Creating the Ultimate Experience for Potential Home Buyers

When you live in a house, you become familiar with it’s quirks, it’s smells, small messes and unfinished projects. You’re just so used to them that they just become normal. When people come to a house showing, however, they have a different perspective. Nothing about your house feels normal to them because it is their first time there. Instead, their sense become hyperactive in their new environment. For this reason, it is necessary that you prepare your home on a sensory level as you get ready for your open house or showings.

Today we’re going to share with you some of our fool-proof tricks for preparing your house for potential home buyers.

Sight

We always recommend that people walk through their home twice a day in order to gauge which projects you should prioritize and which ones you can push aside. So, walk through your house in the once morning and in the evening, as well. As you walk, create a checklist of things you need to do. Look at each room thoroughly, focusing one wall at a time, starting from the top and moving to the bottom, then scanning left to write.

Consider noting:

• small holes in the wall
• missing outlet covers
• areas where paint needs to be touched up
• crayon or marker doodles on the walls
• holes or tears in your carpet
• loose tiles
• uneven floorboards
• unfinished trim

Touch

As you walk through your home, become aware of how things feel. Close your eyes as you walk around the room and feel for any shifts your body makes.
As you walk, ask yourself:

• Is there a loose board that you trip over?
• Is the flooring rough?
• Is your carpet pulling on the edges of your home?
• Are the windows hard to pull up?
• When you run your hands across the wall, does loose paint chip away?

All of these tactile discrepancies can become major hindrances for potential homebuyers because they signal that the house is not turn-key.

Sound

The sounds that a house makes signal it’s level of “quirkiness”. And the older a home is, the more sounds it may make. As you prepare for your home showing and open houses, be sure that you are aware of these sounds so that you realtor may explain it to the home owners.

To monitor these sounds, go into each room at a time and close your eyes. Run faucets and walk around in circles. Just focus on what sounds your house makes.

Consider:

• Noisy staircases and loose steps
• Creaky floors
• Load kitchen and bathroom pipes
• The sound of a toilet running too long

Smell

The scent we encourage you to become aware of is perhaps the most important: smell. Scents affect people in unbelievable ways; especially negative smells. As you clean for you showing or open house be sure that your house does not have any lingering odors.

Be sure that you pay attention to:

• Lingering smells from last night’s greasy dinner
• Residual odors from the trash can
• Cat litter and animal cages
• Pee stays on the carpet that smell
• Bathroom odors

As you become aware of these odors, be sure you take positive steps to begin eradicating them from your home.

For more tips and tricks about preparing your home for resale, be sure that you join our mailing list today! When you join our mailing list, you also have the chance to win an Amazon card.