Selling Your Triangle Area Home?

Here are 14 tips to make your home sell faster.

Price it right from the start. Agents and buyers know when they find a good deal, and they know they need to move quickly. You’ll save yourself time and hassle if you skip the high-price shenanigans altogether.

Enhance your home’s curb appeal. That could mean adding new sod, planting flowers, painting the front door or replacing the mailbox. Prospective buyers form an opinion the moment they spot the home.

Update the interior and exterior. New fixtures, fresh paint and updated landscaping are all fairly easy and affordable ways to give your home a makeover. “It’s got to look up to the current market conditions and what’s in style,” 

Clean and declutter. Remove knickknacks and excess furniture. The fewer things there are in the home, the larger it will look. You may want to hire a cleaning service to do a deep cleaning, including washing the windows.

Depersonalize. Remove family photos, religious items and political posters. Get all the children’s drawings off the refrigerator. You want prospective buyers to envision their family in the house, not yours.

Fix anything that’s obviously broken. A cracked windowpane may not bother you, but it gives the impression that the homeowner is careless about maintenance.

Stage the house to show how the rooms are supposed to be used. If you have odd rooms with no obvious role, give them one. An odd alcove off the kitchen could be staged as an office or a pantry, for example.

Make the property easy to show. The more flexible you are about visits, the more people will be able to see your home. Be ready to welcome prospective visitors early in the morning, at night and on weekends, with little notice.

Go away when the house is shown. You want would-be buyers to imagine themselves living in the home and to peek into closets without feeling like intruders. Leaving the house also gives them the freedom to discuss its pros and cons honestly without worrying about offending the seller.

Remove your pets. Also remove their paraphernalia, such as dog dishes and cat litter boxes (or at least hide them). A prospective buyer shouldn’t even know that a pet lives in the home if you can help it.

Deal with an agent who’s going to showcase your house on social media. Share the listing yourself, too. “We sell as many homes off Facebook as we do off the [multiple listing service],” Both the agency and the individual agents have Facebook business pages where they share listings.

Make sure your listing is on all the major online portals, including Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com. This is usually part of an agent’s service, but it doesn’t hurt to double-check. Some sites allow you to go online and add comments and details about your house.

Ensure the listing has good photos, and lots of them. Most home buyers start their search online and decide which homes they want to see based on the photos. You probably want something better than snapshots taken quickly with your agent’s phone.

Share information about life in the neighborhood. The listing should include photos not only of the house, but also of nearby recreation, dining and shopping areas. If the schools are good, make sure that information is in the listing. “You’re not only marketing the home – you’re marketing the lifestyle,” 

Teresa Mears, Contributor U.S. News & World Report | Sept. 5, 2014, at 1:31 p.m.