Once your house is on the market, you’ll no doubt want to maximise your chances of getting a good offer. The truth is, if you want to get higher offers for your house, you’ll need to put in the effort BEFORE your first viewing.
That’s because first impressions are really important. As soon as a potential buyer steps foot in your home, the clock is ticking to convince them your property is the one for them.
If you don’t have everything prepared perfectly well in advance, you risk losing a buyer. However, if you do manage to get it right, you achieve a higher sales price AND find a buyer more quickly.
The steps to get a higher offer for your home
Selling your house can be a stressful and time-consuming process, especially if you want to get the best possible price for it.
However, there are some simple and effective ways to make your property more attractive to potential buyers and increase your chances of getting higher offers.
Here’s a quick round-up of five tips to help you achieve this goal:
- Declutter and depersonalise
- Stage your house
- Repairs and improvements
- Clean-up
- Open house
We would also recommend taking professional photos and videos to show your home in the best possible light and hiring a reputable estate agent. You need someone who knows – and can get – the best possible price, so check these agents out.
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So, let’s take a closer look at the 5 ways to get higher offers for your house.
1) Declutter
Before you even contact the estate agent for a valuation, make sure you have a thorough declutter and get rid of anything you don’t need.
If you have a shed or a garage, it may even be worth starting to pack a few boxes ready for moving day. It may seem premature, but it’ll show potential buyers you’re serious about selling, and it’ll save you time when you do come to move.
Just make sure you don’t pack anything you’re likely to need and write the contents of each box on the side, so you can keep track of where things are.
Decluttering will help to make your property larger and more welcoming. A decluttered home also makes it easier for potential buyers to picture how their furniture will work in each room. A vital step towards securing a sale.
By doing this before you even contact an estate agent, you’ll ensure they give you the best possible valuation. It’ll also ensure the photographs they take are as appealing to potential buyers as possible.
We have done this every time we sold a home. It’s amazing how much stuff you acquire in a matter of a few years. Often they are things that you never use.
Because you bought them, you might be reluctant to get rid of things, even if you don’t use them any more. In our experience, it pays to be ruthless. Remember, you have to move every single one of them. And the more stuff you have, the more expensive the removal company will be.
You will also need fewer boxes, which again will save you money as well as time you spend packing and unpacking.
Our rule is: if you haven’t used something for at least a year, get rid of it. Because if you didn’t think about it in the last 12 months, you probably won’t think about it in the next 12 months either.
And we do it with everything: plates, glasses, mugs, clothes, gadgets, etc. And don’t just throw these things. We sold our unwanted items on ebay or Facebook or gave them to a charity shop. That way, you can make a bit of extra cash, which is always handy when you are moving house.
Once you got rid of everything you don’t need any more, focus on what you could pack already away. We focus mainly on things that are on show, such as ornaments or things on the kitchen counter and in shelves.
If there are things you use regularly, so it would not be practical to pack them, look in your cupboards and see if you could pack stuff from to make room for the things you still need. A kitchen looks so much bigger when the work tops aren’t full of things.
While ornaments can make a home feel more homely, too many will make it look cluttered and smaller. If you have three ornaments on a windowsill, remove two. Same with pictures.
We believe that by decluttering before putting a house on the market we improved our chances of selling it and get higher offers for our house.
2) Make Your Home More Inviting
Remove as many personal photos and items as possible. Staging your home to appeal to as many buyers as possible has been documented by Lane et al. (2015) to promote a sense of livability and increase positive impression of the property. It helps sell a fantasy, an idyllic life to your buyers.
You might love that family photo hanging above the TV, but your prospective buyers want to imagine themselves living there. And that’s hard to do with your photos everywhere.
When you have a potential buyer coming to look around, make sure your home is warm and cosy and avoid anything that will create bad smells, such as cooking fish.
Instead, light some scented candles or put some bread in the oven. If it’s cold outside, put the fire or heating on so that potential buyers don’t want to leave.
On one of our house hunts, we looked at a house that was exactly what we wanted. It ticked every box and even the decor was to our taste. But it just didn’t feel right, which confused us.
It was winter and the owner had a workman in during our visit to repair a window. As a result, the house was really cold. We only realised this quite some time later, after we already put an offer in on another house.
