If you’re considering a home sale, you already know you’re facing packing up and finding another place to live, so considering renovation to your old home before you leave can seem overwhelming. You want to make sure it’s not fruitless or just extra work, too. But it can make a massive difference to a home if you do a little renovation before you list. What are the benefits to renovating before a sale?
Improve the Curb Appeal
Curb appeal is how your home looks when a buyer drives down the street, and you know how important it is. Unless you’re wanting to sell to flippers who buy low and sell high, you want the best curb appeal possible before listing. Why? For the same reason you’d wear clean, nice clothing to an interview. Putting your home’s best foot forward, including things like pressure washing, landscaping being cleaned up, etc. This is each potential buyer’s 3-minute speed date with your home- if it looks good on the outside, they might choose to continue the viewing.
Increase the Resale Value
The difference between a remodeled, cleaned up home and a cluttered, dirty and broken down home can be tens of thousands of dollars. You need your financial investment to bring you the most it possibly can, which is why you’ve lovingly worked to care for your home during the time you have lived within it. But small renovations make big changes, and new countertops, a deck, or other amenities, can go a long way. And new paint can make a huge difference in resale value. Your future appraiser works on the structure, but things like this do influence their view.
Make Your Home More Photogenic
A decade ago, a photograph or two of your home might appear in the listing. Now, Your Move says your home needs to be polished and ready for a photo-op! Dozens of pictures, video, and even drone footage might accompany your home on its internet listing. You want your home to be fit for the Holiday card, with its best image available. Practice this by taking photographs of your rooms yourself. Often it’s easier to see clutter, stains, scrapes on paint, and other similar issues, more easily in a photograph. Look at the pictures you take and see what stands out or is out of place, and then work to fix that error.
Save Energy
According to Graber Supply, efficient windows and doors can lower your energy bills. While it’s wonderful for you to enjoy while you’re in the home as well, updating windows (unless, like tilework, they are close to a hundred years old and therefore more desirable in vintage form) shows potential buyers that you are serious about taking care of your home, and also that it will be easier to care for and less expensive when they move in.
Buyers Can Visualize Themselves
You want to take down visual clutter, personal items, and, mostly, make your home look like a catalog image. This is one of the first steps in getting your house ready to sell: clutter overwhelms the eye and makes it more difficult to see what space exists in your home. Minimalism makes your space look larger. The same is true of having too much furniture—store what you can to make the spaces visually look larger. Overall, you want your potential buyers to be able to visualize their own family in the home. They don’t need to visualize your family there, but their own future world within the same four walls.
Sell Faster
If you are intent on not waiting for months on the market in your area, and need to sell fast, making sure you’ve done your due diligence will make your home zoom into the market and find your ideal buyer. The Principal List tells us that your buyer wants to know the home they purchase is ready for them to move right in. Whether they intend to change wall colors or not, they likely don’t want to move into a home where they will need to clean, de-mold, swap windows or doors, and remodel the kitchen. Your work in advance means that once your home is listed, it becomes far more appealing and sells more easily.
As a potential seller in a busy and rather hot marketplace, you definitely want your home to be able to sell for the most fiscally possible, and moderate remodels, cleaning up, and similar repairs are the way to prepare for listing. Ask your agent what needs doing, and how much. After all, there are plenty of families who want older model appliances, but few who want drafty windows or scrapes in paint and stained carpet. Check out the changes you need to make so that potential buyers can see themselves in the space, and know you’ve taken care of the home. Then you can list with the confidence you need to have!
Check out this article on invisible home problems that can ruin a sale!