Erasing buyer turnoffs will help sell your home – The Orange County Register
With back to school supplies lining the aisles of the local Target, Walgreens, and Staples stores, you might want to pick up some extra erasers if you’re getting ready to sell your house.
While the pencil erasers may take some marks off your kid’s bedroom walls, you may need a broader range of supplies to erase all the features that might not appeal to buyers.
Here are a few examples.
• You’ll probably want to erase your family coat of arms painted above the pantry door. It is unlikely that a family with the same lineage will buy the house, so best to give the kitchen a fresh coat of paint.
• Same goes for the black chalkboard paint in your kid’s room.
Unless you only want your house to appeal to families with small children, this will be a disappointment to those with older children or empty nesters. Another fresh coat of paint will make it all better.
• If you have holes in the dry wall in your bedroom from slamming the door open one too many times, you’ll want to patch up that hole and give that room a new coat of paint.
• If you have custom decorative accent tiles in your kitchen and bathrooms, you might want to pop those out and pop in plain tiles. Pink ribbons, perfume bottles, and parasols won’t appeal to many of today’s buyers.
And if you don’t want to go to the expense of replacing the counters with quartz or granite, at least pop out the dated tiles. It will erases the stigma of those special features.
• Have your cats and dogs enjoyed living in your house as much as you have? You may want to replace the carpet with something fresh and new.
Be sure to treat underneath the old carpet pad. Vinegar, water, and baking soda are a good way to clean up pet urine odor.
I’m sure there are several good YouTube videos on the process.
• Do you have leased solar panels? Erase the fear from buyers’ minds by providing documentation on the lease transfer process, your monthly solar lease payment and your average electric bill in the supplemental section of the listing report.
Your agent will know how to add the documents to your listing information.
• Have your neighbors gone a little too far with their draught tolerant landscape by allowing the brown weeds to tend to themselves?
Perhaps you can erase this eyesore by asking your neighbors if you can (or have your gardener) do a little touch up for them before the first open house.
Not quite the same as the Easy Button, but a little erasing will go a long way to making your house appeal to more buyers.