How To Get The Best Price For Your Home

If you’ve decided to sell your home, you’ll want to get the best possible price for it. This ensures that you receive a reasonable return on your investment and gives you more capital to put towards a new home or into savings. People nearly always overestimate how much their house is worth, so when you get estate agents round to value it, don’t be surprised if they come in lower than you expect. To maximise the value of your home, you need to look at the most cost-effective ways of improving it and presenting it to potential buyers.

Decorating and decluttering

Two of the simplest and easiest ways to give your home a facelift, are to give it a fresh coat of paint and take out all your clutter. If you’ve lived there for a while, you may be overlooking minor flaws and be oblivious to tired décor, but these kinds of issues will detract from the appearance of your home when it’s being viewed. A house that looks tidy, clean, spacious, and well-maintained will increase the value of the property by far more than it will cost to get the work done, so it’s a worthwhile investment. The key jobs will be:

• Repairing plaster cracks or marks
• Cleaning grubby paintwork or giving it a fresh coat of paint
• Cleaning carpets and floor tiles or buffing wooden floors
• Polishing windows and mirrors
• Cleaning or reapplying sealant and grout in tiled areas
• Putting as many of your personal belongings into storage as possible
• Making sure furniture is arranged to show off each room to best effect
• Tidying outside areas and creating kerb appeal

Taking on larger jobs

If you have more significant issues to resolve, you should look at how much you will gain by arranging upgrades compared to the price you could get if you sold the house as it was. For instance, you have old wooden sash windows, and some of them are suffering from rotting sills or warped frames. If you sell the house without replacing the windows, buyers will be asking for money off to cover the cost of doing the works – even if you set the price low to begin with. However, if you spent £5,000 on replacing your windows, using a high-quality installation company such as timberwindows-direct.co.uk, that could boost the asking price by as much as £10,000.

On the other hand, investing in a loft conversion may well cost more than you could recoup on the sale price. It’s always advisable to consult the estate agents for advice on what will add the most value to your home. They have the specialist knowledge required concerning what adds value in your area and your type of property, which will be invaluable in helping you make the most profitable choices.

The more well-presented your home and the fewer areas for improvement viewers can spot, the closer you’ll get to your asking price and the easier it will be to sell your home, so it’s worth making the effort to get everything ship-shape.