Selling your home can be a big undertaking. You have to find the right real estate agent and set a selling price that you hope reflects your home’s value as well as appeals to buyers. You also have to clean and stage your home to make it appealing to the potential buyers who will be coming to look at it. If you are thinking about selling your house, read on for some helpful tips you can use to make your home stand out on the market.

Consider Hiring a Professional Home Stager

If you are like many people, you might not have the time or the skills needed to stage your home in a way that will appeal to buyers and make it look great in photographs. This is where a professional stager comes in. Professional home stagers are sometimes trained interior designers who know how to make a home looks its best. Other stagers might have a background in real estate sales, and some have taken professional home staging courses.

Sometimes a stager will simply come into your home and give you advice about what they think needs to be removed, added or changed before your home can be put on the market. Others will actually make the changes for you by moving furniture and artwork around and decluttering. Your real estate agent can recommend a professional home stager near you.

Put Some of Your Belongings in Storage

Part of properly staging your home involves removing many of your personal items from the premises, allowing potential buyers to imagine their own belongings in the space. This sometimes means that you will need to put some of your furniture, artwork and even dishware and books into storage for a time. Self-storage units are readily available across the country, usually on a month-to-month basis. Some “on-demand” storage companies will even come to the home you are selling, pick up your items, store them, and deliver them to your new home when you need them, eliminating a lot of the work you need to do.

One of these companies is Livable, a company that provides storage in San Francisco as well as in several other U.S. cities. According to the company, “Today, there are more options than ever when it comes to storage, whether you’re looking to store your belongings for a few days or indefinitely. The storage industry has finally upgraded from outdated self-storage options, and now offers a number of ultra-convenient, secure, and affordable on-demand storage choices at our fingertips.”

Clean, Clean, and Clean Again

It’s hard to overemphasize how important having a clean home is when you are trying to sell it. If you’re home isn’t clean, all potential buyers will see is the dirt on your carpets and the grime in your bathroom, rather than all the great potential your home has.

When you first decide to sell your home, you should do a deep cleaning. This usually entails things like moving all of your furniture and cleaning underneath it, washing and ironing window treatments, shampooing carpets, replacing moldy shower curtains and sweeping out your basement and garage. Although deep cleaning is quite a bit of work, it will make your life easier when it comes time to move because all of the heavy cleaning tasks will already have been done.

In addition to deep cleaning, each time your real estate agent plans to bring a potential buyer to you home, you should make sure all dirty dishes are stowed away in the dishwasher, your carpets are vacuumed and the floors swept, and that there are fresh towels in all the bathrooms. Make sure, also, that you don’t leave laundry or things like newspapers and piles of mail lying around.

Several companies offer deep cleaning services. If you don’t have time to deep clean your home yourself, your real estate agent should be able to recommend a company that can do the work for you.

Paint and Repair

You might be so used to the chipped paint on your woodwork, your burned out light bulbs, and that garage door opener that needs repairing that you don’t notice even them anymore, but potential buyers will see things like this right away. Before putting your home on the market, make sure to touch up any areas where paint might be missing, fill holes in the walls caused by hanging artwork, and replace any burned out light bulbs. If simple repairs need to be made, consider doing them yourself or hiring a handyman for an afternoon.

Author Bio

Judy Lees is a super-connector with yunas photography who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, branding and networking. He frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing, digital photography.

Photo: Sicora Design/Build

It is important to bear in mind that most people go online to find properties that they want to view. They tend to browse through listings very quickly. Deciding within seconds which houses they want to see and consider buying. If the photos of your property are not good, they will quickly move on to the next one. Therefore, your home has to look really good in the photographs. It needs to stand out in a positive way.

If you want to sell your property fast, and get the best price, it is a good idea to take the time to stage it properly. With most potential buyers, you have to paint a picture, show them what is possible. That is exactly what you are doing with home staging, which is why it works so well. Here are some tips on how to do it.

Photo: Gotham Interiors

Modern Furniture

How you furnish your home has a huge impact on how it looks. If it is old and grey, that is how your property will seem to be to a potential buyer. But, crisp, clean modern furniture creates the opposite vibe. Luckily, you do not need to buy anything because you can hire everything you need from firms like Emblem Furniture.

Freshen up your Floors

It is important that your floors are pristine when you take the photos or potential buyers come round. The worst bits of worn floors can be covered up using rugs. However, if they are badly worn it may be worth laying some new flooring. These days, you can easily buy cheap carpet, laminate flooring, and PVC flooring. It may not be 100% to your taste, but this does not really matter.

Remember that what you are trying to do is to make your home look as attractive as possible to potential buyers. If all goes to plan you will sell your house and be moving to a new one very soon. Once in your new house, you can decorate to suit your personal tastes.

Photo: Designstorms LLC

Update your Artwork

You should go through your home freshening up your artwork. Bright, bold images work best. Again, do not spend a lot to do this. You can usually pick up what you need in charity shops or simply take a few posters you buy, cut them to size and put them into some cheap, but modern, frames.

Another alternative is to create something yourself. Again, this is far easier to do than you realize. Here are a few ideas to get you started; most of these projects would take you about an hour to make from scratch.

Reduce the Clutter

De-cluttering is essential. Sadly, your beloved collection of Lilliput houses or Lladro figurines is just clutter to most other people. It gets in the way of them being able to see the potential of a room. So, you need to get busy with the bubble wrap. Basically, you need to pack away most of your personal possessions before inviting people around to view your property.

Tidy up Outside

Kerb appeal matters, so do not forget to tidy up your garden. Also, take the time to clean or paint your front door.

Provided you do the above, your home will seem more attractive to potential buyers. Your estate agent can also help you to identify changes you could make, so do not forget to ask them for advice too.