If your house is on the market and you’re after a quick sale, don’t just hope to get lucky – make your own luck by using these inexpensive and easy fixes to get your house and garden looking their very best.
Ramp up your curb appeal
You only get a few seconds to make that vital first impression on viewers, so make it! House hunters often drive or walk by a property before they make an appointment, so spruce up your exterior and garden as soon as you decide you’re going to market.
Pay attention to your front door – make sure it’s freshly-painted or at least washed down, and clean the porch and immediate surrounding areas. If your welcome mat isn’t looking, err, welcoming, buy a nice new one and make sure any outdoor lights are clean, working and don’t have any dodgy-looking wires hanging around.
Get weeding – it’s free, fast and really makes a difference. You should also fill in any bare patches on the lawn with grass seeds and top up any mulch or bark chippings with fresh supplies.
Property professionals, especially South East London estate agents, often advise clients to concentrate on curb appeal as it can raise the selling price by as much as 10%.
Clean and de-clutter
This is so easy, but so many people miss this trick! If your home is messy and cluttered, it will put off potential buyers as they’ll wonder what else you’ve neglected.
If there’s anything you don’t use on a weekly basis at least, then hide it away – you’re very smart to bulk buy all that fabric conditioner, but it takes up a lot of space. It might be an idea to start packing things up and storing them – if you spend a little money on a storage unit to make the house look bigger, you could “earn” thousands above the selling price. Plus, you’ll have less to pack up when it comes to moving.
Once the place is emptied out a bit, clean it – skirting boards, behind the fridge – every inch of the place.
Depersonalize your space
No-one really cares about your pet rock collection, sorry. All these personal items need to go into storage so that your home looks like a blank slate, ready for potential buyers to project themselves onto. Ideally, during viewings, you and your pets should vacate the building.
If you have an – ahem – vibrant taste in interiors, tone it right down. You should aim for off-white walls, neutral-looking rugs and no individual touches.
Get staging
You’ll have heard about staging by now. This means accentuating the positives and downplaying (or hiding) the negatives. A bowl of healthy exotic fruit on the kitchen table, fluffy new towels laid out in neat ranks in the bathroom, new bedding; all these touches give viewers the feel-good factor. If a window looks out onto the gasworks, invest in some amazing gauzy curtains…you see?
These are great tips! It is very difficult for my mister to see the potential in a house when it is cluttered. I always have to remind him to look past the seller's belongings.
THose are obvious things that people tend to forget, very useful reminder,thanks
These are great thoughts. When we bought our house it was not staged. There was a bunch of stuff here! It was hard to picture my stuff in that space!! Thanks for your tips! kristiedonelson(at)gmail(dot)com Thank you.