Preparing Your House to Sell...

Even before you start thinking cleaning, repairing and staging your house, I want you to mentally prepare to sell your home.

The first thing I'm going to ask you to do is to disassociate yourself with your home.  Tell yourself, "this is not my home; it is a house."   And I want you to repeat that to yourself as many enough times as it takes for you to truly believe it.  It is simply a product to be sold much like a box of cereal on the grocery store shelf.  Make the mental decision to "let go" of your emotions and focus on the fact that soon this house will no longer be yours.  Envision yourself handing over the keys.  Now, visit every room and say goodbye.  Take lots of photos and maybe some video and remind yourself if you ever need to re-visit this place, it will be as quick and easy as pulling out a photo album.

When you have let go, I don't want you to look backwards.  From now on, you'll be looking toward the future.  Because from here on, you'll have a whole slue of new memories and stories to look forward to making.

Now, let's get into some actual physical preparing.  The next step you are going take is to de-personalize the house (Did you notice I didn't say "your home"?).  Pack up all those personal photographs, family heirlooms and all political and religious items...and that means everything on the front of your fridge gets cleared away too. 

Buyers have trouble seeing past all your personal artifacts and we want to make it easy for them to envision themselves in each room.  We want buyers to imagine their own photos hanging on the walls and it's really difficult to do that if yours are still hanging there.  We don't want buyers asking themselves "I wonder what kind of people live in this house?".  Instead, we want buyers to say, "I can see myself living here."  Buying a home is an emotional decision, and you want potential buyers to make an emotional connection with your home by being able to "see" themselves in it.

I'm here for YOU.

~Ciao