From staging to renovations, there’s a lot you can do to make your home more attractive to buyers in ways that will make it sell faster and maximize how much you get for it. However, many of the things you can do to make your home more appealing might not add enough value for you to get back the investment you make in them. Swimming pools are one of the most often cited examples of a relatively costly renovation that might actually make your house less attractive to certain buyers. High-end appliances and ‘invisible’ improvements, like new heating and air conditioning equipment, also often appear on lists of improvements that won’t add value to your home.
Interestingly, some relatively easy DIY projects are at the other end of the ‘return-on-investment’ scale of improvements you can make to command a higher dollar for your home. DIY projects are usually less costly because they tend to be simpler and, by doing your own work, you don’t have the labour costs of professional renovators.
Here are just a few DIY home improvement projects you can do to make it easier to sell your home for a higher price.
1. Paint
You’ve heard it before, but simply giving your home’s interior a fresh coat of paint offers one of the highest paybacks of any renovation project when selling your house. Even if you choose to use professional painters, fresh paint makes the entire home and everything in it more appealing.
But be careful.
Painting your walls to help sell the house is not the time to let your creative side out of the bag. Instead of the bold colours and patterns that you might like if you were staying, paint your walls in neutral tones. In addition to avoiding the potential shock that bold colours might have, neutral shades help potential buyers envision how they would decorate the room.
Think About Painting the Exterior Too
While modern siding can keep looking great for years, if yours is a little dirty or tired looking, think about painting it – you’ll be surprised at the improvement you can make to the curb appeal of the house.
2. Update the Kitchen & Bathrooms
These are the two rooms of your home that many buyers find most appealing. If your kitchen and bathroom are dated, it could reflect significantly on the size of the offers you get. But, unfortunately, the relatively high cost of doing full renovations, with new fixtures and appliances, don’t often pay back at selling time.
Instead, you can easily and less expensively update the look of both the kitchen and bathroom by refinishing or painting the cabinets, adding new handles to cabinet drawers and doors, installing new counter tops and faucets, and connecting stylish lighting fixtures.
3. Add Storage
Decluttering is a must for staging your home to sell. As you clear out your stuff, look for places, like beneath stairs or in an area of the basement, where you can add storage options, like shelving and cabinets. Buyers love to find lots of places to store their things when they move in.
4. Landscaping & Outdoor Furniture
If you’re thinking of selling while it’s still summer or early fall, do everything you can to improve the landscaping around your home. If you don’t have patio furniture, or yours isn’t so presentable, take advantage of late-season sales to get at least a small set to highlight the ‘outdoor living space’ of the house.
If you can find some flowering plants on sale, you can even try digging a new bed to add more colour to your yard.
Like we said, there are lots of different things you can do to make your home more desirable to buyers. If you’d like to learn more, please call us here at The Stephen Tar Team.