Dress Up Your Home for a Quicker Sale

In a Slower Market, Staging Details and Clutter-Control Carry More Mileage

CHICAGO -- A slower U.S. housing market means sellers can no longer bank on having their pick of offers for properties showing their age and the wear and tear of everyday living. Dressing up a home with a thorough cleaning and decorator touches may be vital to luring increasingly fussy buyers.

Sellers work within a range of budgets as they prepare a property for sale, often from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Yet many critical fixes don't cost a dime.

"Walk through the house and remove all the clutter," said Rhonda Duffy, an agent for Rainmaker Realty in Atlanta. She reports four houses on the market for every one buyer in her area, plus slower activity in her firm's Northern California, Washington and Florida offices.

"A living room should have a couch and chairs, a table, some plants and maybe a TV, not a 30-year life history," she says. "Clean out the closets and don't forget the garage."

Since similar houses that had routinely sold in weeks over the past few years may now be sitting on the market for several months, sellers are challenged over a longer time to keep their home free of the remnants of hectic family life.

At the least, agents recommend, stage the house for a series of high-quality photos to run on an Internet listing sight -- first impressions take on even greater importance these days. Then, keep copies of the photos accessible to would-be buyers as they walk through the house, Duffy said. Toys, piled-up mail and crowded countertops are likely to be forgiven if a buyer can see the home's full potential. Staging for photos can include moving a sofa away from a feature window and editing items on a fireplace mantel.

Personal items that will soon have to make the move to a new place anyway should be boxed up and stored ahead of opening the house to potential buyers. Sellers must try to distance themselves emotionally from the house as soon as the decision is made to list, said Fran Bailey, an agent with Baird & Warner in suburban Chicago. "Yes, the purpose of a home is to support a lifestyle. Now, it has another purpose and that is to sell itself," Bailey said.

Don't rid the home of its lamps, however. Plenty of light, including a small lamp on a kitchen counter, can go a long way to warm the place. Made beds and emptied garbage cans should become second nature since sellers never know when they may have to show the place on little notice.

The few hundred dollars budgeted for the house sale might be best spent on storage rental or professional clutter removal -- out-of-commission appliances, for instance -- in order to optimize square footage. For smaller homes, space is often a trick of the eye, said Lindsay Peroff, with http://1800gotjunk.com/ , a junk-removal service operating in larger cities.

Once personal items and extra furniture are out of the way, sellers may want to hire professional cleaners, including someone to wash windows inside and out and to shampoo carpets. Pets shouldn't be around for showings and neither should their smell.

"This may seem simple, but you'd be surprised how many people don't do it," said David Henry, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Aptos, Calif., in Santa Cruz County. "Air the place out several hours a day, for several days."

Have pest, septic and mold inspections before investing in any upgrade projects, he says. Then, sellers can better prioritize upgrade ideas and budget accordingly.