Tips on preparing your home for sale or rent
Here are some techniques to meet different needs and budgets.
As the song says, "Art is not the same as hartar". And neither is it the same to see a house with two rooms and a bathroom as a cosy space with linen curtains and a blue sofa, just like the one in the decorating magazine you saw the other day. It is not the same.
And so, if you are going to put the sale and you want to do it at the best possible price and in the shortest possible time, you have to fall in love with it.. And to fall in love, you can't just aim to enter the search filters of a real estate portal and cross your fingers that they click on your ad. Because in all likelihood, the list of houses that enter those same search filters will be a long, long, long time....
To sell early and sell well, you have to make your house stand out from the rest, make it convey emotionally and make them fall in love with it when they decide to visit it.
Real estate investors, large and small, already know this and turn to professionals in architecture, renovation, decoration... to maximise the profitability of the property they put up for sale. What can you do to transform your home into a #viviendabonita?
Review what already exists
Is your house in good condition but full of holiday memories, toys, maybe some outdated furniture or a lot of furniture from a thousand years ago that has been accumulating in your house-storage room? Surely there is a long list of things that you don't use and that are still lying around because you are too embarrassed to throw them away. Here it will be necessary to resort to the basics: tidy up what there is, simplify the decoration as much as possible, reduce the most personal elements in the house and eliminate the elements that are not really necessary (functionally or aesthetically). With these small touches you will make it easier for your home to look spacious, uncluttered and for someone to imagine themselves living there.
In short, a good dose of Marie Kondo.
Express decoration
If the house is empty or with very outdated furniture, resort to express decoration to give warmth to a cold space or new life if it has become outdated. You can do it yourself or call in a professional interior decorator. home stagingThis is a technique that is gaining more and more followers in Spain year after year in the sale of second-hand homes.
With this technique you can solve it in a very economical way, as you can take advantage of the existing elements of the house and transform them, as well as play with the rental of furniture to minimise costs. Here you have a good summary of the reasons why home staging can really help you to sell your home. There are more basic points that fall within the essential, such as painting the house (always in neutral tones, which multiplies the brightness of the space) and fixing small, obvious and visible faults (don't give the buyer reasons to add up a list of repairs to be carried out in his head, he will negotiate the price down!)
And there are also many solutions low cost to improve the perception of worn or outdated elements: applying enamel paint to old tiles, wallpaper to give a special touch to an empty wall, floor vinyls to hide damaged tiles, changing the shower curtain or washbasin mirror, kitchen cabinet handles, repainting an old, dark piece of furniture with chalk paint in lighter shades (refresh your memory with the ideas we gave you in this article on SPRAY PAINT).
A tip: if you have to choose where to spend the biggest budget, focus more on the kitchen and bathroom, which is what buyers and tenants look at the most.
Reform
Is it an inherited house or one that has not been updated since the 1980s or 1990s? Then the ideal is to carry out a complete renovation to avoid falling into a sale or rental below market value. Rehabilitating a house can increase the appraised value by between 15% and 17% in addition to the cost of the work. But it is always more reliable to check it yourself, go to a real estate portal and analyse the prices of other houses in your neighbourhood, comparing renovated and unreformed houses. Going down to the exact casuistry of your type of house and your neighbourhood will give you a more accurate idea.
According to a study by Habitíssimo, the most valued elements of a home are (in this order):
- The light in the rooms.
- A spacious, renovated kitchen.
- Energy efficiency.
- New technologies and home automation.
- Additional facilities (swimming pool, paddle tennis court, gym).
- Refurbished and spacious bathrooms.
In several of these points we can indirectly see the generalised tendency to look for more open spaces in the home. Knocking down partition walls to eliminate long corridors and enlarge the living room, built-in wardrobes to avoid visible storage spaces, solving small bedrooms or mini-kitchens... Take all this into account when assessing to what extent to completely refurbish your home or to concentrate on certain rooms.
3D recreation of the reform
If you do not have the necessary budget to undertake these renovations, you can use 3D renders to show in a very realistic way, with photographic quality, how the house would look like once it has been refurbished. In this way, the exercise of imagination required of the future buyer of the house is reduced, and that first "bad" impression is softened. By extension, it also minimises the possibility of very low price negotiations. Of course, it is very important that you include in your advertisement, after these renders, the actual images of the house, so that the interested party is aware at all times of the reality that they will find when they visit the house.
You already know all the options to get your property to move up several places and join the #viviendasbonitas club, so that you fall in love with it and it is sold or rented in the shortest possible time and at the best possible price. If you would like a free valuation of your property, without obligation, reasoned and without generating false expectations, request it for free. here.
Now it's your turn, which option fits better in your case? Do you do it on your own or through a real estate agency? In Monapart we can advise you, we collaborate with professionals who can take care of turning your house into a beautiful home. Come in monaparter, welcome to the club!
