When it comes to selling your home, every homeowner wants to walk away with as much profit as possible. As your home selling specialist in Sacramento, I’ve put together this list of ten ways to do just that based on my experience selling homes for top dollar, housing sales data, and industry research.
In part one of this blog, I covered my first five ways to sell your home for top dollar. Those tips including making cosmetic repairs in the kitchen and bathrooms, what we should (and should not) say in the listing description, and how to price it ever so carefully to sell it quickly but for full price (or even create a bidding war!).
With these five additional ways, you now have plenty of tools and resources to get every penny you deserve when your home sells. Contact me for a complimentary evaluation of your home’s value and let’s get started!
1. Declutter and start packing
Aside from just cleaning spotlessly, it’s time to go through every room of your house and remove a good portion of the contents, and especially unneeded and personal effects. Decluttering will simplify your rooms and make them look more open and even bigger.
Likewise, by removing 50-70% of all unnecessary items from each room, as well as closets and shelves (just as important), you’re essentially providing any potential buyers that walk through a “blank canvas,” so they can envision their own paintings, furniture, mementos, and personal items.
So, before we put your home on the market, take just one hour each day going room by room, putting things in plastic bins or boxes and carefully label them. You can either store those in the garage in an orderly fashion or, better yet, reserve a small storage space and start putting your unneeded and packed things there.
Just think of this as the first step of staging your house (which we’ll talk about next), and the good news is that you’ll have to start packing soon anyways when we sell your house!
2. Consider staging
Professional home staging is a fantastic way to maximize your home’s showing potential and is proven to help attract and engage buyers once they see it (which includes on listing photos online!). If you’re selling a bare-bones rental property or a humble starter home, then it may not be necessary, but for just about any other home seller, staging will pay off big time in the long run.
National surveys show that homes that are staged sell on almost twice as fast over non-staged homes (13.8 days on the market compared to 30.9 days) and sell for a higher average price.
In fact, 31% of Realtors surveyed say that staging can boost the sale price by 1-5% and 13% believe it actually increases an offer price by 6-10%!
To put that in perspective, on a $500,000 house, a 1% increase is still $5k and 5% is a whopping $25k!
Professional staging does require an initial investment but, as you can see, that quickly pays off once we close the deal. Ask me how home staging can help you net more money!
3. Lighten
When a buyer first walks in, we want them to be dazzled by how bright, open, spacious, clean, and airy your home feels. Aside from putting on a $100,000 remodel to make it bigger or adding more windows, we can achieve that same effect by removing dark and dreary window coverings, updating lighting fixtures, and adding new soft white bulbs.
It’s also essential that you lighten the walls by painting in light and neutral colors like shades of off-white, which will also make it look larger, newer, and more inviting.
Studies point to the fact that repainting your home’s interior in these easy-on-the-eyes light colors will yield an average 300% Return on Investment once we close the sale!
Courtney Way’s home selling tip:
When does it not pay to paint your rooms in light colors? Research shows that some bolder tones in certain rooms can actually make you more when it comes time to sell!
In fact, a study of 32,000 listing photos of sold homes found that when the bathrooms were painted powder blue or periwinkle, the average value was $5,440 higher!
The same was true for bedrooms painted in blue hues ($1,856 more on average), and blues or soft grays in the kitchen netted an extra $1,800.
4. Make it easy to show
You can have the most amazing home in the world and offer it at an incredible bargain, but if we make it difficult for other Realtors and their buyers to see, you’re doing yourself a big disservice. In fact, homes that are listed as showing by appointment only, have limited hours of availability, or require a call or arrangements with the listing agent or seller, first, statistically sell for less than their competition.
Likewise, make sure that pets – and especially dogs – are carefully sequestered in side yards or someplace away from potential buyers as they walk through, so the buyers won’t be rushing through, be a little scared, or just turn around and walk out.
Quite simply, homes with unfettered access through a lockbox and no free-roaming pets or dogs are easy to schedule, see, and comfortable to walk through, and that can only help you when it comes time for them to write an offer.
5. Document your upgrades
A great way to communicate the value of your home to a potential buyer (and justify its favorable price) is by showing them all of the upgrades you’ve made, pointing out any high-end or uncommon appliances, and demonstrating tech and green upgrades.
Collect all of your invoices from contractors, product and appliance manuals, and other paperwork that documents the energy-efficient features in your home, such as solar panels, electric water heaters, solar shades, and the like.
We can then organize them in a nice binder, explaining a little about each and the benefit to the potential new homeowner, which we’ll use to make the case that your home holds added value. Not only will the buyer appreciate this but trust me when I tell you that their real estate agent will appreciate this touch, too!
A Better "Way" to Real Estate 