---

In order to attract buyers when selling your home, you need to make your home as attractive as possible.

What you don’t want to do is put off buyers by making your home less appealing. Below are a few different mistakes to avoid when selling your home.

Overpricing your home

When setting an asking price, you need to make sure that you’ve accurately valued your home. If you set the price too high, you could struggle to attract interest.

Not sure how much your home is worth? It could be worth asking someone like this tampa realtor to value your home for you. Even if you decide to sell independently, a valuation can be useful as a third-party opinion. Bear in mind that you may be able to increase the value by investing in home improvements. In fact, something as simple as repainting your home’s walls could make an impact.

Failing to tidy up

Your home needs to look presentable for photos and viewings. Too much dirt or clutter could create a negative first impression – buyers may not be able to look past this and see the other highlights of the property.

It’s worth taking time to clean and declutter your home. You may also want to consider depersonalizing your home a little so that buyers can more easily imagine themselves living there. There are companies that can help to stage your home to make it more attractive to buyers. This guide at Homes & Gardens explains more about staging a home.

Taking terrible photos

Photos are typically the first glimpse of your home that buyers see. If these photos fail to show enough information or are low quality, it could put buyers off.

Make sure that you provide plenty of photos of your home with your listing – ideally at least one of every room and a few of the exterior. Staging your home will help to make your photos look better. You can take your own photos or hire a professional real estate photographer to do this (agents and home staging companies may be able to take the perfect photos for you).

Being too restrictive with viewing times

Most buyers want to view a home in person before agreeing to a sale. In order to allow potential buyers to view your property, you need to make sure that your viewing times aren’t too restrictive. If you only allow very specific hours, a buyer may find it difficult to fit a viewing into their schedule, and ultimately may feel that you don’t want to sell to them.

Try to be fairly flexible when it comes to viewings. If you use an agent to help you sell, make sure to use an agency such as Madison Fox Estate Agents that is able to conduct viewings for you out of regular 9 to 5 work day hours. You could even give an agent a key so that they can conduct viewings while you’re out of the house if you are rarely at home.

Hiding major problems

It’s unwise to try to hide major problems with your home. While you may be able to hide these in photos and even during a viewing, such problems could eventually come to light if the buyer conducts a home inspection. A professional home inspector will be able to identify any major structural issues and report these to the buyer. This could be enough to put off the buyer – if not because of the problem, then because of the lack of trust they may then have with you.

Be open with any problems that you are aware of such as old pipes that leak or a partially sagging roof. Letting them find out later down the line is a waste of your time as it is a waste of theirs.

---