Preparing your home for sale
First impressions are lasting. You paint your home and make the gardens more attractive, so people’s initial opinion of your property is good. This is common practice by many people selling their home. There are additional tips however on preparing your home for sale that will make for a smooth sale process.
Styling that works for selling:
- Pack up those personal photographs and family heirlooms. Buyers can’t see past personal effects. So remove them so the prospective buyer will not be distracted. You want buyers to imagine their own photos on the walls, and they can’t do that if yours are there! You want them to imagine themselves in your house, not you.
- De-clutter your house to make it look more spacious. If this means hiring a lockup for a short while or asking a friend for space in there garage. Arrange wardrobes so there is not piles of shoes and kids toys on the ground. That will always make the space look small. Kitchen cupboards are the same, and the bench tops.
Minor Repairs are worth doing:
- Replace cracked floor or counter tiles. Patch holes in walls. fix leaky taps. Fix doors that don’t close properly and kitchen drawers that jam. Replace blown bulbs.
- Consider painting your walls neutral colours, especially if you have grown accustomed to purple or green walls. (Don’t give buyers any reason to remember your home as “the house with the orange bathroom.”)
Preparing for the sale:
- You certainly don’t want any nasty surprises – particularly once you have a buyer engaged, only to have them drop out of the sale once they receive the termite pest report! This can be costly to your selling process!
- Consider having a termite inspection before the house goes up for sale. We can positively say that when people hear the words ‘Termite’ or ‘White Ant’, they will think twice before signing on the dotted line; so in doing a pre-purchase inspection for you, we find all the likely issues that will be picked up when there is a prospective buyer.
Common and potential issues your home may face:
• Leaky showers
• Wood under the house
• Termites in the house or garden
• Rotting timber, decks etc
• Poor ventilation
• Poor drainage etc…All these points and many more add up to negative remarks on a report, making the chance of the sale falling through more likely. When the money for the sale of your home could be earning you interest, or helping you invest in your next property rather than going towards more marketing and your agents to sell the property.
• Leaky showers
• Wood under the house
• Termites in the house or garden
• Rotting timber, decks etc
• Poor ventilation
• Poor drainage etc…All these points and many more add up to negative remarks on a report, making the chance of the sale falling through more likely. When the money for the sale of your home could be earning you interest, or helping you invest in your next property rather than going towards more marketing and your agents to sell the property.
Examples of what you can’t see:
We use thermal imaging to inspect inside interior walls. Significant damage could be present but without thermal imaging equipment, you would not know!
The white glow area is where termites were found in the wall of a leaking shower
Thermal imaging enables us to see the wall framing, not visible to the naked eye
The blue area at the base of wall is rising damp from a poorly ventilated sub-floor
The red heat spot visible here was a space too small to use any other tools. Termites were found with the thermal camera
An example of what we find if we opened up an interior wall where termites have been detected within the wall frame.
