Barbara Corcoran, founder of the real estate brokerage The Corcoran Group, has some useful suggestions for preparing your home for sale. See this YouTube video: Corcoran-home preparation
In some situations, vacating the home and having it professionally staged can be worth the cost and inconvenience, in terms of helping the home to sell faster and for more money. People tend to think of staging only for higher priced homes, but it can be useful for midrange homes as well.
Here are some other things I might add to Ms. Corcoran's suggestions:
- In addition to basic vacuuming of the house, I would suggest cleaning the windows and minimizing clutter absolutely everywhere you can.
- Don't leave garden hoses strewn about the yard, and leave out only those hoses that are absolutely necessary.
- Replace any burnt out light bulbs and make sure that the bulbs in matching fixtures are all of the same type and wattage.
- Remove or replace (with more decorative ones) any floor mats in the kitchen and bathrooms.
If the home must be shown with your own furnishings (as opposed to completely replacing them with staging furnishings), it might still be useful to hire a professional stager to determine how to create the best presentation with your own furnishings, and perhaps to add a few, inexpensive, decorative touches here and there.
