The Safari Guide to Listing Your Home

You made it!  This is the eighth and final installment in our weekly blog series to help you prepare your home for listing in today’s market – Clean Baby Clean!  If you follow this 8-week guide, you’ll be able to break up all those to-do’s into manageable steps.  Check out the prior blogs in the series here: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5, and week 6, and week 7.

Clean Baby Clean

After 7 weeks of hard work, look at you!  You’re in the homestretch.  We’re only days away from professional photography and then listing the home as actively for sale on the market!  Buyers will soon begin scheduling showings at your property. So, after 7 weeks of preparation, now is the time to have your home:

1) Professionally cleaned (or if you’re up for the work, truly deep-cleaned)

2) Windows cleaned to a blinding sparkle

3) Carpets steam cleaned – we recommend having this done professionally

24-48 hours after cleaning, we’ll arrive with strategic staging decor and/or go to work rearranging furniture.  The goal is to use our experience to highlight your home’s best features! Sometimes that means your favorite chair might not be facing the television anymore, but it’s only for a little while! Furniture placement and updated staging items are essential to ensure engaging photography, and to create a home where every buyer can envision building their life.

Professional photography is KEY for:

1) Attracting buyers

2) Negotiation

3) Maintaining buyer interest to the closing table

4) Appraisals

Call me today – I’m happy to have a conversation on the subject of professional photography and its necessity in today’s world of real estate. Furniture arrangement for marketing and sale is important to highlight a feeling of spaciousness, offer ideas on how to use that space, and to offer a ‘magazine’ feel. This isn’t necessarily how we live in the home, but rather how the home is presented to the market.

As discussed in the Get Outside post, your buyer’s impression begins before even entering the home.  Thus our appointment will include special attention to the front door. Following our recommendation, the front door will have had a fresh coat of paint. In addition, we recommend a brand new welcome mat that’s color coordinated with the front door or the interior of the home. We like to see an outdoor chair, and, if in season, a perfectly sized flower pot with healthy and colorful flowers. If it’s not flower season, we recommend a beautiful lantern. These can be found at Big Lots for less than $40.

Lastly, we ensure the positive first impression is complete with a clean lockbox attached to your front door, a clean set of keys, and an attractive key ring.  There’s nothing worse than opening a beautiful home with a grimy and dirty key.  Our goal and our history is breaking price per square foot records in neighborhoods we represent.  We believe details matter!

So, now…it’s SHOWTIME!  Your home is officially on the market and buyers are eager to see your new listing!  This is where I start the heavy lifting of marketing, negotiating, securing offers, seeking back-up offers, and guiding you as your Listing Agent to the Closing Table!