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Need home selling tips? Here are 7 you will like!

November 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Help!  I need to sell my home in St Petersburg!

Some say the real estate market in Tampa Bay is improving.  While it may be so in some areas of St Petersburg and other cities of Pinellas, it is still a challenging time to sell your home.  We talk to sellers daily and all of them have questions: how do I get the most for my house?  What improvements do you think need to be done before I put it on the market?  Is it worth updating my baths?  How much do you charge?  And so on…

We made a short video below with a few tips. Here’s a brief overview:
1) Think like a buyer.  If you walked into your house for the first time, what would you like and what would you absolutely dislike?

2) Declutter.  Clean out your counter space, bathrooms and floors.

3) What would a woman think about your house?  Statistically women play a more decisive role when buying a home.  If she loves it – he’ll like it too!  A man wants to know if he can fit his truck and fishing poles in the garage.  A woman wants to know if baths are clean, kitchen layout is convenient and the home is safe.  Is your home ready for a thorough woman’s eye?

4) Keep your focal points appealing. Your entry point should be clean and inviting, entertainment center organized and kitchen spotless.
5) Address small issues.  Leaky faucet can only make the buyer wonder if there are bigger problems with the house.  Inexpensive updates like painting, caulking, washing windows can make a huge difference and push your home to stand out among the slew of others.
6) Going through a short sale or in a hardship situation?  Feel discouraged?  Getting your home to a sellable level will only help you sell it faster, make your lender happy and avoid losing potential buyers.  With a little effort you can move on with your life quickly.
7) Staging.  For the most part buyers are not looking for a palace; they want to see a neutral pallet home where they can visualize themselves as owners.  So don’t overstage.  Also show them less of you and more of your home. Replacing family photos on the walls with décor appropriate pictures might be a good idea.

There are so many more tips to give, including answers to technical questions about short sales, contract issues, inspections. And we can talk for hours about types of marketing that is appropriate for your home in today’s real estate market.  Just for you we put together a number of articles from our blog.  Click on Things to do before you list your homes in St Petersburg / Tampa Bay to see them all.

Need more advice?  Thinking about short selling your home in St Petersburg?  Call or text us now at 727-644-3370 or contact us here.

We love your comments! Please post them below.

Filed Under: Events in St Pete and Tampa Bay, Home Buying and Selling Tips, Living in St Pete and Tampa Bay, St Petersburg Real Estate Video Blog, Tampa Bay Real Estate Video, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Top 5 Home Staging Tips

May 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

If you live in Tampa Bay here are 5 things you should know about home staging.

If you’re selling a home in St Petersburg or anywhere in Tampa Bay and it’s been listed by a trusted real estate professional you might be left wondering, “What else can I do to help this house sell?”  Well the answer lies with home staging. 

Essentially home staging is a tactic used to improve the chances of capturing a buyer by highlighting the strengths of your home while downplaying its weaknesses.

There are hundreds of home staging tips out there that vary in the amount of money, effort and energy that you have to expend.  So we’ve made it easy by narrowing them down to what we consider our top 5 home staging tips that carry a big bang for your buck (or effort).

1)      Is this place condemned?  Your front entrance will definitely leave a lasting first impression so you want to make sure that it’s a good one.   Clean up and spruce up your front entrance by cleaning, replacing door handles, clearing up clutter and perhaps put out some pretty greenery.

2)      Not everyone will be impressed with your thimble collection – Take an inventory of the possessions that you’ve accumulated and plan to store half of your stuff.  Not only will the place appear larger but buyers will be less likely to be distracted by your belongings.  

3)      Sure that picture of little Tommy on a horse is cute but…- It is critical that your buyers be able to visualize themselves living in your space and it’s difficult to do that with pictures around.  And by removing some of these items you allow the buyer to feel less like they are intruding on someone else’s space but viewing their future space!

4)      Evict the dust bunnies – Clean, clean and then clean some more.  A clean home screams a well-maintained home that has nothing to hide. 

5)      Wow, that lime green kitchen is…ummm…bright – If you can afford to splash on a coat of fresh paint then do so.  Aim for neutral colors so that (again) your buyer can picture themselves living there.   The smell of paint will also leave the buyer with the idea that the property has been recently updated which is a terrific thing.  That is one less thing they have to do when they move in.

Tampa Bay Real Estate Blog.  The Home Team.

Filed Under: Home Buying and Selling Tips, Living in St Pete and Tampa Bay, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,