Howards Blog – Prepare your home for viewings

Prepare your home for viewings

Putting your house on the market can be a daunting thought. Cleaning and preparing your home for the marketing to be prepared can be hard to do around everyday life.
It’s important to get it right though, especially for when people come to look round your home.

You only get one chance to impress, and remember, first impressions count.

Firstly, you need to look at your property from the outside. Go across the road and look back. This is what people will see when they pull up to your home. Remember that people will often drive by before the view and decide on it there and then.

Has the lawn been mowed? Is it free of weeds? Has the hedge been trimmed, and the leaves been swept? Are there damaged fence panels? Do the driveways and paths feel welcoming? Could the windows, facias, and guttering do with a lick of paint? Get those unsightly bins out of sight and out of mind. There are loads of questions to ask yourself, and by answering all of these, you are adding to your ‘kerb appeal’.

The next part is making your home feel welcoming as soon as the door is opened. You often have only a few minutes to capture the viewers’ attention and to make them feel at home.
Cast a critical eye over your home to get in the mind of any viewer.

Starting as you enter the home, declutter, and remove any coats and shoes that may make the space feel cramped. Put them in the car if there is nowhere else. Would painting make a difference? Keep it cheap and neutral by redoing the paintwork in white or magnolia.

Clean light switches as they are often fingerprint magnets, and make sure that when someone presses the switch that the bulbs all come on. What about the carpet? Could borrowing or hiring a carpet cleaner make the home feel fresher? Maybe plug in some air fresheners too.

Kitchens can often be covered in ‘stuff’. Empty bins, clear work tops, put away pots and pans, remove pet bowls and food. Fill fruit bowls, place flowers, there’s loads of things that you can do to make a kitchen feel like the heart of the home.

The bathrooms are another place where a little work can go a long way. Redoing the silicone will make it look and feel fresh, same with cleaning the grout. Steam cleaners are great at doing this. Put towels and bathmats away too.

You could also look at adding mirrors throughout the house as they create light and space.

The idea behind this is the make the person looking round your home feel like it could be theirs. To make it feel like your home has been loved and looked after. To make them want to be there. You can even add certain homely smells like, coffee, warm bread, or if you have one, the smell of burning logs on the fire.

Once the home itself if ‘viewer ready’, the next thing to do is have yourself, and any property information, ready for the day. If you are doing your own viewings then have available an installation certificates for windows, boilers, log burners etc., any information on planning consent if you have added extensions. Provide information on local schools via maps, or transport links, supermarkets, anything that will help someone make an informed decision to buy your home. This is all key information and things that we would ask for to provide to anyone interest in your home. There are many reasons why this should be provided, and I’d be happy to through these if you wanted to get in touch.

Hopefully you aren’t conducting your own viewings and leaving them to the experts, us. On the day we’d always recommend that you vacate the property to allow the viewers the freedom to feel at home. What it also does is free up driveways and parking spots for viewers to pull up as if the property is theirs.

There are many more things that you can do to prepare your home for viewings which I’d be happy to talk through with you.

You never get a chance to make another first impression, so make sure yours counts.

Howard

#helpingyoumove