How to Sell Your House When It's Vacant
According to Rooms with Style, more than 95 percent of buyers cannot picture what their furniture will look like in a vacant space. Therefore, even if you are pressed for time and must move quickly, leaving your home partially furnished could help it sell quicker.
- Difficulty:
- Moderate
Instructions
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Interior
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Furnish your home, starting with the first floor, to influence a potential buyer's first impressions. If you plan to take all your furniture out of the home, you can find inexpensive new furniture and window treatments at discount stores and used furniture at yard sales and thrift stores. Maintain an organized, color-coordinated layout, but avoid filling rooms with clutter. Furnish as many rooms as possible, which helps buyers visualize room size and potential.
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Keep the utilities and thermostats turned on. During the winter and summer, your vacant house could be uncomfortable to preview if the heat or the air conditioning remains shut off. Furthermore, damp weather conditions could cause mold to grow in your home, thus causing allergies and bad smells. If you've moved far from your vacant residence, enlist the help of a nearby family or friend to regulate your thermostat. You can also hire a property management company or house sitter to keep your home's utilities and climate control systems running on a regular basis. Your listing agent can also assist you in this effort.
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Have regular open houses. Keep your house on buyers' minds by having your real estate agent hold your house open on the weekends. Ask your agent to play music and provide refreshments to make visits to your home memorable. Some real estate agents bake cookies during open houses to give vacant homes a warm and inviting appeal.
Exterior
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1
Forward your mail to your new address and stop newspaper subscriptions. An overstuffed mailbox takes away from your home's curb appeal. Although you cannot control receiving junk mail, you can visit your home regularly to clean out the mail box, if you are able to do so, or add mail box maintenance to the list of services you would like to have provided by your property manager, house sitter or real estate agent.
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Keep your lawn trimmed and landscaped. Overgrown grass, piles of fallen leaves and weeds also make your vacant house uninviting to buyers. Even though you no longer live in the home, you can have seasonal flowers planted in your front yard by a landscaping company to make appear no different than other occupied homes in the neighborhood.
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Shovel snow in the winter. Buyers preview homes all year long. If you live in a snow-prone region of the United States, ask your former neighbors to include your former home on the list of homes in need of shoveling services. Have snow removed from any cars you left in the driveway.
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Tips & Warnings
Purchase a timer at a hardware store and set your vacant home's lights to turn on in the early evening and shut off around 10 p.m. Buyers often look at homes in the evening after work and having the lights on makes your home look less scary.
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References
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