PART 2 OF 5: PREPARING YOUR HOME FOR SALE......

In our 5-part series, find out our top tips for getting your home sold quickly and for top dollar through perfect presentation! Whether it’s your first time or the fifteenth, selling a property is a highly stressful time. Here, we will provide you with the top five presentation tips based on our extensive years of experience in selling residential property.

Tip 2: Painting

The interior of your home should be painted around every 5 to 7 years and the exterior can go as long as up to 15 years depending on your location (for example beach side suburbs may need more frequent updates on the outside).

It is important to consider painting prior to listing your home for sale for the following reasons:

• a fresh paint job lifts and brightens the appearance of any room making it feel crisp and clean
• it’s an opportunity to update any too bright, too dark or too dated feature walls
• a paint job can eliminate odours that may have accumulated over the years from strong food flavours, cigarette smoke or pets’ smells.

It’s important to remember when you are getting your home ready for sale, that you want to appeal to the greatest number of buyers out in the market. While you may LOVE your bright green feature wall or think that retro wallpaper suits the style of your home, it will alienate some buyers.

When it comes to the walls and floors of a property, buyers are just looking for a neutral blank canvas that doesn’t require any work on their part. If they walk in to a property and see they have to paint every wall in the house, they’re already deducting $10,000 from their potential offer and that’s only if everything else in the property meets their requirements.

Regardless of the style of your home, you can’t go wrong with neutral wall colours. If you are worried about picking the wrong colour, you should ask advice from the store you are buying your paint from or if you are employing a professional, then certainly take their advice. Neutral shade fashions do change from time to time (for example from creamy beige shades to light grey shades), so it is best to seek advice on what’s current.

If you are looking to do the work yourself, be prepared for exactly how labour intensive and time consuming it can be. If you’ve never done it before or it’s been a long time, start small, say with one bedroom, and see how you go. After this you may want to investigate your options with hiring a professional. Having a whole house painted by the professionals will generally cost upwards of $5,000 so you may want to just do the high traffic areas like hallways, living rooms and kitchen. If all your walls are already quite neutral in colour, you may even get away with just a quick patch-up as long as the colour is perfectly matched.

Make no mistake, painting your home is no small task, but it will help with getting a quick sale for the best price.

“A blank canvas… has unlimited possibilities.” ~Stephanie Perkins~

If you would like to see all our tips, please email info@spartners.com.au to request a copy of our Preparing Your Home For Sale booklet.