If you need to sell your home quickly for cash, the last thing you want to do is undertake a lengthy, involved process of getting your house ready to attract eager shoppers. Just think of what’s involved in selling your home the traditional way:
- Deep cleaning from ceilings and light fixtures to floors and carpets, and everything in between
- Repainting all the walls to a uniform, calming neutral shade
- Removing all your personal effects like family photos and personal correspondence
- Staging your home, either with a DIY approach or through a professional stager, with input from your real estate agent
All these tasks take significant time and energy (or time and money), which seems at odds with the philosophy behind a quick cash sale of your home. Yet putting a little effort into sprucing up your home helps improve the cash offers it attracts.
So where’s that fine line in the middle between “no work at all” and “exhaustive prepping and staging”? Here are a few tips to get your home ready for a quick cash sale and attract the highest possible offer from qualified buyers.
Provided by Wait! Read This Before You Sell Your House for Cash
1. Start With a Thorough Decluttering and Depersonalization
Get a large rubber container with a lid and walk through your home, looking for every item that you own and want to keep but that doesn’t add usefulness or value to the room. That includes family photos, bills and other documents, knick knacks, and all personal items. Stuff all those personal belongings into your storage box and shove it under a bed or in a closet where it won’t show in property photos.
The goal is to strip down your home to very basic design elements of furniture, furnishings, and perhaps a few key pieces of art, so that your prospective purchasers can see themselves living there.
2. Clean the Home Inside and Out
Take the time to tackle any visible damage, scuff marks, dents, or other unsightly spots that will show up in your photos or in a showing. You don’t need to go as far as you would in a traditional financed sale process, with thorough cleaning and repainting. Nor do you need to tackle a lengthy punch list of repairs that need to be made.
Part of the appeal of a fast cash sale, particularly to a home-buying corporation or iBuyer, is that you as the owner and seller get to pass on those repairs and their associated costs to the purchaser. But you do want to make sure you’ve touched up unsightly points of damage so that it won’t put off otherwise interested buyers.
3. Look At Your Home With a Design Eye
You don’t need to be a professional interior designer to stage your home for a quick cash sale. However, it does help to try to view your home as a first-time viewer would. Make sure you’ve left open space for traffic patterns from room to room, and that your furniture suggests the room’s purpose (i.e., a sofa and chairs in a living room, or a bed and dresser in a bedroom). Give it all one final once-over with a dusting cloth and then get ready for your photos.
4. Create the Best Quality Listing You Can
These days, it’s hard to sell a home at all without an attractive internet presence. That means a well written description that really sells your home’s best features, and a set of clear, high quality professional photos that show your home’s major rooms and features. Your agent should be able to help you with a tightly crafted home description. Double check that written content for spelling and grammar errors, as well as easy readability.
A good set of professional real estate photos for a listing doesn’t have to cost hundreds of dollars. Talk to your real estate agent and ask for recommendations. A high-quality set of listing photos can cost as little as $150 to $300. Just make sure you review the photographer’s past work and get recommendations from past clients and agents.
5. Ask for a Cash Offer
It’s as simple as that. With a clean, streamlined home and a great listing with vivid descriptions and dynamic photos, you’re in the best shape possible to attract iBuyers and other buyers with sufficient cash on hand to complete the sale quickly. Then you’re on your way to your next home!