Preparing your home for sale?  Start Early!  Take your time for a better home sale price.  

Preparing your home for sale requires time and effort.  The amount of preparation depends on many things, including:

• Time in your home
• How it has been maintained
• Repairs carried out
• Updates
• How rough the home had been used, and of course the size of the home 

However, home preparation for sale can be a pretty large project.

Preparation sets your home up to enable RealEstateGuy to present it in the best light to get the absolute best money when you sell.  Unless you want to wholesale your home, (and get 70-80% of its worth, you need to prepare it.

Our number one recommendation, is to start early.  Allow 6 months.  For example, if you are wanting to sell in April, we suggest starting in September and take the winter to work on it.  Some of Real Estate Guy’s best results have come when our clients work with us and spend up to 6 months preparing. 

How can this be achieved?   Well as part of our follow up, we identify when a homeowner needs to be selling, and we counsel them on the value of the home stage.  We will often do an in house, or a video consult and help make a plan.  As mentioned, we often suggest taking a whole winter, which in Wisconsin is long and free of all the summer distractions, to concentrate on the chores.  

Taking time takes the mad panic out of the process,  enables planning including scheduling contractors to be hired and projects to be done on a logical order, it enables sorting out personal possessions so they can be disposed of, trashed or packed for the move.  This leads to much less stress than a week long intense dash to the listing time. 

This is not a blog about staging details, however, here are the basics:

• Repairs: fix what is broken
• Replace: what is worn or malfunctioning
• Update: replace older items with more modern an example would be light fittings or faucets
• Organizing: sorting and paring.  Pare down your personal belongings
• Renewing: Things like carpet and paint
• Cleaning: The whole house needs the best clean it ever has Buyers want to see clean
• Staging: the final touches, arranging furniture, ornaments, rugs, lighting

As you can see Staging is just the final step of the home preparation process.  From the start, Real Estate Guy will meet with you and help you make a plan, help you decide what projects should be completed and which ones to nix.  Which ones will give you the best bang for the buck. Then once the bulk of the work is done, we will come back and help with the final preparation.   

Please remember the cost of skipping preparaton can be 20-30% of the sale price. 

Is that enough to get you to make a plan?   Would it be worth spending $2-3,000 to get this return?   

Not selling this year? It is never too soon to start the process.  Just get and keep everything fixed and serviceable.  Don’t accumulate and keep your home updated.