Learn More About Buying in NYC
Hi everyone, are you curious about what you should be doing in order to set up your home for sale? Well, never fear. Today, we’re gonna go over the five things you should do to get your home ready for sale.
My name is Erin Wheelock of the Wheelock Team powered by Keller Williams. And we are helping people from all over the globe to relocate here, whether it’s going to be your new first home, second, third, fourth home, or you’re relocating out of New York City, we are here to help you out.
Number one, when you’re getting your home ready for sale, repairs, what can you fix? You might have handles that have always been loose, or maybe some are, summer brass, summer silver, and you want to make them look similar things like that, can you fix it? Can you change it out, maybe half of your lights are warm, half of your lights are cool. If they’re giving off different lights, maybe you should unify them, little things like that, you should definitely look into getting done before you list your home for sale. Now, if you have a townhome, or a multifamily, there might be other things that you should fix beforehand, because whatever is not fixed, is going to come up in an inspection. So we want to make sure that we are getting new top dollar of a new list. So make sure to handle those repairs beforehand.
Now, especially in our vertical market in Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, it doesn’t always make sense. If you have an apartment to do a full renovation, it can take time because there’s our restrictions of when you can work. And it definitely costs a lot of money here. So doing things like that may not make sense. But those little repairs, again, like knobs, maybe painting things like that. That can be done.
Number two, declutter, please declutter. We want people to come in and see as much space as humanly possible, right? We want them to be able to envision what their life would look like if they lived in there. So if you have a lot of big pieces of furniture, and you can get rid of some of it, that’s a good idea. If you have a wall full of different pieces of knickknacks, you might want to declutter that, right? The more space, the better. And also, the more things that are neutral. And by that I mean, neutral to the holidays, things of that nature, the better.
Number three, remove your personal items, your photos, etc. You know, when you go over- Well, maybe not. But typically, if you go over to somebody’s home, and you know it’s theirs, you maybe don’t make yourself feel quite as much at home. Well, it’s the same thing here, right? So when we have a buyer that’s coming into a home, and they see 15 photos of a wedding, as soon as they open the door, because they’ve had this, the first thing they’re going to think is oh my gosh, I’m entering their home, they’re not going to be as likely to sit down, take it in and be able to picture themselves there. Because all they’re thinking about is ooh these people live here. And then because we’re humans, they’re judging, well, what if I’m not like them? This person seems like they’re very outdoorsy, what if I’m not outdoorsy, maybe this isn’t the right home for me. Whatever it is, it’s really silly, but it is human nature. So try to remove as many of your personal items as possible.
Painting and deep cleaning is number four, I bought a painting a little bit for repairs, but I should have saved it for this one. But number four is definitely painting and a deep cleaning, we always recommend a fresh coat of paint, it can make it look completely different in terms of cleanliness, especially if you have green walls, red walls, blue walls, you know, any accent wall can sometimes throw people off if they don’t like the color. Not every buyer can envision if things were all white. So a good painting we do recommend, it’s not always needed. But we do recommend that and to deep cleaning, often we’ll have somebody come in do a really deep cleaning before we start bringing people in, you know, if you have a buyer come through and they see those like dust balls in the corner, they might think that the House has not kept up as well as it really is. But again, it’s just where our minds go. It’s human nature.
And number five, staging. Now this is always something that we help our clients with staging the property. If it’s empty, you might need it fully staged, or if you are still living there, it might need to be just things that we’re taking back pulling back on. Things like really big, heavy curtains, they can block out the light and they may be absolutely beautiful, but big heavy things tend to make things look smaller. Also, when we’re staging a property, we make sure that we have different colors that are going through the property. Why? Because we want someone’s eye to follow the colors. So it might be something where- You know we noticed that there’s a painting that has red in it so we’ll add some red pillows over here, and maybe a red flower over here, because we want their eye to go through the entire space and focus on what we want them to focus on.
Always making sure that it’s light and bright. Especially in New York City. There’s a lot of buildings that were not built with overhead lighting in the living room, and also sometimes in the bedroom.
So we may want to bring in some more light, just so that whatever hour of the day we’re showing it, we have enough light and people can feel like it’s a light and bright apartment. So don’t forget those five things when you are getting your home ready for sale. And of course, we’re always here to help you out with with that project. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and be sure to check out one of our other videos, maybe, Five Things to Know About Home Insurance. That’s a good one. If you like this, please feel free to like, subscribe, add it, send it to a friend. We would love all of your support.