplify what is meant by staging your home for selling.
While some experts may claim that staging the house for sale to look like the set from a nineteen fifties sitcom with the perfect wife and the perfect family, not everybody lives in a perfect and pristine bubble. It really is proven more effective for the home to have a lived-in and comfortable appearance to it.
This does not mean there is no need to dust or to pick up after the kids, or even wiping the fingerprints off the wall. The house should always appear neat and clean to give a sense of psychological comfort to the potential real estate investor.
If there are children playing on the floor in the family room, do not be so quick to chase them outside. The sounds of laughter and happiness fill a home nicely and make it warm and appealing to the buyer. If someone is in the kitchen making a snack, do not try and chase them off before they are seen and hide the one dirty plate somewhere. When the people who are viewing the house for sale can see that it is lived in, they will relate those little things to what their life will be like in that home.
By making sure that the house for sale is aesthetically pleasing to behold, the potential home buyer will be happy to find some place that they will feel good about coming home to at night. By making sure that everything is in proper working order, the real estate investor can be allowed to roam freely as they are want to do anyhow. By filling the home with a lived-in and comfortable feel, you are giving positive reinforcement to the idea that the new homeowners will be just as happy in the home as you have been.
When all of these factors are combined together by the seller in order to stage the home for a sale, the offers will likely increase in volume as well as in price. Real estate may be a major financial investment, but it is an investment that everybody from the realtor to the homeowner know is ultimately about finding a place that will be home, in every sense of the word.
