Dear Claire: What are Some Common Mistakes When Selling a Home?

Selling Your Home: Smells, Staging, and Pricing

#1: Smells or no smells. There’s always something, typically with a seller when you’re trying to sell your property, you want to know whether you should have smells or no smells in your home. You want no smells because some people are super sensitive to smell. If you have to have smell, then you could have a cookie smell or an open fresh air smell but try to avoid those air fresheners because typically buyers think that you’re trying to hide something when you put air fresheners in a place. Ideally, you want to open all the windows and doors and just leave them open for when the showing happens or whenever the next showing is going to happen.

#2: Staging your home. I have the kind of house when I walk in the door after a long day, I throw my keys down on the table and the mail and all of that stuff. The accumulated problem is when people are looking at your house to purchase it, they want to see, perfection. They want to see the staged home, like you see on HGTV. What does that mean? It means even though you have no pantry, and you have nowhere to store things, put everything away so that they don’t see it. They don’t want to know that there’s no pantry and that you don’t have room for your kitchen stuff. Make sure you pack it away. All that stuff, all your extra books, all of your extra kitchen gear, all of the mail, all of the paperwork, all of your tax stuff that you’re trying to get through — all of that, get rid of it, and make your house look like no one lives there. Ideally, that’s what you’re going to do.

#3: the biggest problem with selling is price. So, if both of those things don’t work, then you might want to revisit your price and see if there’s something you could do about that.

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