Maybe even thinking about selling your home here recently, because everybody’s talking about what a crazy seller’s market is right now, which is true. Don’t sell your home in one day, though. But that’s a different video. It could cost your money. But after watching this video, where to talk about getting you ready to sell your home and how to get it ready for the market. So by the end of this video, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to sell for top dollar with great terms in the shortest amount of time possible. And it starts right now. I’m Jonathan Beasley, and we all know who this is. This is Rachel Beasley, my lovely wife and business partner. We’re real estate agents right here in Hampton Roads, and we do a lot of videos.
You’ve probably seen some of them by now. So if you’re interested in real estate in Hampton Roads or just the community in general, please be sure to hit the subscribe button and that little bell icon as well to stay current on all of our latest content. With that all aside, let’s get into the question how do you get your home actually ready for the market? That’s what we’re talking about today. What are the specific steps that you can take to be ready when the time comes and you’re ready to pull the trigger?
Deferred Maintenance
So number one, we’re going to tackle the small maintenance items that you’ve been aware of, but you’ve probably been putting them off for quite a while, the things that we would typically refer to as deferred maintenance. So items like little holes in your drywall that need to be muddied and sanded and painted, repaired and made to look good. Maybe like caulk around the bathtubs and sinks in your wet areas, maybe spring times rolling around and your gutters are clogged from all the leaves from fall. It can be surprisingly easy to stop noticing these little deferred maintenance items or just things that just kind of pesky. But you get to you get used to living with them. What I’d recommend is take a pen, take 30 minutes, grab a piece of paper and walk the house. With a fresh perspective. Think of it this way. A lot of these things may be insignificant because you’re used to living with them, but buyers absolutely will notice them, and so will their home inspector.
Or so will the father in law or the father or the family member that’s helping them make this decision. So when a buyers walking a property, they’re probably going to take note of some of these things and if they take note of like two or three of these pesky little maintenance items, the perception of the entire home can actually change pretty quickly. So something else we see people do very regularly is over estimate the cost of small repairs in their mind. So even things like a new roof, sometimes a new roof may only be five or $6,000, but a buyer thinks it’s 12,000 or $15,000. So it’s better to just, whenever possible, preemptively remove those potential concerns from the equation altogether. That way, there’s no room for their mind to race and worry about things that really may not be that big of a deal.
Decluttering Your House
Next, we’re going to talk about decluttering your home. Look, we’ve all been there. Things just tend to kind of accumulate a little bit over time. It can take a long time to start organizing all of this stuff, figuring out what you want to sell, what you want to keep. Or maybe donate or just throw in the trash. It’s okay. So we recommend you start the process now instead of doing it all later when you’re trying to pack up and move your family to a new home, buyers can walk through two homes of the exact same floor plan. But if one is neatly and efficiently furnished and organized and decorated, and the other one is just kind of like packed to the hilt with stuff everywhere, the impression to the buyer is that there just isn’t enough space in that second home, even though they’re identical.
So decluttering makes a huge difference and will make your home feel larger, cleaner, crisper, and ready for someone to move in. And you guys it’s actually kind of hard to over declutter, but we actually suggest doing it. If there’s a question, if you keep this out or not, you probably should put it up. Good rule of thumb. And then the good thing is once you move into your new home, all of those knickknacks and decorations, they’ll be ready for you for your new place. So one other tip just one more on decluttering your home would be to kind of de-personalize it. One last tip, you guys, when you’re decluttering, please take down some of your personal photos and items. You want to keep some of them out because you want it to look like someone’s actually living there, but you don’t want people to be distracted when they walked into a room of like 20 photos on one wall of of your children’s entire school life, it gets a little distracting and they’re not even going to remember the room that they walked through. So give them a little bit of a blank canvas so that they can imagine their stuff in your home. That’s good advice. Good advice. Yeah.
Make Your Home Brighter
Next, we’re going to try to brighten your home up as much as possible. So lighting is a big deal, whether it is light fixtures or natural light. There are very few things you can do to upgrade your home as cheaply and effectively as proper lighting adversely if buyers walk into a home and all the lights are on. But it’s very dark and it just feels kind of gloomy and uninviting. It can really impact the desirability of the home and really impact your eventual sales price.
