5 Tips to Prepare Your Home for the Spring Market

There are five tips you need to keep in mind when preparing your home for the upcoming spring market.

How do you prepare your home for the market so you maximize its value and sell quickly and hassle-free? Remember these five tips:

1. Be realistic. Look at the data, see what other neighborhood homes are selling for, and compare those homes to your home’s condition. Your home has an as-is value that investors or other buyers looking for a good deal will buy it for, but if you plan to do some work on the property, you need to determine its after-repair value (ARV). Your Realtor will help you with this—we’ll make recommendations that will maximize your return without requiring too much money into a home you’ll soon be leaving.

2. Ensure your Realtor makes the home marketable. For example, in our Coming Soon listing process, we change all the light bulbs in a house to daylight bulbs so it brightens the property and does away with that dull yellow look. Setting out fresh flowers, cookies, or anything else that makes the home smell good is a great idea too.

3. Be prepared for the inspection. Every buyer who makes an offer on the property will hire their own inspector, so get your home’s foundation inspected (the plumbing, electrical system, AC unit, etc.) and pre-certified first and make sure there are no surprises once you’re under contract for the price you want.

"Setting out fresh flowers, cookies, or anything else that makes the home smell good is a great idea."

4. Use online resources to engage with multiple contractors. This is a tip I use whenever I remodel my home. If I need a plumber or electrician to do some work on it, I invite three or four of them to bid for the job at the same time in each other’s online presence—whether the platform is Nextdoor, Facebook, etc. When I market someone’s property, I want buyers to be on top of each other bidding for it, and the same strategy applies to contractors.

5. Get out of your own way. Don’t make improvements that are only comfortable to you or ones that you alone think would help the home sell for more money. Make improvements that will make the home more comfortable for buyers. Today’s buyers have to pay a down payment and closing costs during the closing period, so they don’t want to have to fix anything before they can even move into the home.

If you’d like more tips to help sell your home quickly and for top dollar or have any other real estate questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to help you.