Selling Your Home (How to sell a house)

Member Name: wendybull

Product:	How to sell a house
Date:	02/05/07 (296 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You sell your house

Disadvantages: It is stressful!!

Perhaps I should amend that title to Selling Your House? The key to making your home the most alluring to potential buyers is to make it a house they can imagine being their home. It cannot be your home anymore. Once you decide to put it on the market it has to appeal to the general public, rather than your ideas of comfort and style.

We have just put our house on the market and got some invaluable advice from the estate agent. I will try and convey some of the tips he gave us and some of my own ideas for selling your house.

Firstly, contrary to most of the popular TV shows that tell us about selling your house, you do not necessarily need to completely whitewash everything. The house can still have your personality about it, and accent walls are all the rage at the moment, but the line for me would have be drawn if the lounge for example, had four different colours on each wall, in psychedelic pink, or luminous green. I am all for a bit of colour and having one wall of chocolate brown and the others cream for instance, is appealing to me but a lot of buyers would be put off by rainbow decoration in a house.

Luckily we have pretty sedate tastes in decoration anyway and all our rooms are comfortable and neutral as far as colour goes. However, there are a few potential stumbling blocks along the way for us. At least we thought they would be stumbling blocks until the estate agent came round. The bathroom was a major issue in our minds. It is very old and needs a new suite installed, along with new tiling and flooring. We were ready to spend a couple of thousand on a new suite and decoration in order to make our house saleable, but the estate agent said as long as it was clean and tidy, he did not recommend fitting a new suite at this stage.

His advice to us was to leave it as it was for the first few initial viewings and see what the feedback was. Apparently, a lot of buyers will view a room like this as liveable until they manage to get round to it themselves, ending up with a bathroom of their choice. I was a little hesitant, although happy to try and save myself some money, we weren’t talking a drop in the ocean here, but he seemed confident this was the way to go, so we allowed ourselves the luxury of leaving it as it is. The fact that it is a white suite in there is a bonus, as we were told the old avocado or blue suites don’t go down as well. One thing we did relent on though was laying a new floor in this room. The old vinyl tiles were broken and lifting up in places, so we spent £60 on some laminate flooring and laid this down. It actually makes a huge difference to the room and even though it still needs re-tiling and a new suite, the floor has given it a temporary face-lift and in my mind, makes it more acceptable to potential buyers.

The other good point to remember is to clear away the clutter. This is especially important if your house is on the smaller side. Everyone wants to live in spacious accommodation and by clearing away as much of your personal collections as possible, you are maximising the space you are offering to viewers. For instance, I love my books but they just took up hoards of space in the dining room, so we boxed them up and along with the bookshelves, stored them in a friends lock up. The dining room now only houses the table and chairs and a small shelf unit in the corner. It look massive compared to before and is definitely much more attractive to potential buyers. The same went for our DVD collection. Rather than storing everything, we simply thinned it out and now just have a small collection on show in the living room, rather than an entire wall taken up with films.

One of the hardest things I have found while having my house on the market, is trying to keep it clean and tidy all the time in case we get a spur of the moment viewing. With four children and an extra two that I look after part-time, it has been a challenge. In the end I found myself rushed off my feet all the time, trying to pick up after the kids. This was obviously ridiculous to try and maintain, and I realised in the end (after thinking how I would feel when viewing someone else’s property) that any viewer coming to a house that has children will not be offended or put off by toys lying around. As long as the general floor area is clear and they can walk through, it doesn’t matter if the kids have the cars out, or the Barbies are lined up on the settee. Everyone is human and in my opinion, as long as the house is clean, a little child friendly mess is acceptable.

In essence, when selling your home, all you really need to do is de-clutter and clean up. Wash the curtains, hoover the cobwebs from the ceiling and then generally do housework as you go along, in order to keep any last minute cleaning to a minimum. I have been vacuuming everyday, just before the kids go to bed, and flicking a duster round every morning. This keeps the place looking fresh and clean, with a minimum of fuss. Every few days do a thorough clean through as normal. There is nothing worse than entering a house that has a sink full of washing up and crumbs all over the floor. It’s only dirt but it does put people off and that would apply to me as well.

Finally the garden really helps sell a property as well. Ours is not the biggest of gardens but we spent a weekend tidying it up. We planted lots of bright flowers and topped up flowerbeds with fresh compost. It is surprising how much difference it makes. Cut the grass and keep it trimmed if you can as this makes it look tidy in itself. Clear away any tools or other garden clutter and store it in sheds or outhouses to make the garden a nice and tidy extension of your home, rather than a dumping ground.

We have had an offer on our property, although it hasn’t been firmed up yet, but by following the estate agents advice we seem to have saved ourselves a lot of extra money and hard work and it will hopefully pay off. My advice to you if you want to sell your house, is to get the estate agents in to give you a free valuation and some advice on what you need to do. Be open to the comments and even if you love your hot pink lounge, ask the agents if this will help or detract viewers from making a purchasing decision. They are only too pleased to help; after all they get a hefty percentage if you sell.

Good luck!

Summary: Try not to get too worked about it - relax and enjoy the experience.