The Home Buyer is the Guest of Honor

When selling your Birmingham Alabama home, you should apply that same tenacity as if you were
planning a party for a guest of honor.  Think about it:  Don’t you want the guest of honor to be pleased enough to make an offer on your house that is for sale?  That is your goal right? 

Have you ever planned a party for someone at your house?  If so, then I’m sure that you try to think of everything that might make it a pleasant experience for the guest of honor.  Right?  If you have celebratory decorations, you probably spent some time thinking about and coordinating the colors of the party decorations.  The house is picture perfect and everything is in it’s proper place.  You stand back look on with pride.  Your first thought is “I hope the guest of honor will like it.”

Planning the Party

You’ve decided to sell your home.  Besides contacting and selecting a Birmingham real estate agent, one of the first things on your mind is a good old fashioned house cleaning.  Don’t just go through the motions of having the carpet cleaned, reducing clutter, polishing the furniture and spit shining the floors.  In your mind, once you’ve done all of that, you believe your house is list and show ready.  You’ve done everything that you could think of to make the home look show  ready as far as you could see.

When preparing to sell your Birmingham Alabama home, the foremost thought on your mind should not be how good the house looks to you, but how it will be looked upon by the potential Metro Birmingham-Hoover home buyer (your guest of honor).  After all, that is who you are trying to impress right?  If your answer is no, then you should clearly rethink your position.  Everything that you do to prepare your house for sale should be done with potential home buyers in mind.

Consider What Would Appeal to the Guest of Honor

• For starters, if these walls could talk would they say “paint me?”  When cleaning the walls and trim or painting,  consider if the color choice would appear to the broadest number of potential Birmingham home buyers.  If you are asking yourself whether or not you should paint the walls, then you probably should.
• When reducing clutter,  choose wisely where and how you will store the excess household items.  Perhaps a short term rented storage space may be necessary.  Home buyers like to be able to clearly see the available space (not envision the space through the clutter).
• Closet space is vitally important.  Do you view your jam packed closets as being evidence of its huge capacity?  If so, then think again.  An overstuffed closet can actually make the closet look smaller.  Remove items that are not in season and store them elsewhere.  Home buyers want to know that the closet space will be sufficient to store their current and future belongings.
• Neatly box  up articles and place them in an area that is designed for or can easily be used for storage.  Make sure the space that you chose to store the items will not interfere with a potential home buyers ability to visualize the use of the room for something other than storage.

Curb Appeal

The party starts at the curb.  The curb appeal of your house should be like the doorman at a fine hotel:  welcoming. 

• If the yard is full of leaves, rake them.  
• If the grass and hedges are overgrown on lack balance, cut and/or trim them.  

When home buyers get home at the end of the day, all they want to do is relax.  A yard full of leaves,overgrown grass and bushes will instantly conjure up visions of “work” for the home buyer.

Update Those Outdated Features
Updating outdated features of a home is probably the most important aspect to consider when preparing to sell your Birmingham Alabama home.  Not everyone can afford to do a vast overhaul of the kitchen and bathroom.  Ideally, as a home owner, you've updated your while “living” in it and ensured that the home’s features have kept up with the times.  Rarely does a decorative style transcend from one decade to another.  By periodically updating your house, you won’t run the risk of having to come up with thousands of dollars at once, to do a job that could have been completed over time.  If you’re thinking about selling your house in the future and your it is currently in need of updating, start planning the work now and accomplish the updates over time.  Give yourself a year or more if necessary, but don’t let procrastination stall the sale of your house.

Check out more tips for the selling your Birmingham Alabama home.