Buy Owner Blog

Spring is wrapping up and summer is quickly approaching, which most people would consider the busiest months of the year! The sun shines for longer hours, the children conclude their year of schoolwork, gardens and yard foliage burst back to life, festivals arise around every town, outdoor amusement parks and pools reopen and people just generally leave the comfort of their home more regularly!

As a home seller, all of these aspects of summer can help you sell if you know how to promote your surroundings. [...more...]

Statistics show that for the past few years, home sales have increased in the month of April. It seems to be the turning point between winter and summer, when homebuyers finally decide that it is safe to move. It is the time between snowfalls and swimming, which is the perfect time to get a sale done with and still have an open schedule for summer events! With that said, you as a home seller need to be doing everything you can to spark buyer interest in your home. Now is your time to shine!

To help you out during this busy buying month, and to hopefully score you a sale, we have collected what we consider our most helpful Selling Tips blogs from our archives. Read up and get to work! [...more...]

While you’re trying to sell your home, you know that it’s important for the indoor air to feel fresh and unstuffy. Hence, you might open your windows during an open house held on a warm spring day. However, selling your home with a high quality of indoor air goes further than that.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air. There are surprising sources of indoor air pollution all over your house. The sooner you know about these sources, the sooner you can clean up the air quality of your home for your future buyer and, in the mean time, for you and your family. [...more...]

It almost goes without saying that your home will show better when you get rid of the extra clutter. The question is: what do you do with all the things that you don’t want to get rid of but are taking up too much space? If you don’t have enough space to store stuff in your home itself, consider renting space from a storage facility while your property is up for sale.

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“We listed our house on Jan. 20 with ‘Buy Owner,’ so it took 2 months to sell. We closed the sale on March 25. The buyers…first visited our house on Sat., March 13th, returned on the 14th and we negotiated the price the evening of the 15th…The closing…happened without a hitch. For this we had prayed and feel very blessed.

Thank you for your help…

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If your home has been on the market since the cold, inactive months of winter real estate, now is the time to step it up. Warm spring weather tends to reactive the real estate market and adds numerous new home sellers to the market, causing your home to fall to the bottom of the pile. Home buyers are also most active in the coming months, and they are interested in the new rather than the old. What can you do to reestablish interest in your home? Here are five starting tips:

• Add a significant upgrade or minor upgrades to your home. A major upgrade could include adding an Energy Star refrigerator, repainting your entire exterior or interior, upgrading your countertops to granite or replacing old carpeting with hardwood flooring.

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In springtime, while it’s easy to excuse yourself from yard work because of constant rainfalls or annoying allergies, you really should prepare your yard for the season, and for the one to follow, summer. If you wait too long, it could take longer for your grass to appear lush and weed-free, for your gardens to redevelop and for your fruit trees to produce.

And this is never more true than when you’re trying to sell. Now is the time to make your home—and its surroundings—look its best.

Here are steps to keep in mind:

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Spring means spring cleaning, especially when you’re selling a home.

Welcome to Part 2 of our series on spring-cleaning suggestions!

• Depersonalize every room. The winter holidays tend to leave our home’s looking like a giant scrapbook. Enough time has passed to now recycle your saved stash of Hallmark cards, to organize the family photos into a photo album for the shelf and to store the newly framed photos into a box for your next house. You want the house to appear homey, but you also want the potential homebuyers to imagine themselves living there. That’s hard to do when your family and friend’s faces are smiling back at them. Instead, substitute your personal attributes with pictures of your house in other seasons, or with neutral photography or artwork.

• Clear your kitchen counters of everything and give them a thorough cleaning with eco-friendly cleaners or just vinegar and water. Our kitchens tend to overfill with comfort foods during the winter months that most of us probably wouldn’t mind tossing now that tank top and shorts season is right around the corner! After you clean the counters, clean each individual appliance as you place them back where they belong back.
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Once the winter weather finally dwindles off, we’re all thinking the same thing: it’s time for spring cleaning.

Now is when you scrub the floors clean of muddy slush from the bottom of your boots, sweep away the lasting remnants of pine needles from the Christmas tree and store away the overabundance of scarves, hats, coats and mittens.

Though spring cleaning is a smart choice for all homeowners or renters, it is increasingly important for those trying to sell their house. No potential homebuyer wants to walk into a dirty, cluttered and dreary home. While you should be constantly keeping up with housecleaning year-round, now is the perfect time to take advantage of the spring cleaning cliché and really give your house a spotless appearance.

We at the Buy Owner Blog feel that the importance of this topic is worth two posts, so here are some helpful suggestions on where to start your spring cleaning in Part 1!

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You can’t learn too much about real estate without hearing this crucial truth: staging matters. Take our posts here at the Buy Owner Blog, for example, where we’ve given you 12 Tips for Staging to Sell, the Top 10 Staging Tips and tips on staging for summer, staging the backyard, even ways to stage the garage!

It can seem like a lot to take in, especially if the idea of staging is new to you. But don’t lose heart! At its heart, staging is very simple. It’s all about making your home look its best.

So do you have 15 minutes? Here’s what you do:

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