How To Get The Right Price For Your House
This article is the first of a number that will be published over the coming weeks looking at what you can do to both decrease the time it takes to sell your house and to get the best possible price.
Preparing your house for sale is always important. When the market is buoyant you are competing for buyers with everyone else and when the market is down, like it is now, you are trying to encourage buyers to make an offer and to maximise the price you get.
The golden rule, as anyone who sells for a living knows, is to put yourself into the mind of the buyer.
So in the case of selling a property, ask yourself what does someone who is looking around your home want to see? What will make them want to put an offer in and give you the price you are looking for?
Well below is a long list of really useful tips that you can put into practice if you are about to put your home on the market.
- Firstly go and view some other houses already on the market and see how the ‘competition’ are doing it, good or bad. Learn from what you see! How did you feel when you pulled up to the property, as you walked through the garden and then as you walked through the door? First impressions count.
- Be clean & tidy – I’m talking about the house of course … but also you as the seller!
- De-clutter – leave the house as a blank canvas for the potential buyer to picture all the wonderful creative things they can do with it once they move in.
- The outside of the house matters as much as the inside – first impressions count so remove that broken down washing machine from the front lawn and take it down the
- In fact go one step further and keep not only the house and garden but also the surrounding street absolutely spotless. Make sure you trim hedges an mow lawns, pick up litter etc.
- Use good, generous lighting inside that displays your home in the best possible.
- Remove highly personal artefacts (ornaments / posters etc) that may clash with other people’s views and tastes.
- Get an honest opinion from a friend. Sometimes we can become blind to the weaknesses of our own house.
- A lick of paint on dirty interior walls will always make a massive difference.
- Deep clean dirty carpets so they look like new and remove those nasty odours.
- Think about getting rid of pets temporarily, not everyone likes animals and their smells. Then again some people love animals – your call on this one.
- Have the house viewed at its brightest time of day … if you can.
- Have the house viewed at the quietest time of day …if necessary and if you can.
- Make sure any building / DIY projects are complete (shelves, tiles etc) and tidied away.
- Leave fresh flowers out, it makes the house feel like a home.
- If it’s you doing the viewings then show the house when there are as few of you there as possible and certianly not over dinner. The house will feel bigger if it is not full of people, dirty dishes and noise.
- Present rooms as bedrooms rather than a toy room / study etc – and market as such (ie a 3 bed house rather than a 2 bed with possible 3rd).
- Let the agent manage the viewing rather than do it yourself – most buyers feel more comfortable this way. Having said this make sure your agent actually sells your property and doesn’t just open the door and let the prospective buyer in. You are paying them a hefty fee after all.
There are lots of tips here, most of them are on a similar theme – one of making a fantastic first impression for your buyer and putting them in the right frame of mind to make you the offer you want.
Hope this helps. Going forward there will be many more posts packed full of tips on how to sell quickly and at the right price.
Until then… take care.
Tags: house prices, property market, selling, tips