Home Seller Tips, Part One – “The Three C’s”

This is the first in a three part mini-series for home sellers on how to sell your home for the most amount possible in the shortest amount of time. The first part deals with the “Three C’s” – Cleanliness, Clutter and Cohesiveness.

Cleanliness

If you’ve ever been house hunting, you know how it is to walk into a dirty home. I’ve heard my buyer clients say things such as,

• “Ewwwww”
• “I can’t believe they can live like this”
• “If the house is this dirty, they must not take care of the rest of the house much either”

These are not things that you want potential buyers saying while going through your property.

Here are some of things that my buyer clients say while going through a very clean house…

• “Wow! They really take good care of their home!”
• “The carpets and hardwoods are in great shape!”
• “The house looks much newer than it really is!”

What a difference in buyer perception, isn’t it?

The cleaner your home is, the more attractive your home will be to potential buyer. And the more a buyer will perceive the house being in good shape which translates to the buyer seeing more value in the property and offering a higher price for it.

Clutter

Though your definition of clutter may be different, the definition of clutter when it comes to real estate is,

• No more than one to two items on any one piece of furniture or wall
• Having no more furniture or items in a room than is necessary to fill it up and make it look lived in

An example of the first would be one lamp on a nightstand…or… two items on the fireplace mantle…or…one item on top of the dresser…or…one painting on the outside wall of the family room.

An example of the second would be a medium sized couch in a medium sized room rather than a huge “L” shaped couch that takes up 1/2 of the room’s floor space…or… a small circular table and two chairs in a small eat-in-kitchen rather than a medium-sized square dining room style table with four chairs that takes up the majority of floor space in the eat-in-kitchen and makes it looks formal when it shouldn’t.

Clutter clouds a buyer’s mind and makes them focus on the items creating the clutter rather than property itself. The less a buyer notices the actual property, the less they will remember the good things about it let alone the property itself. This translates to less of a perceived value by the buyer and less of an offer price – if they make an offer at all.

Cohesiveness

Cohesiveness is how well everything flows together throughout the entire property – furniture, decorating, paint schemes, landscaping, outdoor decorations, etc. If things do not flow, buyers will focus more on that then the  physical property itself. This doesn’t help their perceived value of the property and hurts your chances of getting a high offer price.

For example…Buyers are thrown off when one room is burgundy and has contemporary furniture in it while the next room over is burgundy and has traditional or country style furniture.

Stick with one theme and try to make things match as best as possible.

• If you have contemporary furniture in the family room, do the same in the kitchen and dining room
• If you have neutral paint in two of the bedrooms, do the same or something very similar in the other bedroom(s)
• If you have lots of bright flowers and bushes as part of your landscaping in the front of the home, plant some in the back of the home as well

If you would like to find out how your property does in a “Three C’s” test, call or email me – danilo.bogdanovic (at) gmail (dot) com – 703.582.6900. I would be happy to stop by, give you my professional opinion and be of help.

RELATED READING

Home Seller Tips, Part Two – Marketing

Home Seller Tips, Part Three – Pricing (and Reality)