Listing Triangle™ - Front Street Brokers | Page 17

treatments. Do they block most of the light? Have they been up for more than
10 years? You may want to consider replacing or even removing them. When
we are staging vacant properties, we rarely if ever put up window treatments
for the same reason.
Replace burned out light bulbs. If a room feels dark in any way, you
can often fix it by changing out the current light bulbs with ones that put out
more luminosity. If you already have the max wattage of light bulb for the
light consider switching it out for an LED light blub since they use much less
wattage you can put in a brighter bulb. Your goal is to have no dark rooms.
Buyers dismiss homes too quickly for them coming across as too dark.
Painting = Best ROI
A fresh coat of paint is one of the least expensive ways to improve the
marketability of your home. According to HomeGain.com, painting your
interior walls can bring as much as a 250% return on investment!
However, the biggest mistake homeowner s make when they are
preparing their home for sale is to put a fresh coat of whatever color was
currently there. Maybe the paint color is fine, but you need to objectively ask
yourself: Is the paint on the wall what 90% of potential buyers would like?
Again, the key here is neutral, but a neutral paint color doesn’t mean
white. There are dozens of paint colors on the market now that are considered
“neutral”, in that they’ll compliment virtually any décor and color of
furnishings. Most of these colors would be considered earth tone colors. Be
wary of the current “trendy” colors or “the new color of the year”, which you
want to avoid.
If you need assistance in choosing the right paint color, give us a call.
Painting does take a lot of time, so if necessary, you may be better off hiring
professional painters. Many painters have a large team, and therefore they can
often finish in 1-2 days what it would takes you weeks to do.
Wallpaper most often needs to be removed. There is some exceptions,
but any wallpaper that has been up for more than 10 years most certainly needs
to be removed.
Depersonalize and Declutter
This is probably going to be the most difficult part of the home
preparation process. We’ve already discussed what depersonalization is – the
removing or neutralizing of your personal tastes and preferences, or your
“footprint”, from the house. Depersonalizing goes hand-in-hand with
decluttering, but there’s more to it.
We use the word clutter in a variety of contexts during our
consultations. A kitchen countertop may have a couple of small appliances, a
few days worth of mail, the kids’ homework, and chargers for phones and lap
tops on it, maybe a coffee mug, and we’d say it was cluttered. But we can also
The Listing Triangle™
Page 16