Moving on from a place you call home is not easy. Selling your apartment can, therefore, be quite an emotional ordeal. But it helps to go through it quickly and get as much as you can out of the sale. And with the number of homes listed on the rise, you want to give yourself and your place a competitive edge. A good way to do that is to stage your apartment for sale. This is a relatively simple yet effective way of boosting your odds of a good and quick sale.
Why stage your apartment for sale?
Just like hiring local movers Sudbury, selling your home is the natural part of the moving process. But it isn’t always the easiest or the quickest part of it. Sometimes your home not selling is down to how the market is at the moment. Other times, it’s something you did or did not do – bad pricing, insufficiently detailed listing and the like. Either way, staging your home can help you sell it and even ups the price of it by as much as 10-15%. A makeover can also make all the difference if your home’s been on the market for a while without selling. Either way, it’s worth a shot!
How to stage your apartment for sale?
If you’re working with a professional realtor, they may stage your apartment for sale for you or have someone they work with do it. But there are plenty of things you can do yourself as well, with little to no help and only a bit of investment. These minor changes can make all the difference in selling your home for a good price!
Identify the issues and fix them
The first step to staging your home is knowing what you need to work on. We know that your home is perfect to you. The knick-knacks all over the shelves are souvenirs from your trips, the dents in the walls are remnants from when you first redecorated, the smudge of paint on the doorframe is from when your kids tried to help you repaint and made a mess. It’s all very personal and dear to you. But a potential buyer sees your home differently.
Go through your home with a fine-tooth comb. Look at every nook and cranny. Take stock of any damage, discoloration, scrape, dent or mold you find. Buyers can sometimes focus on the most minute details. And believe it or not, these are all things that may put them off. So be the first to spot them! And when you do, fix them. This will greatly improve the appearance of your apartment.
Declutter the space
All the junk lying around your place may make it feel like home to you but to an outsider, it will just obscure what the place really is like. No one likes walking into a home that’s overflowing with somebody else’s things. Not to mention, buying an apartment where they can’t move around the furniture is not really anyone’s dream. You want to strip your home down to its best essentials – not bare, but not teeming with everything you’ve accumulated while living there either. While this is a great time to declutter and get rid of things in light of your upcoming move, there’s no need to throw everything away. You can always look into storage units Sudbury as a way to temporarily put your stuff away.
Clean thoroughly before you stage your apartment for sale
Before you can stage your apartment for sale, you need to clean it. It’s remarkable, the kind of effect a thorough cleaning has on a place. Be sure to wash the carpets, wipe the windows, vacuum behind the potted plants and clean behind the fridge. You never know where a potential buyer might look! And a clean place will be far more inviting than a dusty, dirty one.
Make smart upgrades
You don’t know how big of an effect minor upgrades have until you’ve made them. You may, therefore, be surprised to find out that you can price your home higher if you just paint the walls a different color!
Change out your curtains
Changing out your old, yellowing curtains for some new, freshly-washed white ones will significantly freshen up the room. And don’t forget the shower curtain either – nobody likes to see mold where they might potentially take a shower!
Get new bedding
Just like curtains, new bedding can give a room a fresher, cleaner look with virtually no effort on your part. Seeing as bedrooms tend to be the biggest selling points, you definitely want to invest in yours looking good!
Repaint
Repainting may take more time and effort than most things you can do to stage your apartment for sale but it is well worth it! A fresh coat of paint will make the whole place look brand new. Not only will you have the chance to paint a color potential buyers might like but you will also cover up any imperfections on the walls.
Let there be light!
Light will make a place look bigger, airier and more inviting. These are all qualities of a great apartment. So remove dark curtains and carpets, clean the windows and open them to let the light in, place mirrors on walls to get an illusion of a bigger, lighter space and paint the walls a light color to avoid the rooms looking small and stuffy.
Think neutral, but not impersonal
You want the place to look as neutral as possible so as to appeal to a larger audience. But don’t make it completely impersonal! It should still feel cozy and lived in rather than like a sterile hotel room.
Think of the buyer when you stage your apartment for sale
Remember that you are staging your home for the benefit of the buyer, not yourself. You want them to be able to imagine themselves having a home and a life in the apartment. You want them to see it as a place of potential. So think: what made you want to buy your home in the first place? Play up those qualities to increase your chances of a sale!