5 Tips to Ensure Your Home’s Showing Is a Success
The purpose of showing your home is to hook a buyer. You want the buyers to come through your house and be impressed – so impressed in fact, that they’re ready to make an offer.
You’ll have one chance to make a first impression on the potential buyers and you want to make it count. Focusing on the outside is the first tip. Make sure that you don’t neglect the outside of your home.
Curb appeal can make or break the odds of someone even bothering to get out of the car to come in. If they pull up and see a home with a lawn that obviously needs edging and has an unkempt flower bed, they’re going to wonder what else hasn’t been cared for properly.
You want the outside of your home to be spotless. Clean the siding, the windows, and the doors. Make sure there are no dirt smudges, no cobwebs and that anything that needs painting has been spiffed up.
The second tip is to take yourself out of the house. That means that you want to take out all the personal stuff. Remove the family photos from the wall or tables. You want the home to look neutral so that the potential buyers can look at your house and picture it as themselves living there.
Everything should be as neutral as possible in terms of personal items. The third tip is to pare down all the extra clutter you see at first glance. If you look around, it’ll amaze you at how much stuff you’ve accumulated over the years.
Some of it might very well be important, but that doesn’t mean that your potential buyers should see it. When you have a lot of clutter, it shrinks the living space of the house.
It makes it look and feel cramped and smaller. Many homeowners get something called house blindness. They’ve lived in the home for so long with the same clutter that they don’t even really see it anymore.
But a stranger will always notice. So clean out your house and make the space as big as possible. The fourth tip is that if you have a pet, no one who walks through your house should be able to notice it exists.
That means no cat litter box, no dog to jump on anyone, no food sitting around in a dish. Your home should not have any pet odors. Having a clean house that’s odor free is a big selling point.
You don’t want to lose a possible deal just because they can smell your pet’s presence or your pet makes a bad impression. The fifth tip is to stage your home. You can hire a professional or you can do it yourself.
Stage your living areas in a way that shows off your home. You can rent furniture to make your home furnishings look good if you don’t use a stager. Someone who knows how to stage a house knows how to play up the best features of your home and knows what to bring in or get rid of to make the entire house appeal to a buyer.
