Home Selling Mistakes
Home Selling Mistakes that You Can Fix!
Are your listing photos suffering from poor, drab lighting?
Is the guest room’s clutter making potential buyers shudder?
Is the condition of your carpet causing uneasiness?
When it comes to marketing homes for sale, we have it down to a science. The Real Estate market is getting busier and busier, and your listing needs to stand out brilliantly if you want to get top dollar for it! Let’s take a look at what not to do, and we will help you along the way.
Skimping on Staging
Buyers are browsing limitless homes a day, but how do you make a memorable impression? If you can build a positive emotional connection between the buyer and the home, you’re one step ahead! Hiring a professional home stager, or virtually staging a vacant home will allow potential buyers to envision their lives inside of it. Imagining future dinners with the family is much easier if the table is already set!
Virtual staging is a revolutionary real estate marketing trend, where you take an image of an empty room and place furniture, decor, lighting fixtures, and more. Virtually staging allows for unparalleled versatility in how you present the home and how buyers perceive it. A high quality, professional photo can only go so far for an empty, plain home. We can’t expect buyers to fill in all the blanks with their imagination, so let’s get creative and make them feel at home!
Our 360 Walkthrough Tour has 2D and 3D Room Planner tools that buyers can experiment with to plan or change flooring, wall colors, room layout and more. This product makes buyers realize the unlimited potential your home presents and inspires them to envision ways to make the space theirs. Twist Tours the only company in our market to provide this for our clients, how cool is that?
Leaving All the Clutter
You may have become blind to the scattered knick-knacks and towers of paperwork, but these things can be quite the eye-sore to someone who has never seen it, especially if they are considering buying your home. Think about it – if you were buying a car, would you purchase the one shown to you with gym bags and take-out boxes on the floor? Seems like a red flag!
A clean, staged home is an inviting one. It gives a glimpse of how the home could be lived in, not how it is being lived in at the moment. Deep cleaning and decluttering adds an average of $4,000 to a home’s resale value. So pour yourself a big cup of coffee, break out some trash bags and boxes, and get to work! Not only does decluttering reveal the great features of your home, but you’ll feel pretty darn good afterwards too!
While decluttering, depersonalize the home to create a neutral environment. Buyers may have difficulty picturing their life there if your child’s art is on the fridge and school portraits are lining the hallway! Put away personal belongings and family photos, repaint bold colored walls, and remove products from the bathrooms. If it’s a bit more than you can handle, you can save time and stress by renting a storage unit.
Using Crappy Photos
It’s 2020 and our cell phone cameras have 3 lenses, but your listing photos look like disposables from summer 2004! In this day and age, buyers are scrolling through listings incredibly fast on websites like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin. Humans are immediately drawn to images, in fact, it is estimated that the human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text. Photos must present your home in tip top shape, otherwise you may lose the lead’s interest before they even pull up to your curb.
Professionally photographed homes sell 32% faster, and for more money. Flaunting the best features of your home is our photographers’ passion, and it sure shows! We are the leading experts in real estate photography, 3D immersive spaces, floor plans, drone footage, virtual tours and virtual staging. From breathtaking stills to advanced Matterport 3D models, we know how to entice online users to come see the home in person. If you’re looking to capture the authentic beauty of your home, look into our Professional HDR Photography services.
Presenting the Home in the Wrong Light
Unless you’re selling to the local caveman, dark rooms are not appealing. Bright lighting is essential to taking high-quality photos and capturing the true beauty of your home. After all, diamonds can’t shine in darkness! A dimly lit room is often overlooked, but when illuminated becomes inviting and full of spectacular detail.
To prepare for your photoshoot, change any broken or dead lightbulbs, and replace those that don’t match the rest of the room. When your photographer arrives, turn on every light and let in as much natural light as possible through the blinds.
Our team at Twist Tours does a full evaluation of lighting before every shoot to ensure we can create irresistible enticing content for buyers. We know how to skillfully take advantage of perceived size, color pallets, mood light and every other different factors of lighting. Since we love painting your home in the perfect light, we even offer extra photos to all of our customers!
Not Refinishing Hardwood Floors or Cleaning Your Carpet
To create a thoughtfully composed room, you need to have a solid foundation! As a focal point of any room, anything awry with the floor will be noticed. Dirty carpets appear careless, and scuffed hardwood floors leave buyers wondering how well the rest of the house was cared for.
Carpets hold a lot of dirt and odor, and they show more damage than almost any part of your home. A professional cleaning makes some of the oldest carpets look like they were just installed, and blasts out any smells you’ve been desensitized to over time. In some cases, you may want to consider replacing the carpet entirely.
Buyers may be discouraged by the work associated with seeing worn hardwood floors. They would much rather see gorgeous, natural light reflecting off of the freshly finished floors. Hardwood floors can add up to 2.5% to the sale price of your home, and you need to put in the work to keep that value. And refinishing means you’ll have to move everything out of the room – the perfect opportunity to declutter!
Reviving your floors is a big, but valuable, undertaking. Buyers will appreciate having one less thing to do, and it lets them get in the house quicker!
Mismatched Appliances
In our opinion, mixing and matching should be saved for throw pillows. Appliances of varying material, texture, and color may distract buyers from the bold backsplash or the vintage light fixture begging for attention. Kitchens with matching appliances give a satisfying, cohesive look for a more sophisticated vibe. Some appliances might just need a little facelift with a new front panel.
We don’t mean that the black microwave amongst all other stainless steel appliances will send buyers running for the hills! However, kitchens are often a deal maker or breaker, so consider upgrading for high-end look and functionality.
Whether it’s your first time selling a home, or the fifth, we are here to help you dodge these mistakes! Selling a home is not simple or easy, but we’ve got the experience to help you get your home in top shape. Pick up some more tips on our blog, and reach out to elevate the online presence of your home with Twist Tours!
And don’t forget to use our online guide: How To Prep Your Home Your Home for a Photo Shoot!
