Home Staging: How do I prepare my home for sale so I can achieve the best price?
When selling your home, preparation is key! In this guide we explore the things you can do to give yourself the best chance of securing a premium price for your home.
Home Staging: How do I prepare my home for sale so I can achieve the best price?
When selling your home, preparation is key! In this guide we explore the things you can do to give yourself the best chance of securing a premium price for your home.
Selling your home is usually one of the largest commitments you will do in your life as it is likely one of, if not, your most expensive asset. We all want to achieve as much as we possibly can for our home, but is there a secret to doing so? If so, what is it and can we do it too?
In this guide we’ll explore ‘the secrets’ you can utilise to help you improve the chance of selling your home and for a better price. We’ll also help you understand whether ‘just leaving it as is’ or ‘becoming market ready’ is the right decision for you when it comes to listing your home for sale.
External presentation (Kerb appeal)
First impressions. When a prospective buyer has booked a viewing and is coming to look at your home, their first memory and experience of your home will be when they’d first laid eyes on it, the street that it’s on and how the combination of the two made them feel.
It’s crucial that you ‘set the scene’ to make a prospective buyer’s first experience of your home a positive one. By setting a positive tone before they’ve even stepped through the front door, you begin the viewing well and create positive momentum which should then continue throughout the course of viewing. To the contrary, an initial impression or feeling which is negative is often hard to overturn throughout the
course of a viewing. A buyer can become overly critical and can actively and ubconsciously look for flaws if they feel the house isn’t maintained well.
So, what can you do to boost the initial experience of your home?
Ways to boost ‘Kerb Appeal’
• If there are bins outside, make sure they’re not overflowing and there’s no loose rubbish lying around anywhere on your property or the pavement just outside.
• Ensure there’s no clutter around on the window sills (inside or out)
• If you have greenery in your front garden, keep it trimmed, maintained and ensure it doesn’t obstruct movement.
• Check your front door, windows and window sills, if there’s chipped paint, give qit a fresh coat.
• Clean any debris on windows, gates, front door, etc.
• If you have a frayed or worn-out door mat, replace it.
Moving on inside your home
After setting the scene, your prospective buyers are in a cheery mood following a successful spruce up outside. We’ve now opened the door and are walking around inside your home. To keep up the positive momentum, we need to make sure that all the hard work you’ve put into making the outside look great reflects just as well inside your home.
Prospective buyers are their most critical once they’re inside your home, they analyse every detail. They’ve seen the photos online and are clearly attracted to the style of your home, this is why they’ve come to have a look around. Our job now is marrying the prospective buyers with the lifestyle that comes with living in your home and area.
We do this by making your home as attractive of a proposition to them as possible. By allowing buyers to move around your home freely without needing to step over clutter, minimising the amount of work they feel they need to do. Partner presenting and making your home smell as great as possible with the previous mentioned suggestions, we then let the house do the talking. It’s about allowing prospective buyers to focus on imagining how they’d live in your home, utilise the space and make it their own.
Here are some ways we can help achieve this.
Ways to boost ‘internal Appeal’
• De-cluttering, ensuring movement isn’t obstructed and shelves don’t look ‘too busy’
• Have a thorough spring clean and get to the corners you’d normally ignore. Buyers are overly critical and will inspect a room from corner to corner – a collection of cobwebs isn’t an ideal sight.
• A house that smells of pets can be a real turn-off for some viewers. Washing the dog’s bed is a good idea, put cat’s litterbox outside before a viewing is also handy.
• A total repaint of your home isn’t always necessary, but if there are scuffs, chips or the paint has faded or gone off colour – a repaint is a good idea to keep it looking fresh
• Lighting candles or having diffusers throughout your home can be a great way to evoke a pleasant, calming feeling and smell whilst buyers are on a viewing.
• Prior to viewings, running a quick maintenance check is great as some buyers will be put off at the idea of any DIY work being needed. Is there a loose door handle that needs to be tightened or do any bulbs need to be replaced?
• Open the windows ahead of a viewing – allow some fresh air to enter your home to avoid a stuffy feeling.
Depending on the season and weather, some buyers may just look into the garden rather than walking out to it. Either way, making sure any garden space looks it’s best irrespective of the time of year is a great idea. It can make the space look bigger, more aesthetically pleasing and even help prospective buyers envision how they’d use the space. Whether that’s for entertaining guests for dinner parties or BBQs in the summer or imagining how the kids would play outside.
Here’s a few ways you can enhance your garden space.
Keeping the garden tidy
• Mow the lawn so that it’s not overgrown.
• Trim any overgrown bushes.
• If you’ve got a low-maintenance paved patio, courtyard or garden: plant some inexpensive colourful flowers to add some greenery.
• Tidy up and/or stage garden furniture.
• Ensure there’s no garden toys lying about that create a messy or unkept look.
Our thoughts
Buying and selling a home is a huge commitment that most people do not do on a consistent basis. With a huge emotional attachment and a large sum of money from both sides involved, we always recommend to our clients to take the approach of ‘do not rush perfection’.
As tempting as it is to just get the property on the market immediately, taking an extra weekend to get the house prepared so that the photography and videography come out perfect will enable you to achieve a much higher quality listing. Subsequently resulting in more enquiries, viewings and possibilities for more offers, increasing the odds of achieving the best price.
With more enquiries and viewings, we can build up an open-day (or block viewings) where we schedule a viewing slot for couple of hours whilst you can take the kids and dog out and enjoy your weekend. We pre-qualify all buyers who express interest in attending to ensure quality and their ability to proceed. This block viewing slot non verbally creates demand and competition between buyers as they can see how
much interest the property has received, showcasing the property’s desirability. This competition creates ‘FOMO’ meaning buyers are likely to push how much they are willing to for your home due to perceived desirability.
A side benefit of this is you can potentially reduce the number of times you need to get the house ready for viewings as you can prep your home once, for multiple viewings to take place.
In short, we strongly believe that taking a little longer to prepare your home for the marketing appointment firstly, and then viewings, is a beneficial step for you to take. By doing the work up front, you can improve the quality of your listing, improve enquiry and viewing numbers whilst possibly requiring less viewing days. If you’re thinking of listing your home for sale, we’ve created a guide on what you need to know when preparing your home for sale, click here to read.
Whether you’re after some more space, a change of scenery or somewhere a bit smaller to be closer to those you love, we’ve got you covered.
