How to Prepare Your Santa Cruz Home For Sale to Receive Top Dollar
So you’re thinking about selling your home, or you’re thinking about selling your home right here in Santa Cruz. I have a few tips for you on how to get your home ready to sell for top dollar and for the best terms.
Now, some people might think that in preparing your home for sale, you just slap on a coat of paint, and take down the photos off your wall. Those are two very important details, but there is so much more that goes into selling your home properly.
I’m Shemeika Fox, your Santa Cruz real estate expert, and here are a few tips for you to get your home, and your mind, ready for the successful sale of your Santa Cruz real estate home.
So, the first thing to consider when you’re preparing your Santa Cruz home for the market is to depersonalize your home. If I come into a space and I want to look at the space and imagine myself living there, I don’t want to look at your wall of family photos. Well, I actually do, they are very lovely. But they are also very distracting, which is the point. You don’t want a potential buyer to look at the wall of the family photos and try and depict who you are, what your life looks like. You want them to feel a sense of ease, comfort, and imagine themselves and their family and friends enjoying the space all on their own. Think of this, when in doubt, take it out. That means if you’re looking at something and you can’t decide whether it should remain in the home, ask yourself if this item will value to the property when a potential home buyer is looking at it. If it does not add value to the appearance of your home, then pack it up and get it out. That is the best way to get the right buyer into your home and get you highest dollar amount with the best terms. So, make sure to declutter and depersonalize when you prepare your Santa Cruz home for sale.
If you’re in the situation where you need to continue living in your Santa Cruz home during the selling process, it is still possible to “stage” it. At Fox Realty Group, we generally will do some light staging after we’ve decluttered and removed all personal items out of the home. We bring in a designer, and we will add accents and some decor to the property to really accentuate each feature in that property. We take pride in the details that make our clients home “show ready” in order to wow potential home buyers.
Once you’ve gone through the decluttering and depersonalizing, make sure you deep clean your house. Nobody wants to come into your home and look at dust bunnies under your couch, or dust on the counter. They do not want to know that you had 3 rabbits, 6 dogs, and 17 ponies living on the property. So, during the deep cleaning process, make sure that you deodorize.
At Fox Realty Group, we have a team of people that we bring in, when you hire us to help you sell your home, that will help make your Santa Cruz home ready for the market. We have a wonderful team of interior designers, Key Impressions Home Staging, that will help with the home staging. to furnish the key living areas creating warmth and a positive emotional response from a potential buyer. Key Impressions provides their owns furnishings, eliminating the need for third party rentals. Which provides a wider range of unique furnishings and the colors necessary to liven up a particular room. We also have a great team who will do the deep cleaning and the deodorizing of the home, making your home shine. Once our home stagers and cleaners have completed their tasks, we will all walk through and see the completely beautiful product that we have all worked so hard for. Our team works hard so we can successfully market your Santa Cruz home, so that we can get top dollar and best terms.
Another thing to consider when you are selling your Santa Cruz home is to take list price into consideration. It is really important not to overprice your home. If you start with a list price that is too high, then you risk having to continually chase the market down to get to that price point where buyers will actually see value, which can delay the sale of your home. And with an elevated list price, you potentially put yourself in a position where we cannot escalate further with multiple offers and with strategic tactical negotiations to get that highest dollar amount. So, it is really important to review the comparable home sales with your Santa Cruz Realtor in order to ensure that you do not price your house too high.
The other thing that you should be really well aware of when you are selling your home is that in California, the California state law requires a seller to disclose material facts and defects. Our disclosure package is very thorough and lengthy, but do not worry, we will help you go through it. Fox Realty Group will help you to answer all the questions appropriately, and add the verbiage appropriately. Part of our job as Santa Cruz Realtors is to make sure that you are protected, and so we will bring in all of the disclosures. After we help you fill them out and they are successfully written, we can give a complete disclosure package to any interested party.
Besides completing the disclosures, another thing to consider when you’re preparing your Santa Cruz home for sale, is to have upfront inspections. Things like a home inspection and a pest inspection. In Santa Cruz City and County, we are required to do a sewer lateral inspection, in order to see the condition of the sewer lateral. Depending on the specific situation of your home, you might even want to do more extensive inspections. For example, if your Santa Cruz home is built on a hillside, do you want to have a foundation inspection so that the buyer can know, whether or not the foundation is super solid. Or if there is a leak in one of the skylights we might wanna bring in a roofing contractor and have your roof inspected. The reason that we want to give these upfront disclosures and upfront inspection reports is so that a home buyer has a complete picture of the home that they’re purchasing. That way, when they make their offer on your Santa Cruz home, they are very well informed about the condition of your home and your property. This helps get the highest and best offer initially, and it also helps minimize or eliminate the potential for renegotiation after the buyer has their offer accepted. At Fox Realty Group, we have a rolodex of trusted Santa Cruz vendors and will help schedule these inspections on your behalf.
Now, let’s say your home is ready; you’ve decluttered & depersonalized, the home is staged & cleaned, inspections have been completed, and your disclosures are ready. Fox Realty Group will then bring in the marketing team. Our videographer collaborates with us to produce a creative, fun, unique, engaging, entertaining, exciting home tour video customized to your Santa Cruz home. We will also ensure there are beautiful photos, and drone shots, so that everybody who is looking at your property online, will be intrigued enough to schedule an appointment in person or attend an Open House. Because the first place anybody’s going to be looking at your property is online, and it is important to make your Santa Cruz home stand out amongst the rest. Fox Realty Group has a robust marketing plan and getting all of the features of your property marketed beautifully and appropriately will help eliminate anybody that that property is not perfect for, so that we’re not wasting your time showing it to people that will not buy it. And it will also help attract people that it is perfect for, drawing them in, getting the right buyers in that front door, getting you multiple offers, maximum dollars and the best terms, so that you can move on to the next phase in your life.
For more tips on how to prepare your home for sale please feel free to reach out to me. Fox Realty Group would love to help you sell your Santa Cruz home. We take pride in making the entire home selling process; from home sale preparation until close, both easy and fun. I’m Shemeika Fox, your Santa Cruz real estate expert, and as always, I’m here to help.
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