Preparing your home for a good first impression.

Spring is the time when the housing market starts to get very busy.  If you have your home on the market or are considering listing it to sell, it’s time to get it ready for showing.  The most important thing when selling a home is the first impression, and you need to prepare your home for that. I always say selling real estate is the only place where you get the chance for 2 first impressions.
As a Realtor, I make sure that the 1'st "first impression" of where they first located your home (usually online) is precise with great details regarding your homes strong points, professional photography, and other marketing strategies. Your responsibility lies with making your home look its greatest when they first pull up to your driveway and step through your door. 

 Easy tips to get your home ready for showings

• Reduce and Recycle – Over the years, you have collected a lot of things that you don’t necessarily need or want anymore.   Go through every room, inside every closet and under every bed and remove everything.  Give things to charity or sell them online if you don’t want them anymore.  Just get rid of it.    

• Remove – After going through all of your things, there are probably many things that you don’t want to get rid of, but that you don’t use much.  If you can part with these things until after you move, then box them up and put them in storage. Anything you can do to clean out the house and make it less cluttered will improve the first impression of the home.
  
  
• Repaint – Your teenaged daughter might have thought that she couldn’t live without an orange room, but anyone looking to buy your house will probably not have the same thought.  Go through and paint rooms that might be less than appealing to a new family.   Many rooms might just need a coat of paint to clean up marks and chips that have shown up over the years, so paint them too.
  

• Rearrange – Go through each room and make it look the best it possibly can, with the least amount of extra “stuff” in the room.  This may require that you remove furniture, or move furniture from one room to another.  Take out the knick-knacks and personal photos, so that it’s easier for a potential buyer to picture themselves in the home.