Dressing Your Home for Sales Success - Part I

The Cleaning Process

When the time comes for preparing your home focusing on a few key areas will pay big dividends. First off the cleaner your home is the more people it would appeal to. People that aren’t real big on keeping their own homes clean seem to notice everything in other people’s homes. Areas that need to become clean and be kept that way include the entryway, bathrooms, kitchen, and windows.

When a prospective buyer enters a home they need to have a great first impression.The entryway should be absent of shoes, coats, and anything that may make the space smaller. If the space is small adding a mirror often creates the illusion of space. Buyers will pay special attention to the kitchen they will look in your refrigerator too! They look through cubbards not that their nosy, they want to see the space available. They open closets and check out the shower almost 100% of the time. Keep it clean!

Unless you are great at getting a home spotless don’t be afraid to enlist the help of a cleaning service. You are selling a home worth thousands of dollars why not spend a couple hundred getting it spotless and get more in return. People often balk at this Idea but in saving a few bucks by doing the cleaning themselves they end up wasting a lot of time and usually wait longer and get less in selling their home.

I am still shocked to this day when I bring clients to a home and enter the home and immediately see a mess or worse yet smell something. I would say 1 in 5 homes smell bad. If you have pets, an older home, or cook a lot you may be the one in five. Don’t be afraid to ask other people’s opinion.

The sense of smell is the most memorable to humans, and when your home has a funny smell to it that is what people will remember. Masking the smell is important. You can overdo the coverup! There are a growing number of people that are allergic to certain fragarances, and even more people that will be turned off by added fragrances. My three favorite tricks to helping the smell in a home are charcoal, cedar and Febreeze. Charcoal? Yes it is great at eliminating odors. Take about a dozen brickets and put them in a basement. You’ll be surprised by the change. Small pieces of Cedar wood add a nice scent to the air and if they start to lose their effectiveness all you have to do is sand them a little and they’ll become more potent again. The product Febreeze also seems to work well in masking odors without creating a noxious smell. Enough with smells…

More is Less! Especially when it comes to selling your home for top dollar. Remember what your home looked like before you filled it up with furniture, pictures, art, TVs and all your other stuff? It looked a lot bigger didn’t it? Well, we want to get the space back. Some good examples would be: remove extra furniture from rooms. In my office, I have two desks and two file cabinets. If it were time to sell I would remove one of the desks and one of the file cabinets.

In smaller rooms pay special attention to the the things that you have on the walls. If there are a lot of pictures on the walls in smaller rooms take a majority of them down. It is easy to try, and the difference it makes is just as easy to see. With less on the walls and less in a room the illussion is created and the room appears larger.

One of the hardest things for me to convince clients of is removing family pictures and collections. These are two areas that distract buyers and can also give them an unnecessary advantage when it comes to negotiating. First, family and personal pictures will take away from the buyer’s thought process of making it their home. If they see you and your family they have a harder time picturing their family in the home.

They also may be able to use the pictures to their advantage in purchasing and negotiating for the home. Let’s say they see your pictures and can tell your age. If you are in retirement age they maybe able to make educated guess that you need to sell your home due to an Illness, moving to retirement community, or changing to one-level living etc. You give them a leg-up on negotiating by revealing your age, the number and age of your kids, and I have even seen people have pictures of kids and only one parent. This gives another possible advantage of knowing of a possible divorce. For the short period of time your home is listed just put the pictures away for your next home.

Collections are another thing you should hide. When buyers come into a home and see a collection they start to check-out the collection and not the home. They may also damage something important to you by picking it up. Kids often come
with their parents and will occassionally run rampant thru the house. When we sold our own home one day I came home to find a bunch of CD’s strewn all over under my bed! Finally, you may upset someone with your collection. Stuffed animal heads or your favorite football teams helmet may offend an animal lover or your football rivals fan. I have had a lot of people focus on other people’s collections and you can see their concentration on the home drift off. So for your collections safety and for improving the chances of selling your home move your collections elsewhere or put them away.

In my next article I will go over my Top Ten small fixes to get the most out of your investment.

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