New Jersey Real Estate: Tips for Getting Your House Ready to Sell
The dead of winter may not feel like the best time to sell your house. However, it is a good time to get ready to sell your house, especially when you realize that house hunters often start looking to buy in the spring months. If you start getting your house ready in December or January, you’ll have a few months to check items off your list and ensure your home is tip-top shape come April or May. You should also remember that every market is different, and what works in Florida may not work in Pennsylvania. That said, here are three tips for New Jersey home buyers looking to sell in 2020.
Update Your Flooring
You vacuum your carpet once a week or sometimes more, and you sweet the kitchen and hardwood flooring every three or four days. That’s nice, but vacuuming, sweeping, and even mopping aren’t going to be enough to get your New Jersey home ready for potential buyers. You need to take a long look at your flooring and consider options like deep-cleaning your carpet or even replacing some flooring entirely.
If you can’t remember the last time your carpet got professionally cleaned, now’s an ideal time to start making calls. Experts say it’s important to steam-clean your carpets once a year or so. That lifts out more dirt than vacuuming alone. Think of vacuuming as brushing your teeth every day, and steam-cleaning as going to the dentist every six months for a professional cleaning.
If you have pets or kids, take a long, hard look at hiring New Jersey carpet specialists to replace the carpet in at least one room. For most people, carpet in high-traffic areas tends to deteriorate faster than the carpet in the bedroom or study. Nylon, wool, or a synthetic carpet material might be exactly what your house needs before you list it.
Hold a Practice Open House
If you’re going to sell a house, you should really enlist an agent. They can help you with one of the events homeowners dread the most: the open house. Among other elements, an open house requires a clean, uncluttered house that’s ready to show off to potential buyers.
On the day of the actual open house, you might not even be there. You might be halfway across town taking in a double-header at the movies. But you can still have a practice run by inviting a few friends over to simulate conditions on the ground. Your real estate agent can help you with a few issues, but they won’t always catch everything. A practice run can help you figure out just how intimately involved in the real event. Get some snacks from the grocery store and wine from the liquor store. Then ask a handful of trusted friends to come over and pretend to be interested buyers.
Light It Up
It’s going to be tougher for someone to make an offer on your home if they can’t even see it properly. When you live in a house for a while, your eyes adjust to the lighting setup that already exists. If there’s not a lot of lighting in the front hallway, you deal with it. But people viewing your house will get thrown off if they walk into a dark house. If you mess up that first impression, some people might decide they don’t want to see any more of the house.
Buy more lamps, but don’t just do that. Also, buy stronger light-bulbs. The house has to look welcoming and even happy. People want to live in a happy house. A well-lit home is especially vital after a long, dreary winter, so open up the blinds and curtains to let natural light in as well. Remind potential buyers that spring is the season when the outside world starts to come alive again.