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How to Prepare Your Home for Selling

Prepare Your Home for Selling

Reaching the decision to put your home on the market is momentous, but once your choice is made, you’ll probably want to sell it as quickly as possible. Time is money, after all, and the longer it stays up for sale, the greater the fees you’ll need to pay to your estate agent. You’ll probably start searching for a new property for yourself alongside this, and if you find one, delays can have disastrous consequences. This makes a quick sale absolutely essential. (Photo Above: SilverWoodHouse in Portugal by Ernesto Pereira)

One of the best ways to bring about a quick turnaround is to take steps to optimise your chances of finding a buyer. To do so, you need to make your house as appealing as possible; a clever little trick that will have the added boon of helping you to achieve your asking price. The better your home looks, the more people will be willing to pay, and the more likely they are to want to buy it.

However, prepping your house correctly is an art – one that many of us have not yet mastered. If you’re among this number, here are a three very helpful tips to help you…

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Depersonalise

When a potential buyer enters a property, their imagination needs to be allowed to run wild. They must be able to envisage your home as theirs, and this is much harder to do if your stamp is all over it. Before inviting buyers over, make a conscious decision to pack up any personal items, from photographs to family heirlooms to collectibles like figurines. The trick is to make it so that your buyers can’t work out who lives in your home, and can start to imagine what it would look like if it were theirs instead. (Photo Above: LA home of Chiara Ferragni – CONSORT Design)

Aside from removing personal items, you also need to take a step back and assess your style. If your influence is strong, as evidenced by brightly coloured walls, quirky accessories, or a collection of fine art or antiques, you need to strip these things away. Turn your home into a blank canvas, even if this means spending a little time and money and repainting your walls or re-laying carpets in entirely neutral, inoffensive colours.

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Make Minor Repairs

Although it may seem pointless to spend money remedying minor repairs for someone else’s benefit, it really will pay off in the long run. When potential buyers step inside your home, their first instinct will be to pull it apart. They’ll look for every flaw, and their eagle-eyed gazes will find them. The chances are they’ll want to negotiate a lower price, and they’ll use every minor problem as a bargaining chip to help them achieve that goal. Thus, it’s much better to spend a few hundred pounds patching up small holes, replacing cracked tiles, and fixing leaky faucets, than it is to receive offers that are well below your asking price. (Photo Above: The W.I.N.D. House by Ben van Berkel / UNStudio Fedde de Weert)

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Improve Your Curb Appeal

When it comes to making a sale, perhaps the most important thing to do is to improve your property’s curb appeal. However lovely your home is inside, if people drive past and see a rundown, dilapidated exterior, they’re very unlikely to call your agent and book a viewing. You have to get people through the door, and the best way to do that is by making your home look neat, low maintenance, and inviting. This is usually easy enough to achieve: simply mow your loan, tidy your flowerbeds, and repaint your front door and window frames. If you really want to push the boat out, you could even invest in some new flowers to brighten your garden and entice people in. (Photo Above The Water Tower by Architect Michael Carapetian)

With these three easy steps, you should find a buyer in no time.

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