Each year, Americans buy over 5 million homes. Homebuyers go into a flurry of activity after the sale with decorating and renovating.

What a lot of people don’t consider is what goes into preparing to sell your home. Home sellers must put an extraordinary amount of work into that preparation process in terms of repairs, upgrades, and staging.

If you’re thinking about selling, you may wonder about how to prepare your home for sale. Keep reading and we’ll cover some of the essential factors you must attend to as you approach the sale.

Repairs

When your own your home, it’s easy for you to put off minor and even some less than minor repairs. For example, you may not worry too much about your aging outbuilding as long as there aren’t signs of leaking. For your average homebuyer, an aging outbuilding just looks like an expense waiting to happen.

One of the key elements in how to prepare your home for to sell is making a list of those problems and getting them fixed.

Upgrades

Another thing that turns off homebuyers is obviously aging appliances in the kitchen. No matter how reliable that range or dishwasher, they’ll work against you if they look dated. That doesn’t mean replacing all your appliances with high-end new ones.

In fact, that’ll be a waste of money since the new owners will likely replace them anyway. Installing new, moderately-priced appliances can make your kitchen look less dated and more desirable.

You should also seek some input from a real estate agent about what repairs and upgrades will benefit your sale potential and which ones will just waste your money.

Staging

Staging is the part of the process that many home sellers despise. Why? It almost always means packing up a bunch of your stuff.

Homes accumulate clutter. They often accumulate comfy furniture that leaves a space feeling small.

That means you must offload or store a lot of stuff to give the home a more open and airy feel, which many buyers like. It also makes it easier for buyers to picture their stuff in the space, which helps you sell.

Landscaping

Curb appeal is a real thing and that means landscaping. You don’t need an entirely new lawn, but you should make sure the lawn is mowed and edged professionally. If you have empty flower beds, get someone in who can fill those flower beds with season-appropriate plants.

You can also check out this resource on selling your property for more tips.

Preparing to Sell Your Home the Right Way

Preparing to sell your home isn’t something you can do overnight. You need a strategy and some clearly defined steps.

You can impose some order on the chaos with a preparing your home for sale checklist. It gets all the steps into one place and lets you organize according to date or importance.

Make sure you start the preparation process well in advance, since some repairs or upgrades may take some scheduling.

Looking for more home or real estate tips? Head over to our Tips Tricks section for more posts.