What can damage your home’s valuation?

Selling a home for a good price is currently a challenging feat. The present housing market is a buyer’s market rather than a seller’s market.

If you are trying to sell your house right now and you feel rather insulted by the offers you have been receiving, you may be wondering what is lowering your home’s value. Fortunately, most of the features that bring down the value of a home are extremely easy to fix.

In order to sell your house at a good price, you must develop a competitive attitude and think like a buyer. Putting all your stuff away and vacuuming the floor every day is not going to cut it.

It is incredibly important to figure which price range your home is in and what kind of people are going to be able to afford it. Websites that have various mortgage calculators and other financial tools can help you get an accurate idea and MoneySupermarket is a great website for this.

Using this information, look for other houses nearby that are in the same price range. These houses are called comparables and are the key to increasing your home’s value.

Buyers who consider purchasing your home are going to be considering the comparables as well, so you have to make sure your house is either better or cheaper than the others. Attend a few open houses, or look up information about the comparables online. Compare your home’s listing and features to those of the ‘comparables’.

What are some of the differences? Perhaps you have a different number of bedrooms, or maybe the other homes have updated appliances and granite countertops. Does your home have the same type of flooring? Maybe buyers in your price range prefer carpet over hardwood since it is more kid-friendly.

After you have gathered this information, make changes to your home that will make your house’s listing comparable to the other listings. Listings are extremely important as buyers use them to determine whether or not to visit your home.

Consider the following scenario. Your home has two bedrooms, an office and a computer room. The comparable homes have three to four bedrooms. In this case, you should definitely turn the office and computer room into two additional bedrooms. This takes very little effort and money, but it makes a huge difference in value.

Make sure your home is move-in ready. This means mowing the lawn, tidying your landscape, applying a new coat of paint to the exterior and interior, cleaning or replacing the carpets and polishing the floors.

Fix everything that is slightly broken, such as wobbly stair rails, holes in walls, missing door handles, or unsecured cupboard doors. Replace cracked tiles and mend leaking sinks.

The final step is removing the “you” from your home. If you want it to sell, you must think of it as a house or a product and not “your home”. If you take on this attitude, everything about your house that is below par will suddenly stand out. In order to appeal to more buyers, the colors of your walls and décor should be neutral (khaki, beige, lighter shades of gray, colors with low saturation and white).

Remove family photos and anything personal, including textual décor with inspirational sayings and religious symbols. If possible, move everything out of your home except for items that could inspire buyers to picture living there (i.e. beds, couches, hand towels, tables, mirrors, bookshelves and curtains).

If you have pets, have them stay elsewhere and remove all traces that they lived in the home. Make sure that there is no “pet smell” or animal hair. Many buyers will automatically reject houses that have had specific types of pets in them due to allergies or personal preferences.