Will your home sell for the highest price if you don’t spend the big bucks replacing that aging kitchen or bathroom? That’s the question on many homeowner’s minds.
With homes selling in days rather than weeks in Metro Vancouver’s real estate market, choosing whether to renovate before listing can be tricky. The topic triggers much debate.
You have to make your house look as attractive as you can with as minimal an investment as you can, because you never know what is going to motivate a buyer to present an offer.
Tidying up the landscaping, repainting, and decluttering and depersonalizing the interior can do a lot to increase resale value.
A clean and uncluttered house will sell faster than any other house on the market and save the sellers money.
In contrast, a dirty house can lose the sale. You can install a basic kitchen for as little as $15,000, but if the kitchen is 15 years old and in OK shape you can leave it as it is and let the purchasers create their vision.
Depersonalizing the home, replacing personal pictures and other family memorabilia with neutral items goes a long way.
So, should you stage the home? The expense of hiring a company to prepare your home for sale can be hard to justify. That preparation – on average costing $5,000 to $6,000 – can range from simply decluttering to “styling the home” by temporarily replacing that worn-out sofa and chair with reasonable furniture.
Deciding whether to renovate can depend on the home’s condition and location. Staging can really freshen up a space. It’s important to ensure that the home photographs well. People are looking at property listings on line before they see the home in person. Great photography creates a good impression.
The goal of staging is to make an emotional connection with buyers and make the home distinctly stand out among its competitors.
National surveys have shown that a staged home sells twice as fast as a non-staged one. Determining whether it fetches a higher price is difficult to measure, adding that most of the evidence is anecdotal.