Your open house can help you sell your home faster and at a higher price. However, small mistakes can spoil the process, making the efforts a waste of time. Here are three fixable problems that can spoil your open house and how to avoid them.
Poor Staging
When potential buyers visit your home, they want to look for its potential. Buyers will redesign your home after purchasing it, but they often have trouble seeing its real potential. Staging your home with rented furniture lets you show what you home can look like with the right design elements, and it shows how you can use the space most effectively. Cleverly chosen items can make potential disadvantages of your home seem like advantages, so ensure you make staging a top priority.
Roaches, Ants and Other Pests
Perhaps the fastest way to frighten potential buyers from your home is to let them see roaches, ants or other pests. Pests warn buyers that the home might be badly infested, and the buyer would have to pay for extermination services. Furthermore, buyers might think the home is prone to infestations, making them less likely to make an offer. Perhaps the most damaging possibility is leaving visitors to think that the home hasn’t been maintained well. If there is an infestation, potential buyers might wonder, has the home been neglected in other ways? A call to a pest control company like Allrid, or any other local company, could be the difference between selling and not selling your home.
Unpleasant Smells
We often get used to the smell of our homes, and it can be easy to overlook parts of the home with a mildly unpleasant aroma. Potential buyers, however, are unlikely to be forgiving, and even a whiff of something unpleasant can lead one to avoid making an offer. Because it’s easy to not notice smells once you’ve become accustomed to them, it’s worth bringing in a friend to give the property a smell inspection. Find the source of the smell, and pay what is needed to have it eliminated. The sense of smell can lead to strong emotional reactions, and it’s tough to make a sale if visitors leave knowing the house doesn’t smell nice.
Damage
It may seem like a given, but a lot of homeowners don’t fix obvious damage before holding an open house. While some damage or imperfections in your home can be expected, you can’t afford to show visitors something that would have been easy to fix. For example, an old window with some warped wood or foggy glass is easy to accept as part of the character of the home. Marker lines, nail holes, and chipping paint may just suggest laziness on the part of the seller. If a simple repair is all that stands in the way of making your home buyer friendly, it is in your best interests to absorb that cost and make the sale.
Your open house gives you ample opportunity to impress buyers, and it can even launch a bidding war if several visitors want to make bids. However, it’s important to take extra steps to make your open house stand out from the crowd. While it might cost money to fix problems before opening your house to visitors, the potential upside makes it well worth the investment.
