Every year, more savvy home sellers are seeing the value in properly preparing their homes for a sale, yet just about as many are still confused about when is the ideal time to start getting their home ready for a successful sale. If you hope to be a seller who sells quickly and for the best possible price, then “the sooner the better!” should be your home preparation mantra.
If you are fortunate enough to know that you may be moving in the next year or even in the next two years, there are many tasks that you should start on now that will help you be ready when listing day arrives and at the same time keep the prep process manageable. You may think this seems ridiculously early to be getting ready to sell, but it is not.
The process of getting the home you are living in expertly prepared for success on the market takes a good bit of planning and time. While it can be accomplished with Herculean effort in a shorter period when need be, the best scenario is to be able to break the preparation process down into manageable steps and slowly work away at the steps. Decluttering, depersonalizing, painting, updating, rearranging, sprucing up of curb appeal/outdoor spaces, and other tasks take time to be done well. Making your the most desirable one in your price range is what will bring in quick and strong offers.
So how do you know where to start and what needs to be done? You’ve likely been living in this home for a while now, and it can be difficult to figure out what will be the best way to appeal to the broadest range of buyers. You will benefit hugely by getting expert advice on how to most effectively and efficiently spend your time and budget on getting your home ready for a successful sale. This is why now, several months or even a year or more before you plan to be on the market, is the ideal time to call a professional home stager and set up a strategy session to figure out your game plan for preparing your home to sell well.
Bang for your Buck—Savvy Sellers are Smart InvestorsA home staging consultation or strategy session costs only a few hundred dollars and then many smart sellers invest a bit more and bring their stager back in to help with the finishing touches shortly before their house hits the market. And the statistics show that if it is staged before listing, your home will likely sell for 7% to 11% more than it would if you had not staged it to sell.
Let’s crunch the numbers. Let’s say your house would list and sell (eventually) for $300,000 without staging. But being the savvy seller you are, you invest $1000 in a staging consultation and then some finishing touch staging and a $1000 in materials to update your house. Now you sell your home in a short time for between $321,000 and $333,000. So you invested $2000 and some time and elbow grease in preparing your home to sell. And now you walk away with between $21,000 and $33,000 more in equity—
a 1050% to 1650% return for your $2000 investment! Not to mention a quick and painless sale.
“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.”
~Thomas Edison
Plan and prepare now to ensure your good fortune when you sell your house!
