Creating curb appeal

Most buyers make snap judgments about your house. Their first impressions, good or bad, generally are lasting impressions. Buyers begin forming their opinion of your house long before they go inside. Curb appeal, the external attractiveness of your property when viewed from the street, is critically important. If you want to see how your house looks to strangers, go across the street and take a good, hard look at it.

No matter how magnificent your house is on the inside, many buyers will drive by your house without stopping if the property lacks curb appeal. Your house’s exterior appearance and landscaping either attract buyers or repulse them. You can enhance your house’s curb appeal through some tried-and-true ways:

• Painting: Painting your house’s exterior before you put it on the market can be expensive (unless you do it yourself), but it gives the biggest bang for your fix-up buck — if you use colors that conform with your neighborhood’s decorating norm. Now isn’t the time to make a fashion statement! White, light grays, or soft tans are safe choices for exterior walls. If your house doesn’t need a new paint job, at least touch up window frames, front shutters, gutters, and downspouts and have your house gently power washed by people who know what they’re doing. Also, be sure to give your mailbox and front door a fresh coat of paint. Greet prospective buyers by dressing up your freshly painted entrance with a new welcome mat.

  In addition to costing you big bucks, house painting is a time-consuming project. Because exterior painting is seasonal work, professional painters are busy folks after the snow melts and during the dry season. Don’t wait until a week before you want to put your house on the market to call several painters for bids to do the job. Schedule your painting contractor well in advance of the crunch or you may end up with two nasty choices: either painting the house yourself or putting it on the market with peeling, faded paint.

• Lawn: A freshly mowed, neatly trimmed lawn gives your house a well-maintained appearance. Don’t leave toys, lawn equipment, or garden hoses scattered around the yard. You can make your grass look extra lush and green by fertilizing it in the appropriate season. However, if your pet, or your neighbor’s pet, tries to help out with the fertilizing, use your pooper-scooper daily to clean up.

• Sidewalks: Sweep your sidewalks daily. Keep your walks free of snow and ice in the winter. Nothing puts buyers in a foul mood faster than falling flat on their faces while trying to navigate your icy sidewalk.

  A badly cracked, crumbling sidewalk is a lawsuit waiting to happen if someone trips and injures himself due to the sidewalk’s poor state of repair. In addition, a poorly maintained sidewalk creates a terrible first impression of your property. Compounding the problem, buyers know that if you don’t fix the sidewalk, they’ll have to do it. Patching cracks or replacing damaged portions of a sidewalk prior to putting your house on the market is money well spent. Keep cost to a minimum by getting bids to do the corrective work from several reputable contractors.

• Shrubbery: Remove or replace any dead or dying trees, hedges, or shrubs, and prune anything that looks scraggly or overgrown. Cut back overgrown shrubs that block windows and keep light from entering your house.
• Flowers: Filling flower beds with seasonal flowers is an inexpensive way to add color and charm to property. Choose bright, fresh colors that draw buyers’ eyes to otherwise ignored areas of your yard. Don’t forget to keep flower beds watered and weeded throughout the marketing process until your sale closes. If you’re among the flower-growing impaired, allow us to recommend Gardening Basics For Dummies by Steven Frowine and the National Gardening Association (Wiley).
• Repairs: Be sure that all gutters and downspouts are in place and clean. Replace missing roof shingles and broken or cracked windows. Repair cracks in your driveway and remove large oil stains. Replace or repair broken stairs, torn window screens, broken or missing fence slats, and defective doorknobs. Make sure your front and back doors, garage doors, and all windows open easily. Check exterior lights to be certain they’re working properly.
• Windows: Keep your windows spotless inside and out throughout the marketing period. When you’re not home, curious buyers attracted by the For Sale sign will peek through the windows to size up your house. Don’t let their first impression be windows covered with cobwebs and smeared with fingerprints. Don’t forget that interior window treatments can be seen from the outside. Worn or faded drapes or lopsided window shades need to be replaced or removed. If your old dual-pane windows are foggy or worse due to a broken seal, you may want to consider replacing them.
• Eliminate or hide clutter: Clear everything you don’t need out of the garage. Friends and family who live nearby can be a great source of temporary places to stash your excess stuff. If you can’t clean out your garage, at least keep the door closed to conceal the mess from prying eyes. Store recycling bins in an out-of-the-way spot in back of your house. Don’t have a fleet of cars, trucks, boats, and campers cluttering up your driveway or parked in front of your house. You’re selling a house, not a parking lot.

If just reading this list makes you tired, you’re not alone. You probably lack the time and the desire to do all this prep work yourself. If you can afford it, make your life easier by hiring competent folks to help you with these chores. Your real estate agent, if you’re working with one, should be brought into the spiffing process as soon as possible. The agent should help prioritize the various projects and can probably refer you to people who specialize in this kind of work.

Exteriors attract, but interiors sell

Curb appeal draws buyers into your house. Appealing interiors make the sale. But you don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your house prior to putting up the For Sale sign. On the contrary, the little things you do generally give the biggest increase in value. Concentrate on the three Cs.

