Although the housing market in Idaho is hot, that doesn’t translate to fast home sales. The selling process can be quite an art of its own, and even top real estate agents can struggle. If you’re dealing with a house that hasn’t sold or would like to have the upper hand when you go to sell your Idaho home, then you came to the right place. Sometimes to get your home from “For Sale” to “Sold” requires some creativity. To help you brainstorm some creative ways to sell your home, we’ve come up with 7 strategies you can use to get your home sale past the finish line.
Learn Some Creative Ways to Sell Your House
1. Provide a Virtual Tour of the House
Virtual tours are a big thing now. Not only do buyers turn to online sources to start their home buying journey, but COVID-19 has made people look at other methods of viewing a listing. If you’re working with a real estate agent, they may have a preferred website for creating and sharing virtual tours or may offer to do it for you. If not, you can always use Imagemaker360.com or SharperAgent.com, which guides you through creating a virtual tour.
Before you create a virtual tour or take photos of your listing, you should declutter, clean, and stage your home.
- Declutter– Make sure closets, the attic, and the garage are organized. Clutter doesn’t show well in photos or virtual open houses.
- Clean – Don’t forget to clean windows, mirrors, sweep, mop, and vacuum. Smudges on bathroom mirrors, dirty floors, and walked on carpets can show in photos and virtual tours.
- Stage-Put away any personal items and photos around the house. If you have any large pieces of furniture, storing them may be a good idea to create more space. Don’t forget to limit knick-knacks and clutter on countertops.
Also, make sure to open all the shades and turn on all the lights to help make everything look light and bright when taking photos or video.
Make sure to upload your virtual tour of the house on YouTube and post links to all your social media pages. Asking your friends and family to do the same wouldn’t hurt.
2. Hold An Open House Party
Why not elevate your next open house by throwing a party while you’re at it! If your Idaho home is built in a specific style like Edwardian or Victorian, play it up, dress up in period costumes, have tea in your backyard. If you don’t want to go to all that trouble, you can always prepare some finger foods and drinks. Here are a few other ways to help make your open house party a success:
- Prepare easy finger foods like cheese and crackers, small sandwiches, fruit, meat on skewers, and easy to hold appetizers.
- Decorate with some fresh flowers.
- Use plastic plates, flatware, and glasses but go for a more nice quality. Don’t serve drinks in solo cups and food on paper plates.
- Severe food in the kitchen on the island, kitchen table, or on the dining room table. These are great areas for entertaining and help showcase the home.
- Use your oven or stove. A fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies can send delicious aromas throughout the house. Stovetop potpourri smells great too!
Open house parties don’t need to be overall expensive; just make sure to set a budget and get a headcount of interested clients from other agents.
3. Extreme Home Staging
If you want to take your staging a step further, you can always hire a professional to stage your entire property. This type of home staging may be a bit extreme, though. A stager may encourage you to store many of your personal belongings and furniture and put in rented pieces of furniture and decor.
Stagers usually have experience with interior decorating and know what’s trendy right now.
Staging will help highlight your home’s unique features and help buyers visualize owning the property. Say you have some large pieces of furniture, a bed frame, or a sectional couch. Maybe they’re a bit large for the space, but you’ve learned to live with it. A stager may recommend changing those out for smaller pieces to help show the size and space available.
When furniture doesn’t fit room sizes well or interferes with pathways, it can translate to buyers that the house isn’t big enough. So a creative way to sell your house would be to hire a professional staging company to makeover your home.
4. Let Potential Buyers Sleep In for the Weekend
If you have a potential buyer interested in your home but still hasn’t made an offer yet, let them sleepover for the weekend. What better way for a buyer to experience what living in the house would feel like.
If you’re working with a realtor, make sure they know about the idea before offering it to a potential buyer.
Prepare your home as if it was an Airbnb. Ensure you clean everything really well and set out towels in the bathroom or on the bed for them to use. Set out things that would be hard for them to find or that you wouldn’t want them to go digging for, like a trash bag, toilet paper, or coffee pods.
Don’t forget to highlight rooms around the house; for example, if you have a lovely screened-in porch with furniture, make the area cozy with throw pillows, a blanket, and magazines. If you have a spa-like bathroom, maybe set out some bath salts and a fluffy bathrobe. These small touches might help your buyer to see the potential if they were to buy the place.
5. Share Your Listing on Social Media
Another creative way to sell your house in Idaho is by sharing your listing on multiple social media sites. The more eyes on your listing, the more likely you will sell.
If you have Facebook or Instagram, come up with a catchy description of your house and add some photos to post about your home.
To get more shares, offer your “friends” or “followers” a reward if their share results in the sale of your home. This could be as simple as a gift card but just make it for a large enough amount for people to take an interest, like a couple of hundred dollars.
Just make sure if you use social media and ask your friends to share that you change the privacy settings for this post to be public.
You can also always purchase Facebook ads to spread the word to thousands of people in your area. You never know; you may have a post that goes viral.
6. Notify Your Neighbors- They May Know Someone
It never hurts to ask a neighbor if they know anyone looking for a house to buy in your neighborhood. They may know someone who wants to get in that specific area and is ready to buy.
Two ways you can notify your neighbors
- Send a letter
- Invite them over and tell them
If you’re not close with your neighbors, you can send them a friendly letter expressing that you are planning to sell and would appreciate it if they knew anyone looking to purchase something in the area that they share your contact information.
If you’re close to your neighbors, invite them over for appetizers and drinks and let them know you are planning to move, and if they know anyone interested in buying, to let you know.
7. Throw in a Freebie
If you’re planning to downsize when you move or moving to a condo that has no yard, use some of the things you won’t need anymore as a way to sweeten the deal.
Say you’re moving to an apartment and won’t need your relatively new lawnmower anymore; use it as a freebie. Maybe you have a piece of furniture you just don’t feel like moving, and the buyer mentioned they liked it, offer it as part of closing on the house.
You won’t have to deal with the hassle of moving it, and your buyer will be happy to get a freebie.
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Conclusion:
Sometimes selling a house isn’t easy and requires some creativity on your part to sell. Unfortunately, even doing a number of these strategies doesn’t guarantee a fast home sale. If you’re in a situation where you need to sell quickly or relocate for a new job, a guaranteed fast way to sell would be to a cash home buyer. Cash home buyers like Gem State Cash Offer can close within 7-14 days, unlike traditional buyer’s closings that take 50+ days.
Gem State Cash Offer is also an as-is buyer. So if you were trying to figure out if you should repair your leaky roof or make some renovations to your home, you wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle or expense if you sell to Gem State Cash Offer.
Gem State Cash Offer has an easy home buying process and could make you a cash offer for your home within 24-hours. They take the stress and uncertainty out of selling your Idaho home; no creative strategies are required.
If you’re interested in getting more information about their company, visit their website at www.gemstatecashoffer.com or give them a call at (208) 999-3396.
Gem State Cash Offer is a home buying company in Boise, Idaho, and is a BBB accredited business with an A rating and 5-star rating by Google. They do not charge realtor commissions or service fees and will even help pay closing costs. They help homeowners in unique selling situations find solutions to selling their Idaho homes.