Selling a home is often a complex process that requires individuals like you to pay careful attention to various elements of the home’s quality and design. Here are five simple steps that will help to prepare you for this process. Each phase has many sub-steps that help to streamline this process more smoothly.

Step One: Know How to Prepare Long Before Listing

When preparing to sell your home, you need to think of things far in advance. We’re talking at least six months to one year before you ever list your house! Starting this early helps you out by making it easier to plan many other elements of your deal, including how you can:

• Choose Your Listing Date – Understand that your listing date doesn’t necessarily indicate when your home will sell. All it means is when you put your home on the market. It would help if you chose a time when prices are high and demand for your residence time is more elevated.
• Carefully Check the Market – Gauge the market’s health and see whether it is right for you to sell. Have prices been going down and show no signs of decreasing? You might need to sell more quickly than you wanted. Or you could wait until prices inevitably rebound. The choice is yours.
• Accurately Assess the Home’s Quality – You may have purchased your home for a specific price, but that doesn’t mean it has retained its value. Get an assessor who can help you understand the value of your home and what steps if any, you can take to improve this value for your needs.
• Talk to an Agent – Make sure that you work with an agent you can trust to handle this process. These professionals will give you the best chance of selling your house at a reasonable price and should be pretty easy to work with if you understand precisely what you want and how to get it.
• Consider Early Lawn Care – Don’t neglect the fact that your lawn is an essential part of the value of your home! Instead, you need to call residential or commercial lawn care professionals to help you plan a better lawn and care for things like lousy grass and much more.
• Don’t Neglect Your Foundation – A home’s foundation is critical to its overall strength and stability. If you don’t carefully maintain your foundation, you might suffer severe damage to its overall structure. So, call home builders who can help get your home’s foundation back in great shape.
• Plan Other Types of Upgrades – Lastly, it is essential to pay attention to other factors of your home’s overall structure and value that can impact how easily it sells on the market. For instance, you need to make sure that you call a roofing contractor to handle many types of repairs for your needs.

You need to spread all of these steps out over an extended period to ensure that you don’t end up doing too much all at once. And then, you need to move on to other steps that will help make this process easier and start preparing your home for the listing date when it finally does arrive.

Step Two: Preparing Your Home for the Listing

The next step in any real estate process is to prepare your home correctly 60 days before your listing. These steps include things you may have missed in the first and legal processes that help make things go easier for you. Just a few things to consider here include how you can:

• Handle Any Other Repairs – Don’t neglect the benefits of home additions and how they can transform your house and make it worth more money. When you take these steps correctly, you give yourself the best chance of selling your home and making it a better place for the buyer to live at the same time.
• Carefully Declutter the Home – Rent travel trailers and load them up with junk from your home that you just don’t need to display. You can either put these things in storage if you want to keep them or get rid of them. Donate, recycle, or throw away these items to make sure they aren’t in your way.
• Take Care of Interior Design Issues – Talk to realtors you can trust about any interior design complications that could affect the value of your home. For example, you may need to seriously consider a more neutral color scheme if yours catches the eye or is too dramatic or individualistic.
• Pay Attention to Your Basement – Your home’s basement needs to be carefully prepared before you end up putting it on the market. For instance, you need to pay attention to any water issues that may develop and even finish to make it more presentable and easier to sell.
• Upgrade Your Home’s Exterior – Your home might not have had exterior upgrades in a while, such as repairs to the siding or other decorative elements. Make sure that you pay money to repair these areas to give your home the best chance of selling for a reasonable price on a crowded market.
• Enhance the House’s Curb Appeal – While enhancing your home’s exterior does help with curb appeal, you also need to take steps like planting flowers, putting up attractive decorations, and other measures that all help make your home easier to market and more attractive to potential buyers.
• Start Preparing Your Paperwork – Sit down with your agent and go over all of your paperwork to ensure that it is legal and easy to understand. Doing so helps to provide you with the necessary help to sell your home and will also help to minimize any legal issues that may otherwise occur.

These simple steps help make it easier for you to prepare your listing and drive up interest in your home. However, it is also essential to understand that you need to market your property during this time. Therefore, your marketing should also increase during the 30 days before your listing date.

