We’ve recently decided to sell our house and the process of getting things ready has caused us to pause and consider what a potential homebuyer would be looking for in a new home. We spend considerable time looking through listings for our next house and as we do I’m keeping an eye on what makes us look deeper and what causes us to skip the house in the listings.
Here are what we consider to be the top 5 things that home buyers look for when shopping for a new place:
- Cleanliness – At the top of the list is simply how clean the house is, beyond the simple organization of clutter,
"There's a room under the mess, I'm sure..."
this attribute goes down to the level of making the house appear new. There are many reasons to buy a house a few years old rather than building or buying a brand new house (landscaping & fencing are done, construction noise at 5am is no longer present, amenaties are established, etc) but shoppers still want to feel like the home will be near perfect, and they can’t feel that way while looking at a pile of clutter or dirty baseboards.
- Location – While you can’t exactly pick up your house and move it, each spot has something unique about the particular lot or location. Highlight the strengths of the lot – The fact that buyers have included the neighborhood in their searches pre-qualifies them as interested, now they just need to understand why this lot is better than the one for sale down the street. For us, we have an unobstructed view out front and back, so we don’t look directly into anyone else’s house and have a nice view of the mountains from our bedroom – The house down the street for sale does not.
- Depersonalization – When looking through a house potential buyers are already a bit uneasy to be snooping through someone else’s belongings, but if they see pictures of you up throughout the house it just makes it that much harder to visualize themselves in the house. Remove photos of people and pets, leaving only artwork and decorations. This will remove some of the apprehension and feeling of possession leaving the buyers to see the house as a place they could call their own.
- Purpose - Many rooms become other things over time. Garages become storage spots, bedrooms become offices and living-rooms become the catch-all location for household activity. When preparing the house for sale, revert rooms to the typical state and give them a clear purpose. A room with a solitary chair leaves the buyer wondering what the space is for, but a bed in the corner (even if the ‘bed’ is just an air mattress with some blankets on it) with a blanket and book placed on that same chair makes the room seem like a relaxing place to sit and read. Removing clutter is a key part of this, so that when the buyers are walking through the house (most showings only last 10-20 minutes, that’s only a few minutes per room) they get a clear and immediate sense of what the room is and hopefully what it could become with their own furniture.
- Olfactory - The sense of smell is strongly connected to memory due to the olfactory bulb’s location in the
limbic system of the brain. This correlation means it is especially important to be aware of the smells your house presents when walking in. Don’t assume that you understand what a potential buyer might associate with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ either – I mopped our floors with bleach and water because I associate that smell with cleanliness, but when my wife smelled bleach she was immediately upset and mentioned that it reminded her of unclean places which had used bleach out of necessity. Some people have recommended the smell of cookies baking in the oven is one that strongly links many people to their youth and feeling secure when growing up. Obviously baking a fresh batch of cookies for each showing will be bad for our wastelines, but for open houses it could work wonders.
Have any other useful tips for staging/selling a house?
