June, 2017
If you’ve recently decided to sell your home, then you’ve probably been researching all sorts of information and asking for plenty of advice from family and friends on how to get it all wrapped up smoothly and quickly. While there are plenty of great tips out there on how to maximise the appeal of your home, there are also a few myths that seem to be passed around from time to time.
Luckily for you we’re here to fill you in on some of the selling tips that may not be 100% true or just wrong all together. So here are our top 5 property selling myths busted.
You get out what you put in
A property purchase is an investment, but that doesn’t mean you need to sink every penny of your income into it. Upgrading or renovating areas of your home - in most cases - increase the value of your home. However, renovations are not sure fire profit.Just because you put £3,000 into doing up your kitchen, it doesn’t mean you’ve added £7-10,000 to the value of your home. Also, if your taste in design is somewhat ‘unique’ then there may be a chance that you’ve turned one room from a generic blank slate, into a buyer’s worst nightmare. The key to putting money into your home is to focus on function and not fashion. Install any missing modern home features, but don’t burn through cash trying to wow potential buyers with your design skills.
You should always aim high
This one isn’t necessarily specific to the property market, but it’s a fairly mainstream belief that whenever you’re negotiating you start high and let them try and work you down to something more realistic.While this may be a good tactic in some situations, when selling a home, you have to keep in mind just how competitive the market actually is. When buyers search for a home they are most likely to look for properties priced below their maximum budget and try and bring the price down further, if your home is priced unnecessarily high, then it won’t even show up on some buyers' radar and you’ll be harming your chances of booking viewings.
Timing is everything
This is one of those half true tips. It is true that Spring is a good time to put your home on the market, the market is busier that time of year and there are smaller benefits such as the return of nice weather that improves the look of any home. But just because Spring is a good time to be on the market, this doesn’t mean that the rest of the year is a poor time to sell. Realistically, people are looking at homes throughout the year and there are plenty of factors that contribute to someone’s decision to move home. There is a chance you may receive more interest during the warmer months of the year, but if someone is willing to make an offer that’s right for you at another time, then there’s no point in delaying a move 3-6 months.
It’s the interior that really matters
This is another half-truth, the interior of your home is obviously quite important when trying to sell your home. However, the exterior also plays a large role. The exterior is your homes first impression, so don’t just assume that every buyer is going to take the ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ approach to property. This doesn’t mean that you need to go all out by laying a new driveway and installing water features, but making sure the front garden is kept in good shape and doors or windows have a fresh coat of paint can go a long way in getting people in the door in the first place.
Buyers love a fixer upper because they’re such a bargain
Although this may seem a bit of a contradiction to our earlier point, when you’re planning to sell your home, it’s important that you invest the right amount of money to help get it off the market. All buyers love a bargain and in today’s DIY world some buyers will consider a fixer upper but that isentirely dependent on what they actually need to fix.There’s a big difference between putting up a few extra shelves and repairing some faulty plumbing. You might get lucky and find a buyer that doesn’t mind getting stuck into all of it, but the longer your list of repairs is, the shorter your list of potential buyers will be.
