Your home may have seemed absolutely perfect when you first bought it, but after living in it for a while, maybe it’s no longer quite what you need. It’s served you well over the years, but now it’s time for you to move on to another home. You’ve decided to put your house on the market and between looking for a new place to live and dealing with selling your home, it can be a very stressful time. Before you call the real estate agent about publishing that listing, taking some of these steps could make the process a little bit easier for you:
Schedule a Pre-Sale Inspection
While it’s really easy to look around your house and find things you could do to spruce it up a bit -- give walls a fresh coat of paint, replace old windows with new vinyl replacement windows, switch out dated-looking light fixtures with new ones -- many issues might not be so obvious. Having a pre-sale home inspection is a great way to find some of the more hidden issues that are lurking in your house that could make a potential homebuyer reconsider when they have their own inspection done. After all, a lot of the most important things in your home like electrical wiring and plumbing systems are all largely hidden behind walls so small problems with them often go unnoticed until they turn into big problems.
If a pre-sale inspection uncovers problems and you fix them right away, you’re going to be in great shape once your house hits the market. Just think of how happy a person thinking of buying your home is going to be when they have an inspection done and no major issues are found!
Find Your Warranties
What things around your house have warranties? Don’t worry about the warranties on things like your computer or your food processer, think of the things that will stay with your home when you sell it like your air conditioner, furnace, water heater, and your roof. If any of these things are still covered by warranties, it would be helpful to have proof of that ready to show.
Get Estimates
If there’s something around your house that needs to be repaired or replaced, go ahead and get an estimate for how much that would cost. Even if you aren’t going to make the repair or replacement yourself, just having the estimate on hand could be very helpful when negotiating prices for your home. Many potential homebuyers tend to see an issue and overestimate how much it would cost to fix it. So if you have a homebuyer who sees something they don’t like and says, “Oh, it’s going to cost at least $7,000 to fix that,” your real estate agent can easily show them proof of how much it would really cost.
Rent a Storage Unit
One thing many homebuyers struggle with when getting their homes ready to sell is de-personalizing their homes for showings. When a potential homebuyer takes a tour of a home they’re interested in, they want to get an idea of what it would look like if they lived there. It’s hard to do that when a home is full of extremely personal touches like family photos and mementos from various events of your life.
It can be hard to see your home suddenly not looking like your home, but putting those things away, at least during showings, will make a better impression on homebuyers. Actually, renting a storage unit is a good move in general. Too much clutter can also be a big turn-off for potential homebuyers so if you have extra furniture that isn’t used very often, closets jam-packed with clothes and other items, or have a lot of other random clutter around the house, go ahead and put some of it in storage for a while.
