The Importance of Décor When Selling your HomeBy Angelica Malin
When it comes to selling your home it is vital to maximise the property’s potential. Even if you’ve got a spacious lounge, vast kitchen and bedrooms galore your décor matters and can be the thing that makes or breaks a sale.
Before you begin the process, have an honest look around your whole house and consider what, if anything, you need to do to make sure that this is an asset rather than something that saps away at the interest of buyers.
Photos
Your décor will shine through in the photos you post of your property and these are vital in helping to make a first impression on someone searching through their options online. Go through the pictures posted by other sellers and be honest. Which bits put you off? Then go back and apply the lessons back to your own décor.
Remember, brighter, lighter walls help make rooms look larger, especially if they do not benefit from much natural light. Firms such as HouseSimple online estate agents use professional photographers to make sure these pictures are as good as they can possibly be. If you use a pro it’s important to give them the best possible materials to work with.
Visualise
Every buyer wants to be able to visualise what a property would look like with their furniture and their personal possessions in. Décor can help them to do that. Neutral colours – and that doesn’t just mean boring beige – and minimal use of soft furnishings helps to create a canvas that buyers can paint their vision on to. Fussy, overpowering colours and patterns, meanwhile, will hinder this. Personalised additions such as artwork, pictures, experimental feature walls and stencilled slogans threaten to leave a greater impression after a viewing than your room itself.
Clean
It’s also important that your home comes across as clean and fresh. Peeling paintwork and faded skirting boards leave a poor impression in this respect.
If you’ve taken down paintings or moved furniture in order to ‘stage’ your home for the sale then the spaces behind these might show up paintwork that is in need of attention. For the price of a tin of paint you might well be able to transform an opinion of a room or two.
Value
It’s hard to quantify the monetary value of décor. Its impact is largely felt through the harder-to-define impression your home gives off – and in making sure the strengths of your rooms are accentuated. However some people choose to invest in décor as a way of adding value to their home. This Is Money reported how a new carpet can add a couple of thousand pounds to the sale price – especially when it replaces an aged worn-down predecessor. Pet owners might well want to replace a carpet that contains hairs and odours from their beloved animals.
You need to maximise the strengths of your house in order for it to achieve the price you want in the timescale you need. Décor can be an asset but first and foremost you need to make sure it doesn’t dominate and reduce the appeal of your property.
