- Make your home appeal to all buyers. Promote your home using professional photos that look appealing on a smart phone or tablet, while making sure a phone number is readily accessible for those interested in your home who are not so tech savvy.
- Depersonalize for staging: Pack up family photos and personal knick-knacks before showing your home. You want potential buyers to be able to visualize themselves living there, so providing neutral decoration helps make that happen.
- Declutter for staging: While you obviously want your home to be clean, you need to rid your home of any extra “stuff” for staging purposes. Consider areas like under the sink, the refrigerator and closets for decluttering.
- Highlight your winning rooms: While every room is going to be scrutinized by potential buyers, rooms like the kitchen and master bath are ones that will likely stick out most to prospects. Make your kitchen homey with new hardware on cabinets and decorative touches. In the bathroom, clean out your medicine cabinet and add new lights, facets and features like towel racks if necessary.
- Don’t leave your buyer with a to-do list: Get the home as move-in ready as possible before showing it to buyers. Do the repairs you would want done as a home buyer, including fixing broken light fixtures, trimming the foliage or giving the carpet a thorough cleaning.
- Offer extras: If you have items that you know you won’t need at your new home, or that are too large to move, offer to sell them along with the home. Extras like the washer/dryer, pianos or even large TVs could become good selling points.
- Price fairly: However, don’t start too high and cause your listing to go ignored. By setting it between 5 and 10 percent of the market, you’re more likely to get an offer close to your home’s actual value.
- Know your closing costs as a seller: Sellers have closing costs, too. The type of closing costs you will have to pay varies according to your location, but generally these costs amount to between 6 and 8 percent of the home’s sale price. In most cases, the cost will be deducted from the profit on your home. Seller closing costs could include closing fees, loan payoff costs, title insurance fees, transfer taxes or recording fees, attorney fees or agent fees.