I don’t stink!….Tips for Marketing Your Home #1

You’ve decided to sell your home and plan to put it on the market in the spring….what can you do between now and then to increase its marketability?

In today’s busy market, sellers might be tempted to relax when it comes to preparing their home for buyers. I often have to remind them that its like selling a car. You wouldn’t take a dirty car filled with old food wrappers and empty pop cans into a dealer and expect a good trade in amount. Nobody wants to take on somebody else’s stinky lifestyle so the first thing you need to do is thoroughly clean your house and eliminate the stinky areas….

This involves more than dumping the garbage. There are other areas in our homes that stink….the laundry room, the kids rooms (especially their closets), the area where we feed our pets or have the cat box, the back porch where we sneak a cigarette on occasion, the carpet, the furniture and the kitchen. All these areas carry our odor and guests can smell it as soon as they walk in the door. We get used to it so we don’t even notice it…unless it gets really bad. If we love to cook with a lot of onions and garlic, the smell of those two items can cling to the rooms of our homes, our clothing and our furniture for days.

The best way to identify your “stink” is to have a friend, who you trust to be totally honest, come into your house and tell you what they smell….good and bad. We have a saying in real estate, “If you can smell it, you can’t sell it”. This isn’t totally true because eventually we can sell anything but you don’t want your house sitting on the market for months…Put the time in at the beginning and reap the benefits in price and time on the market.

A great resource for information on home buying, marketing and creating a lovely home can be found at http://www.houselogic.com