The pros and cons of decorating your home before you sell

Common wisdom has it that you should do everything you can to improve the presentation of your home before you try to sell it.

There is a lot of sense in this, however, it’s not an absolute rule and there can be some very good reasons why you might want to sell your home essentially “as is”.

With that in mind, here is a brief guide to the pros and cons of decorating your home before you sell.

The pros

In very blunt terms, you want to make your home a place where buyers want to live and this is going to extend way beyond the sort of “hard” specifications they can read in a description, such as number of bedrooms and their size.

You want to present them with the prospect of a desirable lifestyle, which extends through every part of the home, especially the kitchen and bathroom(s).

The reason why kitchens and bathrooms generally matter so much to the home-sales process is because these rooms tend to be the hardest to update in any meaningful way.

Get this right and you can have your home speeding off the market at top price while similar properties in your area stay overlooked.

The cons

The cons of decorating your home before you sell all revolve around the cost and hassle involved and the question of whether or not these are likely to be justified by a faster sale and/or a higher level of profit.

A coat of paint and a professional deep-clean both cost very little and should be seen as must-dos prior to any house sale.

Likewise a de-clutter costs nothing (in fact it may even make you some money if you can sell some of your stuff and at the very least could save you money on moving costs) so it should also be done as standard.

Once you go beyond that, however, you need to start thinking carefully about your potential return on investment and be very aware of the fact that the more expensive an update is, the more challenging it could be to recoup the money you spent on it.

It’s also worth noting that expensive updates tend to be significant ones and so if anything goes wrong with them, it could have significant implications on your ability to sell your home at all, at least in the short term, until the issues are resolved.

You also risk creating a situation in which the only way to recoup the money you spent on the upgrades is to price your home at a level which few(er) buyers are able to afford, even if they would like to do so.

What you need to remember, here, is that most buyers need mortgages and, even if a mortgage lender is prepared to accept your higher valuation, the higher price will lead to higher financing costs (and possibly higher stamp duty), whereas selling your house “as is” and leaving the buyers to upgrade it could work out substantially more affordable for them, as well as giving them the opportunity to get exactly what they want.

Author Bio

Indlu are estate agents in Manchester offering a no sale, no fee estate agency service in the North West as well as a free online house price estimate to find out how much your house is worth.