Do not! Keep your clothes on, please! But make the house you want to sell look neat and clean. An appraiser once told me that the houses he most feared having to appraise were houses that had been “professionally decorated.” What that phrase generally means is that an owner has paid a lot of money for many things, like custom paint and trim that don’t work at all on resale.
The truth is, decorators don’t help you when you need to resell your home. Your ideas (costing you all those dollars) can hurt resale! Ask any of the relocation companies. They go with the basics. They buy a lot of ivory paint. Painting is the first thing they do after taking you out of your house. And they won’t pay a lot of money for your house! You may not even get a market price. They plan to make money even if you don’t.
They are approaching the problem of packaging a home for resale from a business perspective, not an emotional one. Why? Potential buyers are looking for clean, uncluttered spaces where they don’t have to work after the sale. Your custom paint job may not match your things. That is why he wants to be able to show them a neutral interior. It’s like resale insurance.
What ALL buyers want to do is move out and do nothing exactly! If you are not an assignee lucky enough to have a “relocation” company to back you up, it is especially vital that you know this. Potential buyers don’t want to correct your decorating mistakes. They don’t even want to paint, the easiest and cheapest of DIY jobs.
Relocation companies rarely do more than paint. They never put in $ 50,000 kitchens or remodeled bathrooms. From time to time they can replace the carpet, but even that is very rare. If you really want to sell your home for as much $$$ as possible, you have to make decisions that serve your interests while you live there and when you need to resell it.
Note that you may need to prepare it for resale. It must be clean, neat and neutral in color. Another way of saying this is that your home should match every buyer’s stuff. Of course you don’t know what his things are like. That is why the colors have to be beautiful!
Your decor should also be neutral. Forget matching furniture sets, country flower couches and valances, and your collection of action figures. If you are a collector, pack those things and store them off-site. Count on someone to touch your most expensive item while looking at your home … or put it in your pocket.
Instead, make your home look like an expensive hotel suite. It is even necessary to remove examples of art that could offend anyone. Go clean, neutral and neat for faster resale. Skip the really expensive remodel and keep more cash. You will be glad you did.