But it does highlight that it’s important to create the right atmosphere, which means it should feel like a home, and that means warm and cosy.
The more inviting your home, the more likely potential buyers are to fall in love with it.
3) Fix Any Issues
There’s nothing worse than viewing a property and finding yourself making an ever-growing list of things that need repairing when all you want to do is get higher offers for your house. Even a few small jobs can start to mount up and spoil any magic you may have first felt about the house.
Repairing things doesn’t just cost money; they also indicate you haven’t taken as much care of the property as you might have done. And that could put potential buyers off.
After all, if you haven’t fixed that dripping tap or that broken shower screen, what other jobs have you neglected that have yet to be discovered?
Go round your house with a fine toothcomb, looking for any job that needs doing, no matter how small, and make a list. Then work through the list or get a handyman in to make everything good.
You may also want to use the opportunity to re-paint any walls that are looking tired. Stick to neutral tones to ensure your property has as broad appeal as possible.
We’ve always checked everything around the house and spent a good amount of time fixing any issues that needed attention. Sometimes this has involved us having to bring in a tradesman or two to help.
Don’t forget the outside too! When we sold our last home we got a gardener in for 2 full days to sort out a wide range of jobs from cutting the grass and trimming the hedges, right through to pressure washing the drive and laying some new stones in our borders.
4) Keep Things Clean & Tidy
Estate agents will often talk of the ‘kerb appeal’ of a property and how that can affect the price of a house. What that basically means is how appealing the house looks from the street.
You can’t do anything about the design of the house, but you can make sure the front garden is tidied up and made to look as welcoming as possible.
Keep that theme going throughout the property. Tidy away those piles of washing or kids toys. Clean that kitchen and bathroom. Just like fixing all those small issues, keeping your house clean and tidy shows you have looked after it.
A clean and tidy house is always likely to attract more offers than a messy or unclean property.
Keeping your house clean and tidy at all times can be a challenge, especially if you have kids or pets. We cleaned and tidied our house every evening after we had eaten when we had it on the market.
This way we were always prepared for a viewing. So even at short notice we didn’t need to run around the house with a duster and vacuum cleaner in a panic.
It does make selling a house a lot more work and time-consuming, but it’s definitely one of those things that will get higher offers for your house.
We always got comments on how clean and tidy our house is, which shows that potential buyers do notice and also appreciate it. I know that we have been put off houses because they were a mess.
If you’re way too occupied, having a professional cleaning team step in may come in handy. It’s a service definitely worth paying for, as evidenced by consumers’ attitudes towards cleanliness. In the hospitality industry, guests went as far as agreeing to pay a premium for enhanced disinfection in their hotel rooms (Zemke et al., 2015).
5) Host An Open House
Generally, the more interest you get in your property, the higher the final sale price is likely to be. That’s because buyers will start trying to outbid each other to avoid missing out.
If your house hits the market and quickly gets a lot of enquiries, you’ll want to consider hosting an open house. This is where multiple viewings are booked on the property at the same time.
It may sound stressful, but it can work wonders to get higher offers for your house. When potential buyers see how much other interest there is in your property, they are more likely to make a higher offer to try and beat everyone else. No one likes to lose out on their dream home.
By doing so, you’re borrowing a method from the broker’s playbook AND it’s backed by science. Allen et al. (2015) proved that listings in both broker and public open houses are guaranteed to fetch higher prices.
The added advantage is that you don’t have to constantly make your house ‘viewing-ready’. You can just clean and tidy once before the open house instead of having to do it before each individual viewing.
Tips on how to get higher offers for your house
So there we have it, five sure-fire ways to get higher offers for your house. A good estate agent will be able to advise you on all of these points. They’ll also be able to negotiate any offers for you and help you sell your home for the maximum price possible.
Don’t forget that selling your house can be a rewarding and profitable experience if you follow the simple and effective tips the PropertyRoad team explain in the article.
The aim is to make your property more attractive and valuable to potential buyers by decluttering and depersonalising, making repairs and improvements, staging your house, taking professional photos and videos, and hiring a reputable estate agent.
You can increase your chances of getting higher offers for your house and selling it quickly and smoothly. Remember, your house is your most valuable asset, so make sure you present it in the best possible way.
