1. Price your home competitively with other houses in the neighborhood. Use a local Realtor you trust to get a free competitive market analysis of what your home should be marketed for. This should ideally include 3 actively listed & 3 recently sold homes in your area that are similar. It is to your benefit to have a Realtor that works full time to sell your property.
2. Stage your house to sell. Buyers are paying for square footage not your things. Pack away as many personal items & unnecessary furniture as you can. Rearrange furniture where you make the room look as big as possible. A storage unit or POD might be a good idea. You are moving so you might as well get a head start on the process.
3. Curb Appeal!!! Clean up your flower beds & make your entry way look inviting. A new welcome mat might be in order. First impressions are extremely important. You don't want a spider falling on your buyers head & killing the deal! Yes, it happens all the time because people don't use their front doors anymore. LOL.
4. Outdoor rooms....notice I didn't call them decks or patios. Again, we are selling square footage so make use of all the spaces that are available to you. If you have a deck or patio, stage a sitting area. Make it look nice with candles or flowers. Place a tray with a pitcher of ice water & a bowl of fruit on it when you have an open house....
5. Offer to pay closing cost for buyers. This is about 4% of the sales price on FHA, conventional & rural development loans now. Most sellers won't take much less than asking price when they pay closing cost for the buyer but it helps by reducing the amount the buyer has to come up with at closing.
6. Clean the house from top to bottom. Don't forget to do the windows! Natural light is an asset when showing off your home so pull back those curtains & open the blinds (unless you have unsightly neighbors).
7. Organize your closets & get rid of clutter. Your moving, you don't want to move things you don't need so now would be a good time for a garage sale or a trip to the Salvation Army to donate unwanted items. Buyers will look in your closets to make sure there is room for their things....if your closets are crammed packed, they will think "if they don't have room, I won't have room here either."
8. Take care of any maintenance issues now. That is a big turn off for buyers. Peeling paint, rotten wood, a crack in a window or missing window screen....those things won't pass through a banks appraisal process if the buyer is doing an FHA or rural development loan. Actually, everything has to be in good working order to pass. Conventional loans have more flexibility but not a lot of buyers have 5% or more to put down.
9. Make sure there are no odors. There is an old saying in real estate it goes like this "If you smell it, you can't sell it." If you need help eliminating odors. Ask your Realtor for help. We are trained in many arts.....including odor removal! LOL.
10. Try to keep the house picked up daily. Keep baskets handy for easy pick up of kids toys in the living room, make your beds every morning. Buyers that call to see a home usually don't reschedule so this could be your one & only shot at a sale. It doesn't have to be spotless every day but keep it neat with deeper cleaning on the weekends when you have more time. If you've packed most of your things away, it shouldn't take long to dust! ;)
