If you check their website, you’ll find real estate and staging experts with blogs full of tips and hacks on things that may help with the sale of your home. These professionals have seen the patterns by which buyers choose a house to buy. They then advise the sellers about what buyers seek.

What they don’t tell sellers is how to lose potential buyers. Sometimes the steps realtors advise sellers to use alienate potential buyers due to the sellers investing their own taste into these steps. It leaves potential buyers cold. 

What are these steps and this advice? How do you lose a potential buyer in three steps?

Step 1: Poor To No Curb Appeal

No buyer drives by a house for sale to check it out without noticing the yard and the outside of the house. Unkempt yards and sad, baggy shutters or gutters will make potential buyers drive right on by. One of the things that may help with the sale of your home is a bright, orderly lawn against which a clean, well-maintained house is set like a jewel.

Planting flowers, clearing underbrush, and trimming back overhanging branches go far toward giving a home a nicer look. Pressure washing the siding, painting the windows if necessary, definitely painting the front door, and replacing the roof and gutters if necessary give potential buyers a good first impression of the house.

Step 2: Dirt And Clutter

Many sellers have the mistaken idea that potential buyers want to see what the house looks like with the seller’s possessions in it. Sellers think this gives a contrast to stark, empty rooms. Buyers can then more easily envision their own belongings in the rooms. Wrong.

What’s Hiding In The Rooms?

Potential buyers wonder how much dirt and grime is hiding behind the furnishings, boxes piled in closets, and in the basement. Cluttered rooms deny them this opportunity. 

Sellers should take every room down to bare walls and floors, find an expert to deep clean any carpets and paint the walls. Carpeting can hold on to odors and stains very easily so click here to find a business that offers great service and uses top of the line cleaning products. Potential buyers check the Internet first for sites like Zillow or a local realtor. They need to see clean rooms in the pictures on their website.

Declutter

When staging a home for sale, potential buyers need to see how a room would look with furniture in it. The bare minimum is required, with perhaps a lamp on an end table and a painting on the wall. This will show buyers how the room might be arranged. The key is that it’s uncluttered.

Step 3: Home Systems That Aren’t Functional

Most house hunters can get past the smell of the dog or cat (they won’t come back if they smell mold, though.) However, the one unforgivable thing is non-functional home systems:

  • HVAC. These are so integral to the running of a house, and they’re so expensive, that a seller with a non-functional HVAC system may as well take the house off the market until it’s fixed or replaced.

  • Electrical and plumbing. The wiring and plumbing are also one of the things that may help with the sale of your home. People who tour homes turn on the lights, plug their phones into the outlets, and flush toilets for a reason. They won’t buy a house just to spend a fortune fixing broken systems.

  • Windows. Leaks, locks, and looseness are checked by every house hunter because these can’t be checked on FSBO sellers, realtors, and similar websites. Windows are an expense for which no buyer wants to pay. It also tells them about the house’s power bill which is another concern for potential buyers.