Living At Home vs. Selling Your House

Are you selling your home? If so, there are several things to consider before a potential buyer comes through the door.

1) Is cleaning the home good enough? NO ...being clean does not remove the clutter. To elaborate:

• We all love our "stuff" and think our stuff makes the home feel comfortable. But guess what? The potential buyers who visit your home will most likely think it is cluttered, messy, and uninviting.
• Buyers need to see a home in "model perfect" condition and they should be able to picture themselves living in your home. That means a minimum number of pictures of your family, no personal items like golf clubs or back packs, and no papers or mail sitting around.
• You want the house to look like they could bring all their "stuff" and move right in. When people see your collectibles, your kid's toys, etc., they focus on that and forget about the house. Give them a reason to see your home as their home.

2) Should you stage the home? ABSOLUTELY.

• There is a special mindset associated with "staging" your home to sell.  Staging refers simply to the act of improving your home's appearance in order to appeal to the widest segment of potential buyers. The approach you must adopt is to see your home with an objective eye.
• Since you may have a strong emotional attachment to your home, you may not fully appreciate hearing about a better way to show it, but try to recognize that the way you decorate to SELL may be quite different from the way you decorate to dwell.  The appearance of a space often trumps its functionality when impressing buyers.

3) Is it still your home? YES and NO.

• You are obviously still the owner until it sells, but when listed for sale it quickly becomes inventory and should be viewed as a house not a home.
• Start visualizing it as the "product" to sell, like a car or another commodity. The better the packaging and price, the easier it is to sell. Both a real estate agent and a professional home stager can help to market your product successfully by highlighting positive features and downplaying less attractive aspects.

Overall, your goal is to sell quickly at a fair price. A survey by a large national real estate brokerage showed that staged homes sell in half the time, and another survey of REALTORS® showed that a $500 "staging" investment recouped 343% of that cost.  So be prepared to swallow a little pride, move some furniture, and field better offers on the road to your successful sale.

To learn more about the Houston real estate market, selling your home, staging your home, or Houston homes for sale, please visit our website at https://www.2Mrealty.com.

Mark W. Martin is a Texas Real Estate Broker and Houston Realtor. He can be reached at (877) 839-5263 or by email at martin@2mrealty.com.