6 Tips For Selling Your House For Top Dollar
Getting the best possible price for your home isn’t easy, but you can do it if you know how. Follow these six tips for selling your house and you’ll maximize the money you get for your home.
1. Get into the House-Selling Mindset
Of all the tips for selling your home, this one is the most important: get into the right mindset. Before you even begin the selling process, stop thinking of this house as your family’s home. Instead, view it as a financial transaction. The more you can remove your emotions from the selling process, the better it helps you focus on getting your home sold.
2. Make a “Fix It” List
Take a notebook and go through your home, scrutinizing each room individually. Look for cracks, stains, or signs of wear. Make note of anything worn out, damaged, outdated, or unappealing. Pay particular attention to flooring, light fixtures, doors, trim, plumbing fixtures, and kitchen hardware. Then, go through and fix as many of the problems as possible. Plan on doing plenty of painting.
3. Maximize Your Curb Appeal
A manicured lawn can help win over home shoppers, but that’s just the beginning. Look over your entire home carefully: roof, entryway, sidewalk, fences, and everything else you can see from the curb. Pay attention to the small details, too. Ask a friend to help you spot flaws, such as a faded street number, dirty porch light, or peeling trim. Everything you clean up makes your home look better and helps fetch a higher price.
4. Stage Your Home
Staging a home for sale doesn’t have to be complicated. Start by clearing out as many personal belongings as possible, including any nonessential furniture or electronics. A good rule of thumb is to remove half of the items from every room.
Then it’s time to rearrange. Working around focal points such as large windows and fireplaces, arrange each room to look as spacious and comfortable as possible. Finally, clean your home thoroughly and keep it spotless until it sells.
5. Make Your House Easy to Show Anytime
In order to get the best possible price for your home, you need to make it easy to schedule showings. Obviously, if your house is vacant, you can just put a lockbox on the door so that real estate agents can drop by anytime without notice. But if you’re still living in the home, you need to decide when the property will be available to show.
It may be tempting to show just on the weekends, but that’s a common mistake. While the weekends bring in more foot traffic, those are generally idle shoppers who aren’t as serious about buying. During the week, shoppers who have taken a day off work to look at houses are the ones who are ready to buy. Make sure that your house is available to show whenever possible.
6. Think Outside the Box
Knowing how to get your house ready to sell and actually doing it are two different things. Each of these steps requires an investment of time and money. To make the selling process easier and faster, you may want to sell your house as-is to real estate investor. That way, you can skip all of the fixing, staging and showing, and go straight to selling your house for cash.
