How To Get Top Dollar Offers For Your Home
Home equity is one of the greatest sources of wealth for many Americans, but you only get to “cash in” this wealth when you sell your home. With a little effort before your house hits the market you can prepare your house to attract top dollar offers from buyers. Here are my top 5 tips to help you maximize your payout from years of homeownership.
1. Clear The Clutter
When having guests over, we all run around and try to make our house look as presentable as possible. Consider potential buyers the most important house guests you’ll ever have (only this time you can’t shove everything in that one closet…). Tidy homes show better and better showings lead to higher offers. Clear most items from shelves, counters, and tables. Remove at least half of the items from your closets and consider putting the remaining items into attractive organizational containers. Closets that aren’t crowded look bigger. Do the same with your clothes closets – aim to keep your clothing closets at or below 1/3 capacity. If you have to temporarily rent a storage unit for some of your stuff, the higher offer price(s) may help offset the cost.
2. Paint
A fresh coat of paint can absolutely transform a space. Dollar for dollar I can’t think of a more impactful home improvement to attract the best offers from buyers – especially if it’s been a while since your walls have last seen a brush or if you have previously chosen a particularly bold color palette. Aim for fairly neutral colors and consider how the trim and ceiling will match your color choice.
See Todays Trending Paint Colors3. Update Knobs & Hardware
What’s the first thing you touch when you enter a home? Door knobs, drawer knobs, faucet handles and other high-touch surfaces disproportionately affect the feel of a home. And the great news for sellers is that they are often inexpensive to replace. Updating door knobs (making sure they all match throughout the home), fixing loose hinges, finally installing that last piece of trim, etc. subtly shows your buyers that you have taken care of your home.
4. Showcase Your Home’s Personality – Not Yours
You may love your collection of antique toasters or trinkets from your travels, but they don’t have the same sentimental value to your potential buyers. Buyers want to see how your house matches their lifestyle – not yours – and will pay top dollar for that place that “just feels like home”. A few pieces of artwork or photos are fine but the focus should be on the house – not your stuff.
5. Create A Focal Point
Home buyers likely tour many properties before making an offer (and undoubtedly browse dozens or hundreds more online before ever calling a Realtor). Give your house distinguishing feature to help it stand out from the crowd. Think back to when you were shopping for your current house (or think about your current home shopping experience). Do you refer to homes by their street address or do you say “that one with the cute red front door?” Whatever it is, be sure it’s memorable.
And lastly, I want to leave you with one BONUS tip of what NOT to do.
6. Don’t Over-Improve Your Home
Many sellers mistakenly believe that if they fully renovate their home floor to ceiling that they will magically increase their home value far more than their renovation costs. Unfortuantely, most of the time this simply isn’t true. A $30k kitchen renovation may not add $30k to the value of your home, and if you renovate just before selling you won’t even get to enjoy the fruits of your hard spent improvements. Compare this to a fresh coat of paint that may likely more than pay for itself in higher offers. If you’re considering undertaking renovations solely to improve your potential offers, contact a REALTOR to help you understand how improvements would affect the value of your home in your particular neighborhood/market.
