Spring Home-Buying Season Is Here – Clean Your House and Put Your Best Clean-Face Forward!

With warmer than normal temperatures already here, it may feel more like summer is upon us, but rest assured it’s still spring. This is the time of the year most homeowners tackle spring-cleaning chores, and buyers set out all over the St. Petersburg-Tampa area looking for a new home. So, if you’re selling your home, here are some handy and compelling tips on making it as enticing, attractive and sale ready as possible.

10 Tips To Give Your House The “Wow-WOW” Factor:

We’ve written before about how important curb appeal is to helping a prospective buyer get a great first impression of your house. We can’t stress enough how critical it is to create a “wow” factor right off the bat.

1. Start with the landscaping. The winter “browns” are over; rake then fertilize and cut your lawn, prune the bushes, pull the weeds and plant colorful flowers to give the front of your home some pizazz. Remove leaves from your flowerbeds, bushes and shrubs, and replace with a light covering of mulch to give areas a finished, well-maintained look. Remove and replace anything that didn’t make it through the long, cold west coast Florida winter.

2. Pressure wash the exterior. Florida’s state flowers may sometimes feel like mold and mildew, but they have no place residing on your house. Rent a pressure washer, and thoroughly clean everything from the fascia down. Buyers will think the inside is a mess if the outside looks like a biology experiment, and they will probably drive away without parking the car.

3. Identify repairs. In the process of pressure washing, you’re sure to find areas that need repainting and repairs that need to be completed. Make note of what they are, and take care of them as quickly as possible. Clogged gutters can become garden boxes. Clean them out before you have a Sequoia popping out of your roofline. You want your home to be in the best condition possible, not a state forest.

4. Paint your front door. Your home needs to be inviting. What better way than to give your entry a fresh new coat of paint, preferably in a color that contrasts and compliments the rest of the home’s color scheme. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to remove and paint the door, so no excuses. While you’re at it, replace or refresh any missing house numbers, put down a new welcome mat and remove any clutter from the entryway.

5. Shutter the clutter. You like all your stuff, your knick-knacks, your bobble head collection, your wall of stacked beer cans, but you’re alone on this one, trust us. No one else wants to see all that stuff. So get rid of it. Toss whatever you no longer want, and store anything that’s not absolutely necessary to the good look of your home. Remove the clutter, and allow buyers to picture in their minds what their stuff will look like once they move in. If their imaginations have to work overtime to overlook your Star Wars character collection, send it to DefStar9.

6. Cleanse your closets. We all have leftovers from some long lost and not well thought out fashion era, but even though we’re sure they’ll come back someday, chances are they won’t. Get rid of them. Buyers are always interested in how much closet space there is. If your closet is packed with costumes circa 1975, buyers won’t be able to gush over how extensive the closet space is they’re buying. This applies to drawer space, as well. You want buyers to think there’s an overabundance of storage space.

7. Clean, clean, clean. Make the place sparkle. Period.

8. Smelling is believing. Sometimes it’s not the look that turns buyers off, it’s the smell. Have a cat? Neutralize the odor. Have kids in diapers? Ditto. Take a lesson from your local bakery and make cookies before buyers arrive. Fresh, fragrant flowers will also do the trick, but they’re not nearly as tasty as chocolate chip cookies.

9. Lose Uncle Bernie. Buyers don’t want to see every space filled with photos of your family, extended family, vacations and casual acquaintances. They want to envision what the house will look like with their photos filling the spaces. They may want to know you have strong family values, after all, happy families make for happy homes, but they don’t want to see photos of Uncle Bernie proudly holding that 31-pound carp (but keep it handy for when he visits).

10. Remove what you want to keep. There are limits to this that your Realtor® can better discuss with you, but if you want to keep your hand-made, Romanian chintz curtains, take them down, and store until you can hang them in your new place. This also goes for some built-in appliances, lighting fixtures, your stuffed elk head, etc. But be sure to replace them with something, so your house does not look as if it were recently robbed.

These are just a few of the things you can do to help make your home as attractive as possible. Once you think you’re done, invite a couple friends over, ask them to look at the house as a buyer would and consider doing what they suggest to make the place more marketable. Then, sit back and watch your house sell!

So when your house is clean, contact us ( 727-642-9107) and we’ll get you on your way to selling your home.