Getting to your next:  Selling your home

House with elegant wood grain front door surrounded by ivy

While inventory is low, it’s a wonderful time to capture top dollar for your Oregon home. If you are thinking about selling, here are a few key things to consider to prep your home for sale.

  1. You’ve heard it said. You should declutter your home. This is so true for several reasons:
  • We want to make your home appear as spacious as possible. 
  • We don’t want to distract potential buyers with your belongings. Collections, family photographs, too many books on potentially controversial topics and your drinking or smoking preference are some of the things that can create distractions and should be eliminated.
  • Working with me means we’re using the best photographers and there are ideal furniture placements and removal of “normal” home items that will make your home appear more desirable. Things like clearing kitchen countertops, and shower shelves, packing up some of your closet items so closets appear more spacious, etc.
  1. Go out to the street and look back at your home.  How is your mailbox? Doormat? Flowers?  Is there anything you can remove or spruce up?  Specifically at your front door are there spiderwebs? Do we need to update the doorbell, paint the front door, change a lightbulb?  Buyers will be standing at the front door while their agent retrieves your key for showing. Make a great first impression by looking at that space with fresh eyes and making any needed tweaks.
  1. Inside – clean is everything.  I am happy to assist my clients with cleaning services and to do a quick walkthrough with staging and decluttering suggestions. As a rule, realtors don’t usually photograph the inside of a garage so boxing and storing extra things there works great!  Just keep it as tidy as you can and put everything in the center of the room so that inspectors can see all the walls and get to electrical panels, attic access, etc.
  1. If you have not had your HVAC serviced in the past year have it serviced and do any recommended repairs and put in fresh filters.  That paperwork will save you time and money once you are under contract with your buyer.
  1. Make a plan for that first weekend on market. I advise my clients, if possible, to go away for the weekend so that we can accommodate as many showings as possible and do two open houses.  This gets us off to a great start and, in the current market, with exceptional marketing might even land you a contract in the first week.  

These are just a few of the many ideas I share with my clients when prepping their home for market. There are strategies for everything in real estate! From timing your sale and purchase and navigating two transactions at once, to getting not only top dollar but the best terms for your home.  This is a very personal transaction and you need a stellar agent with great marketing, negotiating, management  and communication skills.  If you are thinking about selling your home in two weeks or two years, I’d be honored to have a conversation about the possibilities and to learn more what works best for you and how, together, we can create that and get you to your what’s next!