How to Evaluate and Improve Your Home’s Overall Appeal – How to Sell Your Oahu Home (Part Three)

In Part Two of our series on “How to Sell Your Oahu Home When It Failed to Sell the First Time,” we shared the secrets to properly price your home. I stated that proper pricing was probably the most important of the three elements in selling your home, (Price, Product and Promotion). 

In today’s blog, we will explore the second of the Three P’s, and look at your home as a product. Once you have decided to sell your home, you have to look at it as a “product” competing in a very tough market. Let’s talk about what we have to do to make your product the best looking box on the shelf (or house in the neighborhood).

Viewing Your Home as a Product

The product is your home! Although it may be difficult to view your home as just a product, have no doubt that the buyers viewing your home will do just that! Consider yourself when you visit a grocery store, you are faced with numerous choices with just about every product you wish to purchase.

Just like the cereal boxes in this photo, your home has a lot of competition

How do you evaluate these choices? First and foremost, most consumers will shop by price, second to that they will begin to look at the packaging or the product itself. If the package or product is appealing the buyer has a much greater chance of completing the purchase.

How Do You Make Sure That Someone Chooses Your “Product” Instead of the Next One on the Shelf?

Let’s make your product look bigger, brighter, more inviting and more exciting, just like the best selling cereal products. Think about it — would you buy a box of cereal that appeared to have drab colors, no exciting wording, a box that was smaller than all the others, nothing that made it jump off the shelf? Not likely. The same is true of your home. 

Putting a product on the market that is exciting, inviting, warm, spacious, and sparkling will attract buyers. If your photos show a drab home, people will not pick it up (or put it on their list of homes to see), just like you will not pick up the poorly marketed cereal box.

How Can You Make Your Home More Appealing?

There are really two main areas to be concerned with:

1. Your home’s curb appeal
2. Your home’s interior

No curb appeal

Most buyers will make a three second decision immediately upon seeing your home from the exterior. This split decision will either be favorable or unfavorable (this example is a little extreme, but you get the idea). If the home doesn’t make a good first impression, you will have a huge obstacle to overcome when the buyer does come inside the home – if they do at all.

How Can You Evaluate Your Home’s Curb Appeal?

The best way is to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. Walk out to your curb and look back at your home. Often, we begin to visually gloss over glaring problems because, like most people, we lead busy lives, but buyers won’t; they will pick apart your home and instantly compare it to the other homes they have just seen.

To receive a free curb appeal review call me at 808-216-7300, or email me at Reinhardt@hawaiilife.com and I will provide an educated and honest third party opinion of your home’s curb appeal at no cost to you. We will help you make it look great.

How to Improve Your Home’s Interior

The interior of the home is also very important as buyers must be able to “put themselves in the story.” What greets a buyer as they walk through a home is critical to the buyer’s ability to emotionally bond with the home. This visualization tendency is something that all buyers find themselves doing when they like a home. They will begin mentally placing furniture, hanging photos, and day dreaming about future projects – all of these are clear buying signs.

What can prevent this much needed process?? Vacant products. If you put a vacant home on the market, buyers have no help in visualizing how it could look and fit into their lifestyle. Statistically, less than 10% of buyers can visualize how a space will look with furnishings. All they see are the deficiencies and their natural assumption is that you have to sell because the home is vacant and you have a mortgage, taxes, and insurance to carry every month. 

Vacant homes always take much longer to sell and sell for as much as 8% to 15% less according to a Realtor survey. Kind of like going to a party where there is no food, drinks or activities — not much of a party. I will fully stage your vacant home for free!!

Products (Homes) That are Not Very Exciting

1. Products that are not clean. It goes without saying that a product that needs cleaning will always sell for less than a sparkling product. Even if you have to spend $500 for a professional cleaning team, you will always recover that investment. Pay particular attention to kitchens, bathrooms, and windows — your buyers certainly will.

2. Products that don’t cause an emotional connection. Think about it. If you were a buyer wouldn’t you want to walk in the door and start to feel excited? As you enter the next room you start to feel like “this is the one” and then you start visualizing your new life in this home. You have all felt it when you walked into a home and it “just felt right.”

I will make sure your home causes this emotional connection because I will professionally stage your home for free when you list with me. Using my staging company, Stage It Hawaii, with over $140,000 in furnishings I will make sure we create a model home environment to insure that the buyers walking in go “wow” and make that emotional commitment.

Need Help Improving Your Home Before Putting it on the Market?

For a complete consultation on how we can make your home look like a model – at no cost to you – please give me a call at 808-216-7300. I know how to create the best looking product on the market — and I do it for free.

Now that you know about Price and Product, our final blog on “How to Sell Your Oahu Home When It Failed to Sell the First Time” will explain the last “P” – Promotion. Hawaii Life does this better than anyone, so don’t miss that exciting blog!