Have you ever thought about the most important things to think about while prepping your home for sale? Well, today we are going to talk about the seven most important things to focus on while preparing your home to hit the market.

How to Get Your House Ready to Sell

Step 1: Contact a Real Estate Professional 

Our team has been doing this a long time and we’ve seen the good and the bad, and we honestly believe step number one is to contact a real estate professional to set that initial consultation so you can plan out and get a roadmap for what the next couple of months looks like. We always appreciate and encourage our clients (when possible) to call our team and give us a heads-up when they’re looking to sell in the next few months to get an idea of what’s ahead. If we are able to have those three or four months to help a seller, we can get a lot done to support our client. Some of these conversations include talking about the market, what to expect, and building out that roadmap toward our target listing date.

Step 2: Setup a Staging Consultation

After we’ve gone through the initial listing consultation and we’ve made a bit of a roadmap, we’re looking towards the future and this is where we often recommend having our interior staging designer over to do a staging consult. If you haven’t heard of this service before, there are interior designers that will come through your home pre-listing, and give you a plan of things that you want to focus on in order to prepare your home in the best manner to hit the market. These stagers are absolutely incredible and we think there’s some incredible value there, so we provide this as a free service to our clients when we help them list their homes.

Step 3: Decluttering and Depersonalization

Step number three really goes hand in hand with that staging consultation as we’re going to talk about depersonalization and decluttering techniques. This is one of the most important things to think about when prepping your home for sale. Now, obviously, it does depend on how long you’ve lived in the house as we accumulate things and personalize our home, but at the end of the day, we’re trying to sell our home to somebody else so we have to dial back on the clutter and depersonalize where we can so people can truly envision your home being their next home.

Step 4: Cost-Effective Improvements

Step number four is where we start to talk about the cost-effective improvements to maximize your return. We put a heavy focus on this along with our stagers. We’re going to go through the house and analyze what can we do to the home. If we have two months, three months, four months, or six months, what can we do that’s going to be cost-effective and give the greatest return for our sellers? We’re able to look at a home, analyze paint schemes, and analyze any necessary improvements. These are often the little things here and there that will pay off to our sellers in a big way. The beautiful thing about this is we have an incredible vendor list of our go-to vendors for these scenarios. We really do find that it’s critical if a seller has time to really focus on cost-effective improvements, and that is step number four.

Step 5: Let’s Talk Curb Appeal

Number five is all about curb appeal. Have you ever come up to a house and you just either feel good about it or you really don’t? That is often how the curb appeal of a home is making you feel. First impressions are absolutely critical. From the photos to the video, to the first impressions of walking up to the door, your curb appeal is absolutely critical to how you’re going to make a buyer feel when they’re walking up to the front door. Things that you would focus on would be landscaping, the color of the front door, if the home has been power washed, etc. All of these seemingly little things are going to make curb appeal really stand out in a positive fashion to the buyer.

Step 6: Deep Clean and Carpet Cleaning

For step six, we’re going to talk about the final deep clean and potential carpet clean. After you’ve spent time getting the house ready, you’ve talked to a realtor, you’ve talked to a stager, and you’ve done the improvements, now it’s time to put the final touches with a super intense, deep clean. This may seem like we’re super detailed but we want a buyer to walk through and feel how clean, fresh, and new this house feels, so we highly recommend it as one of the last steps to get a deep clean, along with a carpet clean if needed.

Step 7: Market Research and Pricing

For the last and final step, we’re going to talk about market research and pricing. By this time, it’s maybe been a month or potentially even longer since you met with your real estate agent. In that initial meeting, we would have a really good idea of what the home value was, but in these market conditions, things are going to change and the house is going to change if we put the work in. This is where we are going to get together again with our sellers, look at the market, look at the trends, and really come up with a game plan and a strategy for final pricing based on all the work that you’ve just put into your home.

We hope you’ve found these seven tips to be helpful, and we absolutely love helping our sellers prepare their homes to hit the market in the best fashion. We’ve been doing this for a long time so if you have any questions, definitely reach out to our team as we’re always happy to help!