As the saying goes, “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” The saying is truer when it comes to selling your home than skinning cats since we don’t advocate doing that. Home buyers in Fort Myers have different needs; preparing your sales strategy accordingly helps increase home showings and makes for faster sales. Here are 4 ways to attract interested home buyers in Fort Myers.
4 Ways To Attract Home Buyers in Fort Myers
1. Declutter Inside and Out
Decluttering your home can indeed be a daunting task, particularly when your family has lived in the same space for an extended period. Over the years, belongings tend to accumulate in closets, on bookshelves, and kitchen counters, eventually spreading into the garage and even the washrooms. The presence of clutter not only affects the aesthetics of your home but also contributes to a sense of it being smaller and more cramped than it actually is.
However, embarking on a decluttering journey can be incredibly rewarding. It allows you to reclaim your space, create a more organized and functional environment, and even improve your mental well-being. By systematically going through each room and sorting items into categories such as keep, donate, or discard, you can gradually reduce the clutter and restore a sense of order to your home. Additionally, this process often uncovers forgotten treasures and allows you to rediscover the joy of items that were previously buried under the clutter. With patience and dedication, decluttering can transform your home into a more inviting and spacious living area.
If you are looking to sell, it means you are looking to move. So take this opportunity to be proactive and started getting rid of things you’re going to toss out or donate anyways. Pack up items you don’t need for the next few months and rent a storage unit if your garage isn’t large enough to store it without seeming cluttered.
Once everything is cleared, you can then give the home a good solid deep clean. With counters, bookshelves, and floors cleared, sweep mop and disinfect anything and everything you can. This helps give the home that open flow potential buyers want.
2. Make Necessary Repairs
It’s crucial to address any known issues with your property before listing it for sale. While it might be tempting to wait and see if potential buyers notice these problems, it’s not a wise strategy. Buyers are likely to discover issues like non-working appliances, leaky roofs, or plumbing problems during their inspection. Such discoveries can lead to negotiations, delays, or even the loss of a sale if the issues are severe enough. By taking care of these issues upfront, you can avoid these potential pitfalls and present your home in the best possible light to potential buyers.
Furthermore, addressing these issues demonstrates to buyers that you have taken good care of your property, which can enhance their perception of its overall condition and value. It can also help you justify your asking price and reduce the likelihood of buyers negotiating for a lower price to account for needed repairs. In the end, investing the time and resources to fix known issues before listing your home can pay off by streamlining the selling process and potentially leading to a quicker, more profitable sale.
How? Well, first you are required by law to disclose anything you know as a problem. Second, if you happen to not be aware of the problem, the home inspection will surely discover it. Buyers will request repairs or credits – so you will pay for it one way or another.
It is so much easier to disclose repairs, maintenance, and upgrades made while people are looking. It expedites the escrow process from lengthy repair requests and gives potential buyers the confidence to know you were a responsible homeowner that has taken care of what might be their new home.
3. Stage the Property
Real estate agents get push back on staging from clients every day. Unless they have a multi-million dollar home, most clients don’t see the need for the additional expense of staging.
Keep in mind that staging doesn’t always mean moving everything you have out and renting all new furnishings. It can simply mean working with a skilled eye to rearrange existing furniture, remove odd family photos, heirlooms, and art.
All that decluttering was a good start. Now is the time to make the home look like the home everyone can visualize themselves living in. That maximizes the number of people who will make an offer on the home.
4. Set a Market Price Just Under Expected Fair Market Value
This might seem counterintuitive: set a lower price than what the market says you can get for your house.
When potential buyers are looking at homes, they are looking for specifics on size, location, condition, and price. When the first three qualifiers are equal, then the buyers will look at the price as the primary sorting factor. In markets where there are a lot of buyers looking for homes, a lower price gets more people walking through.
A good agent then holds open houses where droves of people “ooh and ahh” over your home because it is clean, clutterless and staged. These situations often get multiple offers giving you the seller the ability to bid up the offers to what would be the fair market price, often higher than what you would have listed for if you didn’t list it at a lower than normal price.