The Outside Appearance of Your Home Might Not Make Your Sale...
... but it can certainly break it! A nice looking home is always easier to sell, so when selling is your goal it's important to get the outside appearance to work in your favor. That's pretty basic, and although most sellers put forth exhaustive effort fixing up the interior, they seem to overlook the outside appearance. The esthetic aspect is always important when it comes to selling real estate. You could compare this with the packaging of a sentimental gift -- it sometimes seems that the packaging is as important as the gift itself.
Real estate agents advise sellers to pay attention to the overall presentation of the house, both inside and outside. The outside is vital because it is what the buyer sees first, and as the saying goes, "There is no second chance when it comes to making a first impression." An unfavorable first impression will hurt your chances of making a sale. In the market today there are lots of homes competing for attention and the buyer can just move on. For this reason, at least some minimal landscaping improvement would be greatly beneficial before selling a home, as this will help you attract attention giving the home some curb appeal. Fail that step, and it hardly even matters how good the bonus room looks.
Easy Things to Do With the Yard -- Quickly
For anyone who owns a home, whether or not selling is on the horizon, there are always plenty of home improvement projects that can be done. If you are getting ready to put the home up for sale, though, you would want to do something that is inexpensive, yet is quick and worth the effort at the same time. These suggestions can help get you going the right way.
Spruce up the garden. Anybody can just run the mower over the lawn, but with a little more effort you can make a substantial improvement in the appeal of the yard with flowering plants of the season. Put in a border on at least one side, or all around making the lawn an attractive rectangle of brightly colored flowers. Flowers are always a great touch. If it is too much for you to plant a flowerbed, you could just add some rows of potted plants in a similar manner.
Fences can be a plus. It is surprising how much fencing can benefit the looks of the outside of a home. In places where high privacy fences are the norm (more often in the back ), they are often neglected and gradually become ugly. Renewing them by replacing broken sections is a wise use of your time and money. In places where a low fence is used for appearance instead of for functional security or privacy, the same thing applies and it is less expensive to use nice looking materials such as a traditional picket fence, log rails, or stones. You could use synthetic fencing materials which cost less but are no less impressive looking to highlight the front yard. You will need to decide what kind of fence looks most attractive, but the choices are many and, after all, anything that looks good will do the trick. Another way is that you could build fencing by installing hedges which would look as impressive.
Clean up and repair the essential things people see. Sellers will spend all their time to fix up everything on the inside, and overlook the loose door handle or something equally glaring to someone looking at the home for the first time. If you could do nothing else, you could simply clean up both the front and back. Pay careful attention to the driveway, gutters, and downspouts. Cleanliness has a great impact on the perceived value to a buyer.
Going a little beyond these suggestions, you could also clean the outside woodwork, check and repair the windows, polish the doorknobs. Everything should look new and inviting. This will not only increase the value of your property, but also help it to sell faster.
Content provided courtesy of Automated Homefinder, Colorado's best Longmont real estate experts.
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Linda Zimmerman, GRI, e-PRO, SRES |
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