As the saying goes, “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” The saying is truer when it comes to selling your home than skinning cats since we don’t advocate doing that. Home buyers in North Carolina have different needs; preparing your sales strategy accordingly helps increase home showings and makes for faster sales. Here are 4 ways to attract interested home buyers in North Carolina.
4 Ways To Attract Home Buyers in North Carolina
1. Declutter Inside and Out
Decluttering your home can seem overwhelming especially if your family has been in the home for years. Things accumulate in the closet, on bookshelves, kitchen counters and spread to the garage and washrooms. Clutter isn’t attractive and makes a home feel smaller.
If you are looking to sell, it means you are looking to move. So take this opportunity to be proactive and started getting rid of things you’re going to toss out or donate anyways. Pack up items you don’t need for the next few months and rent a storage unit if your garage isn’t large enough to store it without seeming cluttered.
Once everything is cleared, you can then give the home a good solid deep clean. With counters, bookshelves, and floors cleared, sweep mop and disinfect anything and everything you can. This helps give the home that open flow potential buyers want.
2. Make Necessary Repairs
If you know something needs to be fixed, fix it. This may seem like common sense but many homeowners think they will wait to see what happens when buyers start looking at the house. Buyers will eventually find out about non-working appliances, leaky roofs and stubborn plumbing issues.
How? Well, first you are required by law to disclose anything you know as a problem. Second, if you happen to not be aware of the problem, the home inspection will surely discover it. Buyers will request repairs or credits – so you will pay for it one way or another.
It is so much easier to disclose repairs, maintenance, and upgrades made while people are looking. It expedites the escrow process from lengthy repair requests and gives potential buyers the confidence to know you were a responsible homeowner that has taken care of what might be their new home.
3. Stage the Property
Real estate agents get push back on staging from clients every day. Unless they have a multi-million dollar home, most clients don’t see the need for the additional expense of staging.
Keep in mind that staging doesn’t always mean moving everything you have out and renting all new furnishings. It can simply mean working with a skilled eye to rearrange existing furniture, remove odd family photos, heirlooms, and art.
All that decluttering was a good start. Now is the time to make the home look like the home everyone can visualize themselves living in. That maximizes the number of people who will make an offer on the home.
4. Set a Market Price Just Under Expected Fair Market Value
This might seem counterintuitive: set a lower price than what the market says you can get for your house.
When potential buyers are looking at homes, they are looking for specifics on size, location, condition, and price. When the first three qualifiers are equal, then the buyers will look at the price as the primary sorting factor. In markets where there are a lot of buyers looking for homes, a lower price gets more people walking through.
A good agent then holds open houses where droves of people “ooh and ahh” over your home because it is clean, clutterless and staged. These situations often get multiple offers giving you the seller the ability to bid up the offers to what would be the fair market price, often higher than what you would have listed for if you didn’t list it at a lower than normal price.