BROADCASTS.com

b"

Hi, this is Gina Mullen with Gina Mullen Realty, answering questions that you have about real estate. Today we're going to be talking about \\u201chow do we get our house ready to sell?\\u201d

So we always have a staging appointment with our clients where our team comes in. A staging appointment used to be where you decorated the home, maybe brought in some furnishings. That has changed somewhat. Now with the new trend that we have, we try and use what the client has in their home, but we also try to make the home as streamlined as possible. One of the first things we do is we remove all personal photographs. This is for privacy reasons as well, but we also want someone to come in and not feel like they're in someone else's home. We want them to be able to picture themselves in your home, which is one of the reasons we remove a lot of the decor. A lot of our clients say that their homes look empty by the time we get done with our staging appointment, and that is the way that we want it. We like for someone to be able to see their own decor items in the house. Even though a buyer may not understand that the reason they don't like a house is because of the way it is decorated, it does subconsciously affect their feelings on a home. The more that we can clear out decor items from a house and make it more of that clean, streamline look, then a buyer can come in and see their own items in the house.

The second would be curb appeal. We like to have as much curb appeal as possible. People will drive by your home and see the for sale sign in the yard. We like to get all the flowerbeds cleaned out, fresh new mulch, and we like seasonal color to be put especially up by the front door. Any trees that need to be trimmed, pots with flowers in them by the front door, and also some exterior maintenance as well to make sure that everything is cleaned up, that we have leaves that are cleaned up. The lawn should be freshly mowed and edged so that it gives a really well maintained feel when somebody is looking at your house.

The next is maintenance in the house. We don't want you to go ahead and, you know, do large maintenance projects, but anything that might need to be fixed in the home will be caught at an inspection anyway. So now's a really good time for you to be able to attack those things that maybe aren't working the way that they should. If you've got a faucet that dripping or a toilet that's running, things of that nature, that can easily be done by a handyman, those items should be taken care of before we put the house on the market. If you have windows that are cracked, if the windows are under warranty, then we should go ahead and request for them to be replaced or repaired under the warranty. If you have an insurance claim that needs to be done, whether it was for a leak or maybe it's a roof, then let's go ahead and get that insurance claim initiated it and get that done before we put it on the market. It looks really good when we have on a seller's disclosure that a roof is only nine months old or four months old. People really like moving into a home where some of the bigger ticket items have been taken care of and they know that they won't have to worry about them for awhile.

Consider some updating. I know this is a scary thought and that's probably why a lot of our sellers are moving is that they want to update, but we're noticing that more and more buyers are not really interested in coming in and doing any updating to a home. Used to be that the standard thought process was if a home just needed to be painted, then we could go in and paint it any color we want. But what we're finding is that buyers of all budgets are not wanting to come into a home and be bothered with having to even paint the home. The number one thing that you can do to a home to give it a fresh updated look and to make the largest impact is to paint. Paint the walls, paint the trim (which is the base boards, th"