Have you just placed your home on the market? Have you had your home on the market for months? Are you considering accepting a low bid or lowering your asking price to sell your home? Before you lose all hope, try these five easy and inexpensive tricks to make your home more appealing to potential buyers.
Why Your Home Hasn’t Sold Yet?
Many homeowners experience a great deal of stress when trying to sell their homes. There is the anxiety that comes along with selecting your realtor. There the back and forth with setting your asking price. There is the seemingly endless stream of strangers wandering through your home. There are a ton of bids that are just too low, or maybe there are no bids at all.
So how do you position your home in the best possible light to those buyers who can actually afford your asking price? For one, don’t fall prey to the same roadblocks that other sellers run in to while trying to sell their homes. Homeowner’s inability to look at their home objectively, through the eyes of a potential buyer, causes many sellers to accept bids that are much lower than their asking price.
When decorating your home, you decorate to our own tastes, incorporating items that are special to you. However, it is important to understand that not everyone has the same tastes as you, especially if, like myself, your taste includes bright mismatched colors, or eclectic art displays. It is also true that items, which are special to you, may look like junk to someone else.
With just a few simple and inexpensive cosmetic changes you can completely change the way potential buyers see your home. You can make your home seem appealing to a much wider variety of homebuyers and increase your chances of receiving your asking price for your home. The following five simple steps can help you to transform your home in to a much more buyer friendly environment.
1. Kill the Clutter
Even if you have to get a storage locker to hold some of your prized nick knacks or the nine hundred family photos that you keep around the house, whatever you need to do, get the clutter out. Clutter of any type will make your home look smaller.
If you have too many pictures on the walls it will distract from the rest of a room. Clutter on the walls will also make the ceilings seem lower, and the rooms seem darker. So even though all those pictures of family vacations make you feel warm and welcome, it will have the reverse effect on your potential buyers by making your rooms seem darker and smaller.
Tables and selves should also be free of clutter. Clutter on shelves and tables distract from your room, make your home seem unorganized, and the unorganized look of clutter makes you home seem too small. A general rule of thumb is 60% free space to 40% used space on shelves and 70% free space to 30% used space on tables.