Staging

Staging a house goes way beyond your efforts to make it look nifty before having friends over for a dinner party. After all, your pals are there to eat your food and drink your wine — not buy your house. Just as stagehands set the stage for Broadway productions, you can stage your house to create a production designed to wow prospective purchasers. Good stagers know how to emphasize the best features of a house and minimize the worst.

Staging became even more important with the advent of Internet marketing, which we cover in Chapter 13. Today it’s no longer a simple matter of how your house looks to people who walk through it. Many buyers shop online prior to actually seeing a house, so be sure your house looks good online too.

If you’ve ever visited a new home development and walked through the builder’s model home, you’ve seen staging. Builders usually do extremely elaborate staging jobs. They use professional decorators who take care of everything: placing furniture, choosing soothing colors for carpets and drapes, hanging artwork, having a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter, putting flower arrangements in the living room, and leaving an open book on a table by the bed in the master bedroom.

All cabinets, closets, and drawers are empty, of course, so buyers can easily see that the house appears to have plenty of room for their stuff. That unnaturally clean, utterly bare garage looks huge. The patio is furnished with nice lawn furniture and one of those tables with an umbrella in the center. Staging the property this way helps prospective buyers visualize themselves living in the home.

The message a bright, cheerful, immaculately clean model home in perfect working condition sends to buyers is, “What are you waiting for? Go ahead. Buy me. You won’t regret it. Living here will be easy. You can relax and enjoy life.”

Staging finishes the process you started with the three Cs (see the preceding section). You don’t have to spend wads of cash to stage your property. Small bucks spent staging can bring big rewards. If you’re looking to increase your house’s emotional appeal, check out the following areas of improvement:

• Kitchen: Aromas from fragrant goodies like freshly baked gingerbread or just-brewed coffee bring back wonderful memories of home. Conversely, many people find odors from pungent foods such as liver, fish, and cabbage a turnoff. Be careful about the foods you cook throughout the marketing process; you never know when prospective buyers may tour your house.
• Bathrooms: Always have fresh towels and potpourri in bathrooms. Buy new shower curtains; old ones may have water spots or mildew on them. Put new soap in the soap dishes. Take toothbrushes, toothpaste, combs, prescription bottles, and rubber duckies off the bathroom counter. Clear out the medicine cabinet, make sure the toilets are flushed and cleaned, and remove the tub mat and rug in front of the toilet.

• Collections: Everyone has collections — family photos on the wall, autographed baseballs, dolls, sports and school trophies, model airplanes, whatever. Unfortunately, now isn’t the time to have prospective buyers thinking about your family living in the house. You want them to focus on their family living in it. Depersonalize your property. Put away your collections so people focus on the task at hand — buying your house.

  Most folks use magnets or tape to stick everything from vacation snapshots and finger-painting masterpieces to notes for the kids and “to do” lists on the surface of their refrigerator. That’s a mighty distracting collection. Clear everything off the top and sides of your refrigerator.

• Comfort: Keep your house warm in winter and cool in summer. A house that’s too hot or too cold isn’t inviting. Remember Goldilocks.
• Fireplace: Functioning fireplaces are utilitarian (another heat source) and romantic (candlelit dinners by the fire). If you have a fireplace, spotlight it. Polish your fireplace tools. Pile logs neatly in the fireplace. When your house is shown on cold fall or winter days, nothing says “Welcome” like the warmth, glow, crackle, and smell of a blazing fire in the fireplace.
• Flowers: Vases of colorful, fresh flowers spotted throughout the house make a wonderful impression on prospective buyers. You don’t have to spend a fortune on hothouse orchids. Bouquets of daisies, tulips, or other seasonal flowers from your local supermarket are fine.
• Furniture: Rearrange furniture to create a warm, inviting feeling. If you’re selling a vacant house, consider renting furniture to create a homey atmosphere.

• Light: Bright, well-lit houses seem more spacious and cheerful. Wash all your windows. Clean the window screens. During the day, open all your curtains and drapes (unless you overlook the city dump or your view is a brick wall). If the view is unattractive, get sheer window coverings that let light through but mask the view. Don’t force buyers and agents to grope around in the dark looking for light switches. When you show your house, brighten up rooms by turning on all your lamps, even during the day. Check all your light bulbs — replace any that have burned out. Be sure hallways and stairways are brightly lit. Don’t forget to turn on closet lights, oven lights, and the lights over your stove and kitchen counter.

  Prospective buyers often drop in or drive by in the evening to see how your house looks at night. Interior lights that can be seen from the street make a house look cozy and inviting. From sunset until you go to bed, keep at least one light on in each room that faces the street.

As you may know, some folks earn their living (either part-time or full-time) as home stagers. If you’re working with a real estate agent to sell your house and you’ve done a thorough job interviewing agents, as we explain in Chapter 7, your agent can probably recommend several stagers. In the event your agent is unable to suggest anyone, she should ask fellow agents in her office and her office manager for advice.