As the saying goes, “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” The saying is truer when it comes to selling your home than skinning cats since we don’t advocate doing that. Home buyers in Connecticut have different needs; preparing your sales strategy accordingly helps increase home showings and makes for faster sales. Here are 4 ways to attract interested home buyers in Connecticut.
4 Ways To Attract Home Buyers in Connecticut
1. Declutter Inside and Out
Decluttering your home can seem overwhelming especially if your family has been in the home for years. Things accumulate in the closet, on bookshelves, kitchen counters and spread to the garage and washrooms. Clutter isn’t attractive and makes a home feel smaller. The purpose of decluttering is to make your house look bigger, with lots of storage space, but its purpose is also to get rid of personal items, knick knacks, family photos, etc. You want potential buyers to walk through your house and be able to envision themselves in it!.
If you are looking to sell, it means you are looking to move. So take this opportunity to be proactive and start getting rid of things you’re going to toss out or donate anyways. Pack up items you don’t need for the next few months and rent a storage unit if your garage isn’t large enough to store it without seeming cluttered.
Once everything is cleared, you can then give the home a good solid deep clean. With counters, bookshelves, and floors cleared, sweep mop and disinfect anything and everything you can. If you don’t have the time to do a good thorough deep clean, there are cleaning companies you can hire to do this for you. They will come in as a team and do a deep clean of your house in a matter of a few hours. This helps give the home that open flow potential buyers want.
2. Make Necessary Repairs
If you know something needs to be fixed, fix it. This may seem like common sense but many homeowners think they will wait to see what happens when buyers start looking at the house. Buyers will eventually find out about non-working appliances, leaky roofs and stubborn plumbing issues. If buyers find these things out during their inspection, that will make them question the integrity of the rest of the house and they will ask themselves what else you might have not disclosed to them.
How? Well, first you are required by law to disclose anything you know as a problem. Second, if you happen to not be aware of the problem, the home inspection will surely discover it. Buyers will request repairs or credits – so you will pay for it one way or another. If you do these things ahead of time, you are helping yourself out by helping the selling process be quicker which means getting to the closing table sooner!
It is so much easier to disclose repairs, maintenance, and upgrades made while people are looking. It expedites the escrow process from lengthy repair requests and gives potential buyers the confidence to know you were a responsible homeowner that has taken care of what might be their new home.
3. Stage the Property
Real estate agents get push back on staging from clients every day. Unless they have a multi-million dollar home, most clients don’t see the need for the additional expense of staging.
Keep in mind that staging doesn’t always mean moving everything you have out and renting all new furnishings. It can simply mean working with a skilled eye to rearrange existing furniture, remove odd family photos, heirlooms, and art. Simply rearranging furniture or getting rid of one piece of furniture can make a big difference in the size appearance of a room. You don’t want buyers to think the house is small and cluttered but instead you want them to feel like it is roomy and flows easily.
All that decluttering was a good start. Now is the time to make the home look like the home everyone can visualize themselves living in. That maximizes the number of people who will make an offer on the home. More offers, means more negotiating power!1
4. Set a Market Price Just Under Expected Fair Market Value
This might seem counterintuitive: set a lower price than what the market says you can get for your house.
When potential buyers are looking at homes, they are looking for specifics on size, location, condition, and price. When the first three qualifiers are equal, then the buyers will look at the price as the primary sorting factor. In markets where there are a lot of buyers looking for homes, a lower price gets more people walking through.
A good agent then holds open houses where droves of people “ooh and ahh” over your home because it is clean, clutterless and staged. These situations often get multiple offers giving you the seller the ability to bid up the offers to what would be the fair market price, often higher than what you would have listed for if you didn’t list it at a lower than normal price.