CREATING JUST THE RIGHT FIRST IMPRESSION IS ACCOMPLISHED IN THE OVERALL LOOK OF YOUR HOME, BUT IT’S ALSO VERY MUCH IN THE DETAILS

Potential buyers start to form an opinion of your house before they even walk in your front door. For a house, the street appeal is a BIG determinant. That includes things like the landscaping and your home’s façade. For an apartment it’s a little different, it happens the moment the front door opens. What will they see first? What impact will that have on them? These are key questions to answer.

It’s important to maximise first impressions, but then you must also carry that same attention to detail right through the rest of the home.

Your goal is to romance potential buyers. You want them to lose their hearts and say, “This is home. We have to have this house!”

In a national survey carried out by homegain.com, they found that out of the 12 things you can do to your property to prepare it for sale, the top two ways to increase your home’s worth in the eyes of your buyer was simply a ‘clean and declutter’ followed by ‘styling’.

And remember . . .

“Buyers are not looking to buy property! What they’re really looking to buy is a better life (property just happens to be the way they’ll get it)”

For the presentation of your home to really attract buyers (and the highest offers) you need to make buyers want what you’ve got – give them a glimpse of a better life and you’ll be that one step closer to getting ‘The LOVE Price’ for your home.

The good news is, you can present virtually any property so that it has the wow factor (if you know how to do it).

Recently, I was contacted by the owner of a large ground floor luxury apartment in New Farm. The apartment had been on the market for several months with another agent in the area. During that time, not a single offer in writing had been received. I understand from the sellers, there was one buyer willing to offer $1,000,000 but a written offer was never forthcoming.

Understandably, the sellers were frustrated. When I conducted a realistic market appraisal of their home, the appraisal range we agreed upon was actually no different from what their former agent had told them. So, in my opinion, the sellers had realistic expectations.

I found out that the previous agent did the old one-size-fits-all plan. They had it listed at a fixed, ‘top-down-price’ of $1,295,000; and they did numerous open homes. But no written offer and no sale.

What excited me about this apartment was the large living space and its great courtyard. It just didn’t present as well as it could. There was no WOW. So I felt it needed a little styling magic. Enter my stylist wife, Karen. Karen started the transformation off by decluttering it.

That resulted in the owners putting thirty boxes of their personal things into storage along with several bookshelves, rugs, some musical instruments and a sleeper sofa

Talk about WOW, decluttering really opened up the space inside. Next was the courtyard. This was the real hero of the property but it was empty and looked unused. So Karen brought in a groovy outdoor setting and repositioned the owner’s outdoor dining table and pot plants. Inside the apartment a breakfast nook was created, furniture adjusted to create a better energy flow and bedrooms were joojed. By the time she was finished, the property was virtually unrecognisable compared to the state in which the previous agent advertised it. It now had a definite WOW factor. Once that was done our photographer did a great job capturing the WOW that Karen had created.

Just four days into the promotion of the apartment we secured a cash offer of $1,250,000 which I negotiated to a successful sale. The result? A sold price of $1,300,000.

That was $5,000 higher than what the previous agent was advertising it for. I should also point out, the sold price was more than the appraised ‘best case scenario’ price. The seller was over the moon.

(This is an excerpt from the book, ‘The Love Price’ by Peter Hutton)

If you’d like to get some help preparing your home for sale, call our in-house stylist, Karen Hutton on 0466 987 222.