How To Prepare Your Home For Inspections
Inspections can have a huge first impression on the buyer. They are all about creating the right feeling and drawing an emotional response.
Top agents believe that buyers buy feeling. When they're coming to the home, they're looking at how they can live and relax in your space. Anything that you can do to contribute to that feeling helps, especially when it comes to the negotiation stage.
To create the right feeling in a home, approach an open home as if you were hosting a BBQ or dinner party. When we have people coming over for a BBQ or a dinner party, there's a certain clean up we do. We think, "I've just got to put that away".
Approach an open home with the same mindset. You're about to entertain. You're about to showcase your home and you want to make sure a buyer feels right in the atmosphere within the home.
Before an open home, do a showcase rehearsal and walk through as if you were the purchaser. Make sure the home is really comfortable. For example, in the middle of summer, it's a good idea to run the air conditioning for a while to take the heat out of the house and cool it down. Open the windows and turn on all the light switches.
Top agents will do what they can to make a buyer feel at home. They will encourage a buyer to sit on the deck and enjoy the ocean view, to imagine what it will be like if they lived there. Buyers will feel what it is to live like you do.
A genuine example of how important it is to create the right feeling is on a negotiation where the offer and desired price were $200,000 apart. On the final inspection, the agent was sitting with the buyers and we actually called up the sellers to ask if they could grab a bottle of wine out of the fridge.
The buyer got to try before they bought. They sat on the deck and enjoyed the views. It was just very, very comfortable. They were inspired by the realisation that they could live like that for the rest of their lives and that secured the purchase.
Selling is a transference of feelings. Your agent is seeking to attract a buyer to the property who will feel the way that you do about your home. That transference of feelings comes back to great preparation of your ‘open for inspection’.