So if you have a lot of windows, be sure to peel back the curtains and use natural light to brighten the interior of the home. If you have dark curtains, consider getting lighter ones or just leaving them pulled back pretty much any time that you’re going to have the house open to showings. The big thing is stay creative and find as many ways as possible to keep the home very bright. Oh, one of the tip dark paint. If you have a dark paint color in your home, really consider. And when I say consider, please do paint the home a much lighter color. It just reflects light around the house. And the same thing goes for flooring. You want it to be bright, airy, open, and spacious. If it feels like a dungeon, it’s going to turn people off. That’s some tough love for you. If you have a darker paint. Look, if there’s one wall like an accent wall, that’s okay. But if your entire house is a dark color, it might really turn off some buyers. We also recommend that you leave at least one light on in every room during showings.
It’s going to use a little bit of electricity. I know, but that’s very miniscule relative to the upside of having a buyer fall totally in love with the brightness of your home. So definitely use lighting to your advantage while you’re getting it prepared for the market.
Outdated Kitchen or Bathrooms
Now, let’s talk kitchens and bathrooms. Yay! If your kitchens and bathrooms were a new in the seventies or the eighties, maybe even the nineties, it’s going to be very notable, even if they’re perfectly functional in a buyer’s mind, they’re freaking out thinking, Oh man, I’m going to have to update this kitchen out of my own wallet. And remember that previous rule, they’re probably going to overestimate how much it’s going to cost. Sometimes you can really change the feel of a kitchen just by painting the cabinets and selling butcher block countertop instead of the old whatever the laminate. We run into this a lot when we flip houses. We have great cabinets that are just dated and old, but you’d be amazed at how a good painter can paint them white and they look beautiful. New hardware makes a big difference. Yes, for sure. So these small investments in your kitchens and bathrooms can have a huge payoff in the end during the sale. Yeah. Next. And probably what might should have been first because in my opinion, its most important is curb appeal.
First Impressions Matter
So I really want you to focus on your curb appeal. When a buyer first walks up to your property, what they see really is going to set the tone for what they remember. There’s an interesting psychological concept known as confirmation or hindsight bias. I’m edumacated basically when we first see something we make or someone, a lot of times we can make instantaneous decisions right then and there about what we’re seeing and its really our brain making an effort to help us organize information. But what happens is the downside is later on, we’re more likely to accept facts that confirm our initial decision rather than accept facts that might contradict that initial decision. So how this plays out in real estate is they walk up to your house and they say, oh, this is cute, pretty house.
But the first impression could have been a little better. You know, maybe there’s some spiderwebs or cobwebs on the front porch and there’s some weeds in the flowerbed. So now they walk in they’re more likely to look and accept the facts that confirm the concerns they had. At that first impression. They saw the overgrown yard, they saw the cobwebs, and now they’re noticing the mildew in the bathroom or the smudge in the mirror. And it doesn’t take does it take much to set off those preconceived judgments that they’ve already made? You only have 5 seconds to make a first impression on your home. So make sure that the yard is in good shape, the grass is cut, the weeds are whacked. If there’s any painting that needs to be done, take care of that. Get the house pressure wash if necessary. Even if there’s soffit. If you need to do any aluminum wrap anywhere, just make sure that when they walk out of their car, they really like what they see.
Interview Agents
So so our last tip would be to start interviewing real estate agents very early in the process. So don’t just get the first one that gets recommended or the first ad that you see. I really want you to interview multiple brokers, ideally two or three before you finally choose one. And there’s a couple of areas that you need to pay attention to. One is what kind of marketing are they doing for their current listings? Are they taking pictures on their cell phone that should be an immediate disqualifier. Run for the hills. If Agent Sally is taking pictures with her cell phone for a listing, it just goes to show you the level of effort and frankly, the focus and money that she’s putting into marketing the home. Second is, do they have a good digital marketing presence and social media presence? This will tell you if they know how to market your home by today’s marketing standards.
So personally, depending on how large a home it is, we spend anywhere from 1000 to $5,000 marketing our listings. And if it’s a luxury listing, it tends to go above the $5,000 mark. So we utilize video marketing, we use Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, we create buzz and interest for all of our listings and we tell the home story through video. Then we target and retarget buyers looking for homes that are really close match to the ones that we’re listing. But most importantly, we tailor our marketing plans individually for each of our listings so that we can shine the best of light on the home’s very best attributes and then market them properly and natively to each social media advertising platform. So suffice it to say, we’re really good at what we do and we would love the chance to interview with you to earn your business. So with all that said, it’s time for the Question of the Day. What makes the biggest difference in a home to you in the feel of the home when you walk in? Is it lighting? Is it curb appeal? Have you ever walked into like a weird, creepy, dark house and it just totally turned you off? We’d love to hear any funny stories you have about experiences walking into a home when you’re home shopping. So I’m Jonathan, this is Rachel Beasley, we are That Fit Team professionals in real estate and passionate about people. See you soon.
