2 Inexpensive Ways to Separate Your Home Listing From All the Rest

Real estate agents get to play the good guy most of the time. Not always.

At some point we need to tell a client that their favourite chair isn’t right or that the front lawn needs to be mowed more than once a summer. When you insult a seller’s home they take it very personally. It isn’t fun and the seller is so defensive that they really don’t see the negative effects on the value.

Sometimes a Toronto real estate agent can make a suggestion and the budget isn’t there to make the improvement. That is fair. I have two very inexpensive suggestions based on what I see over and over again.

Clean up the front of the house and de-clutter the interior.

The return on renting a storage unit, racking some leaves, and buying a few cans of paint is high. In my humble opinion those should be no-brainers for all sellers.

The least expensive thing you can do to help sell your home is to simplify the space and make it easy for buyers to see the potential. De-clutter. Think about it as the packaging on a product in a store. If the package is torn, crumpled and looks old you will avoid it and choose a nicer, brighter, newer looking product. You assume that because of the bad packaging there must be a problem with the product. This is exactly the case with real estate.

Remove all of the excess stuff that is filling up the closets and bookshelves. Move anything that is out of season or not used on a weekly basis to a storage space. This will create a lot more space and will allow potential buyers to visualize their own items in the house.

You don’t want the house to look sterile or not lived in but clutter is a sellers worst enemy. Don’t remove the soul of the home, just the excess stuff. Old school agents don’t like photographs but I love to see a few personal photos around, not too many though. It gives the buyers a little window into the happiness that the current owners enjoy.

Once the inside has been dealt with grab any household magazine and go outside to your street curb. Now compare the homes in the periodical to yours. Don’t bother with the details. Get a sense of what belongs and what doesn’t belong. Note the differences. Obviously you will see some similarities and some problems. The magazine will represent what an ideal home would look like without budgets or reality.

The differences will mainly be the chores that you just haven’t gotten around to. Clean up the yard, plant some seasonal flowers or bushes, maybe remove or trim a bush, straighten the mailbox, hide the snow shovels, scrape down the flaking paint on the porch and repaint the front door.

One of the best things I can suggest is to have professional outdoor lighting installed. A few hundred dollars and your home will now be on display 24hrs a day. Your neighbours won’t likely have professional lighting so your home will stand out all evening and into the night.

The reason why this is so important is because everyone passes judgement based on the MLS photos. The front of the house is the first photo you will see and decide whether you want to look a little further or click on the next place.

Put the makeup on the house and make sure your Toronto real estate agent brings a professional photographer. Do not accept an agent with a point and shoot camera, this isn’t a bicycle you are selling on Craigslist.

About the Author

Evan Sage is one of only a handful of award winning
Toronto real estate agents
. Evan instills in his clients the confidence to make the right purchase or sale decision. He achieves this by demonstrating a superior knowledge of
Toronto real estate
and by providing a wealth of free resources on his website evansage.com to educate buyers and sellers in Toronto.

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