101 Easy Ways to Make Your Home Sell Faster - Softcover

Barbara Jane Hall was a licensed New York state real estate agent and Associate Realtor of the Orange County Board of Realtors. She is also the author of 101 Easy Ways to Make Your Home Sell Faster.

Introduction
 
Why is it that one house sells within days after the realtor’s sign appears on the front lawn and another lingers for months on the market? You’ve probably seen this happen in your own neighborhood: the Harrisons’ charming little Cape sells the first week for the full asking price while the Campbells’ tidy Colonial languishes for seven months before it finally moves at $8,000 less than the listed price.
 
In today’s tough real estate market, far too many sellers are spending endless months, even years, watching prospective buyers troop through their homes without making an offer. To avoid this kind of frustration, you must learn the secrets of making your house more salable. And no, you needn’t invest $5,000 in a new redwood deck or $10,000 in an in-ground swimming pool to make your home a quick seller. The fact is, if you were to carry out all 101 tips recommended in this book, your total outlay would be measured in mere hundreds rather than thousands of dollars.
 
That’s right, most of the following 101 tips will cost you little or nothing. If you want to reap the rewards of a fast sale of your home, what you must be willing to invest are your time, your imagination, and a little old-fashioned elbow grease.
 
The rewards should be obvious to all. There may, of course, be urgent reasons why you have to move, such as a job transfer, relocation, or retirement. Ask any friend or neighbor whose house took ages to sell, and you will hear an all too common tale of frustration, annoyance, inconvenience, and disappointment. Having hordes of strangers invading your private domain for months on end is no picnic for you and your family.
 
More important is the fact that the longer a house is on the market, the less likely the seller is to receive a high offer. It’s human nature to suspect the quality of merchandise that has been “on the shelf” for a long time. A slow-selling house makes prospective buyers nervous. More often than not they either reject the house or make a ridiculously low offer in the hope and belief that the weary and discouraged owner is desperate to sell.
 
Happily, it doesn’t have to be this way. Selling your home, though rarely a “fun” experience, can be a painless and profitable one—if you follow the guidelines offered on the following pages. And don’t neglect to involve your family in this project. It is a cooperative venture with one shared goal: to make your home sell fast.
 
Part 1
THE GROUNDWORK
 
Understand what you’re selling.
 
Remember that you’re not selling a house, you’re selling a home. That structure consists of far more than four walls and a roof. A home is a personal shelter, a haven from the pressures of the outside world, and a warm, inviting setting for family living. Although a house is probably the biggest purchase a couple ever makes, the decision to buy one is never purely rational. Buyers buy with their heads and their hearts.
 
Beyond the obvious considerations of location, size, quality of construction, present condition, and design, buyers look for special qualities that appeal to their emotions. Often they probably have no idea what these hidden, emotional qualities are that draw them to one house over another. It’s your job to prepare the groundwork, to set the scene for a buyer to fall in love with your home. Believe it or not, many a house has sold quickly because of a spectacular lilac bush, a cozy windowseat tucked under the eaves, or a kitchen bay window filled with potted herbs.
 
Put yourself in the buyers’ shoes, and remember that they arrive at your front door wanting to fall in love with your home. They are eager and filled with happy expectations. If you don’t know how to take advantage of these feelings, your customer is likely to beat a hasty retreat with a tight smile and a “thank you very much.” On the other hand, if you’ve done your homework and set the stage, or stages, correctly, every room in your home will greet the customer with a pleasant surprise. Your home will sell itself.
 
What makes your home special?
 
Let us assume that you and your family have made the big decision. You’re ready to sell. You’re no longer just thinking about it or toying with the idea. This is the real thing. First, settle down in your favorite easy chair, close your eyes, and try to remember your feelings the very first time you walked into your home. Now, pick up a pencil and start listing your impressions of your home’s most positive features in the first column of Chart One (opposite). This list should be purely subjective. Let your remembered feelings be your guide: the more personal, the better.
 
Ask your spouse and your children to add their own special positive reactions to the chart. Don’t forget that it’s important to get a “child’s-eye view” if you hope to sell to another family with children. Your teenage daughter may remember how she fell in love with your home years ago because of a swing that hung from the old oak tree in your backyard. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring children’s special impressions. They are an invaluable addition to this chart.
 
To complete the list, take a slow tour through every room in the house (bathrooms, too), then canvas the attic, basement, garage, and finally the yard. Make an effort to note at least one positive feature in each area. Include not only the items that attracted you to the house in the first place, but also those desirable features you have added since you bought it. If your list spills off the printed chart, as it probably will, lucky you! You’ve discovered that your home has lots of salable assets.
 
No home is perfect, even yours.
 
This exercise is tougher, but equally important. Your first list was fun; for this one, you have to be ruthless. Try to imagine that you are a stranger seeing your own house for the first time. Plunge right into the spirit of the game by starting your dispassionate tour from the street. Then take a pencil and start filling in the first column of Chart Two (this page) with every negative feature you can find.
 
Don’t skip any area of your home or property. Is the upstairs hall too long and dark? Is the kitchen too small? Is that forsythia bush getting out of hand? Again, invite your family to participate. Try not to let your love for your home color your objectivity.
 
You must neither close your eyes to your home’s negative features nor let them depress you. Once aware of them, you’re going to learn to solve the problems with ingenuity—and a very small outlay of cash, if any.
 
Accentuate the positive.
 
A real estate agent may bring prospective buyers to your door, but don’t rely on him or her to do the whole job of selling your home. A salable home speaks for itself, each room sending out a unique message to the customer. It is far more effective to have buyers “discover” your home’s special features themselves than to have the owner or agent point them out like a tour guide.
 
Short of installing neon signs in every room, how can you draw attention to your home’s best assets? All it takes is a little creativity: a cheerful glow of logs in the fireplace; a spotlight beaming down on the gameboard set up in your family room; a pot of red geraniums by your front door.
 
Take the example of your teenager who remembered falling in love with your home because of a swing hanging from the old oak tree. You listed that tree as a plus; now accentuate it as a selling point. Buyers will notice that tree if you hang the swing there again, if you group two or three lawn chairs in its inviting shade, or replace the sparsely growing grass around its trunk with a bed of vivid red impatiens. Stimulate the customers’ imaginations by setting the scene for them. If you can draw them into that scene and make them see themselves living happily ever after there, they will already be halfway toward making an offer for your house.
 
Now, start filling in the second column of Chart One with ways and means of visually highlighting each of your home’s best assets. Don’t worry if immediate solutions do not leap to mind. This book is filled with suggestions for drawing the buyers’ attention to your home’s most attractive selling points.
 
Eliminate the negative.
 
You can eliminate many of your home’s negative features by transforming them into something more visually pleasant. Clever disguises may not turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but there are many cheap and creative solutions to problem areas that will minimize, if not eliminate, those drawbacks.
 
A long, dark hall, for instance, will appear shorter if it’s wallpapered in vertical pastel stripes. By hanging a few pictures (borrow them from other rooms) on the walls and installing inexpensive gallery lights above them, you will stop the buyers’ eyes along the way and the monotonous tunnel effect will be eliminated.
 
It’s time now to start filling in the second column of Chart Two. But don’t despair if you can’t come up with obvious answers to every problem. After you read the following 101 tips, you’ll be thinking more creatively and you’ll be ready to tackle—and conquer—any difficult area of your home.