Home Selling Tips Continued

In my last post I talked about 2 key strategies for selling your house: 1) Look at your house with “New Eyes” 2) De-Clutter. Now I want to continue the discussion of Tips on How to Sell Your House, but looking at a couple more techniques that may be a bit more advanced.
1) Staging your home. Staging your home is something that is becoming more and more popular. It is when you, the seller, hire a professional to come to your house and make suggestion on how to place your furniture to maximize the show quality of your home. Sometimes this is as simple as shifting furniture around and showing of qualities in your home you may not really notice because you’re in your home everyday, or it may be as severe as having pieces of furniture brought into the home if yours is vacant or does not have pieces that show of the home effectively. Stagers are becoming more and more popular as the maket tightens and some command a pretty high price for their services. Some Realtors, like Chris Cowley (www.chris-cowley.com) with Heart of Texas Realty (www.HeartofTexasRealty.com), provide some of these services for free. What I do is provide a visit from our certified stager who will come to your house and make suggestions to what you can do to improve the showability of your home. This may seem like something that could only provide minimal benefits, but in a tight market it may be those minor things that make the difference between your home and the guy down the street. Remember there are neighborhoods in San Antonio that have as many as 70 homes for sale in one neighborhood. The minor details make a difference. If you plan to list your home make sure you deal with an agent who understands the importance of details! Personally, I don’t have the best eye for design so I make sure I can provide you someone who does have that eye.
2) Remove some personal effects. Some Realtors with tell you to remove all pictures of your family when showing your home. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) Too many pictures of you and your family may distract a potential buyer while looking at your home, 2) As Realtors we cannot control who enters your home. We can only control that only people escorted by Realtors can get into your home. We don’t know if they are good or bad people. If you have pictures of your young children up all around with house, or worse pictures of your children with their names on the frames, you may be supplying the wrong person too much personal information. We always have to have your safety at heart. We never want to put anyone in your household in any type of danger, so it’s just easier to remove all pictures. My thoughts on the subject are this; make sure you don’t have anything displayed that could put your kids in danger, but it is perfectly alright to have some pictures up in your house. I think having select pictures with “Pier 1″ type trendy frames give your home some personality. I like to see smiling faces in a house. I think it makes it look like this is a place where we have been happy, and if you buy this house you’ll have good memories here too! The other thing that some Realtors don’t realize is that people buy homes that they want to imulate. I noticed this when I was selling new homes for builders in San Antonio. Most everyone who buys a home in a new home neighborhood buys the model. Most of those people have grand plans to decorate their home to look just like the model. Nearly all them fail to so. Their house looks very plain when compared to the model because they aren’t professional designers with a blank checkbook. What I have noticed is if someone walks into a home of someone they see themselves being “someday” then that house turns them on. If they walk into a home and it gives them a feeling of this is the home of where we used to be, or below the socioeconomic level we are at now, it turns them off. So how do you which will walk through you house? Know the demographics of your neighborhood. Are you a first time homeowner neighborhood? Are you a move-up neighborhood? These things will tell you how the house should look.
Well, there are two more Quick Sell Strategies for listing you home. I’d be happy to meet with you and discuss selling your home if the time is right.

Chris Cowley

www.Chris-Cowley.com