Step Three: Know How to Market Your Property

Marketing is an essential step when attempting to sell a home. Though that might not seem immediately evident, you need a great marketing plan to ensure that your property sells smoothly and efficiently. Just a few steps that you can take include how you must:

• Understand Your Home’s Pros and Cons – When creating your marketing plan, you need to highlight the great things about your house and minimize the weaker aspects. Doing so helps keep your home more accessible to market and provides a more straightforward way of selling it to others.
• Consider Physical Marketing Methods – Find local newspapers near you and realtor listings where you can pay to put your home. This type of marketing is still incredibly effective, as many local people find most of their home-purchasing options in this way rather than online.
• Not Ignore Online Marketing – While physical marketing is a huge benefit, online marketing is also critical. It helps to highlight younger people who may not buy newspapers or realtor listings and also helps to focus on people outside your area who may want to buy a home near you.
• Know How to Reach People – Focus on things that you know make your house stand out in your neighborhood. Do you have a finished basement? A pool? A second story with plenty of storage? Point out these different factors, and your home is more likely to sell quickly.

Make sure that you highlight extra steps that you’ve taken to make your home more livable. For example, you can discuss how you used shower remodeling services to make your house more comfortable. In this way, you should find it reasonably easy to get an excellent showing.

Step Four: Neutralize the Interior and Exterior

If you’ve lived in your home a while, you’ve probably done a lot to make it unique to your tastes. There’s nothing wrong with that step unless you’re trying to sell your house. People usually want a home that feels more neutral and easy to change when buying. So follow these steps to neutralize your home:

• Choose Neutral Colors – Paint your interior and exterior pretty neutral colors to minimize any issues here. White, light brown, green, and gray are all great neutral colors. Even if it makes your home look bland to you, it will appeal to people who see it as a blank canvas on which to paint.
• Simplify Decorations – Take the time to carefully simplify the interior of your homes, such as getting rid of personalized photos of your family and paying attention to things like removing clutter or excessive furniture from your home. Doing so helps to make your home more appealing.
• Put in New Appliances – When upgrading your home’s interior, you need to put in new and better appliances to make it worth more money. Though you may not totally recoup the cost, your chances of selling the house increase, often more than worth a slight financial loss.
• Open Up the Floor – An open floor plan helps make a home feel more comfortable and easier to sell. If necessary, you may need to remove some unnecessary walls to make the home feel more extensive and more welcoming, even if you don’t add any extra additional room to the house.

You might have a hard time taking these steps because you may have spent good money on many of your implemented changes. We understand this agitation but emphasize the importance of change. Doing so will help to ensure that your property sells at a reasonable price and should make your deal smoother and more effective.

Step Five: Create a Comfy Showing Situation

Lastly, it would be best to prepare for your showing on the day of your listing to make sure that things go smoothly and efficiently. Doing so helps cut back on any complications and gives your house the best chance of making a significant impact. Just a few steps that you need to take here include:

• Deep Clean Everything – Are you sick of cleaning your home yet? We wish we could tell you that you didn’t have to do anymore. But, unfortunately, you’re going to need to do one more deep clean of every room of your home to ensure that it is as suitable for your showing as possible.
• Take Great Photos – Make sure that you place great photos throughout your home to feel more appealing and friendly. Beyond that, you also need to do things like taking pictures of the house and upload them online to create an enjoyable virtual experience for your potential home buyers.
• Do One More Round of Repairs – Talk to building companies near you (you should know a few that you can trust by this point!) and get them to do one more round of repairs. In this way, you can provide your house with the excellent interior and exterior that you need to thrive.
• Schedule Showings – Work with house painting professionals and other experts before you start scheduling showings. You need to make sure multiple viewings occur every day and that you or someone you can trust is there to guide people through the home smoothly and efficiently.

Don’t forget to make cookies (to create a homey smell) and provide other snacks for people who may visit. Doing so will make your showing more enjoyable for everyone and produce the kind of success that you want and deserve when you’re putting your home up for sale for the first time.

As you can see, preparing your home for sale on the market isn’t a significant challenge if you fully understand how to handle each of these steps. So, make sure that you get started right away, and you should be able to produce the kind of unique and beautiful home you want and deserve.