Stage your house for market with our checklist for preparing your house for sale, from booking routine maintenance to addressing cracks in plaster & cleaning the windows.
There are plenty of ways to sell your home, but how do you guarantee that someone is going to buy it? The truth is you can’t. Not without undercutting the market and losing out on thousands of pounds, at least!
However, instead of throwing in the towel and underselling your home, one of our best house selling tips is to appeal to buyers directly. What made you buy your home in the first place? What are you looking for in your brand new property? Take those answers and use them to make your home into something you’d want to see on the market.
What Sells a House?
This is a subjective question, but there are a few things that a lot of people will look for before they move. These include nearby schools, proximity to train stations, a house’s ‘main road’ status and how close to the shops it is. Unfortunately, your house’s value will always be dictated by factors outside your control, and you can’t change your property location to sell for a better price.
That being said, there are some things that you can change to appeal to buyers. For example, built-in security systems, EV chargers and leak-free gutters do wonders for selling your home, and they’re all changes you can make if your budget allows it. When you’re making the best home improvements for resale value, it’s important to pick and choose what you focus on - otherwise you won’t be making any of that renovation money back.
How to Add Value to Your Home Before Selling
There are plenty of inexpensive ways to get your house ready to sell. If anyone tells you that you’ll have to sink thousands of pounds into renovations before you list it on the market, they’re lying to you! Renovation work doesn’t always result in an equal rise in resale value, and you can end up throwing money down the drain if you aren’t careful. Here are a few of our favourite ways to prepare your second hand home for sale without breaking the bank - especially when you need the extra money to take a step up the property ladder.
1. Seal up the Cracks
Your home needs to look well-maintained if you don’t want your buyers to develop an eagle eye to every flaw it has. That doesn’t mean covering up big problems like drafty chimneys or water damage - it just means fixing the little things that you’ve been sitting on for years. Re-caulk and re-grout your tiling and shower base, patch up small cracks in the plaster and screw down the door sills to make your home feel polished. And if the damage isn’t too expensive to fix, you can even eliminate squeaky boards and bubbling around your chimney breast.
2. Book Routine Maintenance
Is your boiler behind on its yearly checks? How about the gas and electrics? It’s time to call a few tradesmen and book some routine appointments. Ask your contractor to put their conclusions in writing, and you may be able to provide these documents to give buyers confidence about the state of your utilities. Buyers often look at the state of the pipes, wires and boiler in second hand houses, and this is a very simple way of putting their minds at ease.
What Not to Fix when Selling a House
There are plenty of common mistakes people make when selling a home. Whether you’re spending too much on renovations or redecorating rooms that buyers are just going to redo anyway, it’s very easy to throw money away trying to increase your house value. It’s important to look at these mistakes on a case-by-case basis, but here are a few general things to avoid changing when you’re selling your home.
3. The DPC Coating
It can be tempting to try and fix damp before you sell, but replacing your DPC isn’t a good idea. It’s one of the most expensive projects you can plan for, and the money is much better reserved for doing up your brand new home instead. DPCs last up to 30 years and are not the sole reason your house may be suffering from damp. After all, there’s nothing worse than spending money and finding out the problem is still there.
4. Structural Problems
Deep-set structural problems are not worth fixing if you’re selling your home in a few months. It may feel scary to sell a home that you know has some issues, but all you need to do is balance the price to reflect it. Don’t lie to potential buyers by painting over a hole in the roof; your estate agent should be able to give you advice on how to sell your house without being dishonest and causing problems in the future. Either way, it’s important not to bankrupt yourself by fixing up a home you won’t own for much longer.
5. Disused Chimneys
In our modern - and often fire-free - age, chimneys are nothing but a nightmare. Not only are they susceptible to damp and structural problem, but they’re also expensive to fix and even more expensive to brick up. This cost isn’t guaranteed to raise the house value enough to justify it, and it’ll also take a while to do properly, potentially delaying your move by months if you decide to make the change at the last minute. Just leave the chimney as it is - if the next owner likes the house enough, they may choose to renovate it themselves.
How to Stage a House for Sale
First impressions are golden, and nobody wants to see someone else’s chaos when they walk into a house viewing. Staging your home to be viewed is a huge part of succeeding at a sale, and it also allows you to present your buyers with a ‘blank slate’ - a property they can adjust and decorate according to their preferences. Here are a few tips to help you prepare for that very first viewing (and all the ones after!).
6. Add a Fresh Coat of Paint
Faded, flaking or thick paint draws the eye, especially the ‘landlord white’ type of paint-over where everything appears to have been covered up. If you have a poor paint job (either too little or too much) it’s time to strip it down and redo it before the viewing. Choose a pleasant colour that enhances the ‘feel’ of your home: if your rooms are small, a coat of yellow, soft green or baby blue can expand the space, while warm colours can make an open area feel cosier. Avoid painting over mould or wet walls, since it’ll only make them look worse: unfortunately, if your house suffers from water damage, it’s probably a cost that you’ll have to pay in property value.
7. Hire a Carpet Cleaner
Nothing smells quite like an old carpet. Decades-old dust, pet fur, smoke and damp cling to carpets like fur to clothing, and it’s a smell that potential buyers are going to pick up on
immediately. The best thing you can do for your resale value is blast the carpet with a hired steam cleaner or pay a professional to deep clean it. If you’re still worried about the smell afterwards, you can also buy air fresheners to lighten up the scent of the house.
8. Add a Few Plants
It seems cliché, but you’d be astonished how much of a difference some carefully placed extra touches can make. Leave a couple of plants on the windowsill, a stylish ornament on the mantelpiece, a small welcome mat by the door and a picture or two on the walls. Anything that gives the place a welcoming feel without cluttering the space will help your house to stand out against its competitors. The last thing you want is for the property to feel abandoned or unloved, even if you’ve moved your own possessions out to help stage it.
9. Improve the Kerb Appeal
Our last tip is probably the most important: brush up your facade. The front of your house is your very own advertising board, and the interior is the product. A street view needs to catch the attention of passersby and appeal to potential buyers before they even click on the listing. It’s not going to do that if you have peeling paint, dirty windows and leaky gutters splashing rain onto the public pavement. Hire a window cleaner to blast away the dirt, clean or replace sagging gutters, and strip and redo the old paint job if you can. It doesn’t hurt to focus on the garden, too: some healthy bushes and a green lawn do wonders for first impressions!
Need to Sell Quickly?
Our Part Exchange Scheme will help you to sell your home directly to us, cutting out the hassle of ‘catching’ a buyer in the wild. If you’re interested, chat to a Homes Adviser to discuss selling up and moving into an Anwyl home.
