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 St. Paul 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 St. Paul.
4 Ways To Attract More Home Buyers in St. Paul
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.
Just remember if you are trying to sell your house then most likely you are trying to move. NOW is the time to go ahead and start packing all your trinkets and organize your house. Having to much stuff distracts potential buyers and also makes the home feel smaller. NOT GOOD!
Now that everything is cleaned up and put away in the appropriate spots we can start our deep clean. Grab your old tee shirt and sweatpants, roll up those sleeves and get to work. Having a clean house will go alone way. No longer are buyers distracted by the fossilized dog turds in the corner of a room and the moldy green slime thingy growing on the walls. They now will be more focused on the positive side of things in your home rather than your junk and the way you live.
2. Make Necessary Repairs
In order to get top dollar for your house you should really think about fixing any sort of thing that needs repair. People will have a hard time looking past a leaky roof or broken plumbing or lights. How the old saying goes “You need to spend a little to make a little.” The saying couldn’t be truer in real estate. Spend the extra dollars fixing some of the bigger problems in your home and most likely you will get paid back in 10 fold by your efforts. Even if the damage to your house is in a spot that cant be seen while a buyer is preforming a walk through you should always consider repairing it.
Why? 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.
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.
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.
4. Set a Market Price Just Under Expected Fair Market Value
This might seem counter intuitive: 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.