Strategic Construction Blog

If you’re in the market to sell, don’t underestimate the importance of curbside appeal.  First impressions are crucial- they often determine whether a potential buyer will stop to take a closer look, or just drive on by.

It all starts with having great
curb appeal

It all starts at the curb: make sure your first impression is memorable and favorable

You know the basic curb appeal storyline: If potential buyers don’t like what they see from the street, they might never get inside the front door. You might have done the same at some point yourself when shopping for a home.

A remodeled kitchen and bath can help sell a home, but curb appeal is what gets buyers through the door,” says Betty Jane Garrett, a licensed agent with Paradigm Realty in Oklahoma. “If they don’t like what they see from the street chances are they won’t waste time going inside.”

Fortunately, unless you’re living in an Addams Family-like spookhouse, there are plenty of quick and easy ways to spiff up your home and give potential buyers a reason to come inside.

Yards should look appealing and inviting, a place where you’d like to relax on a pleasant spring afternoon. An easy way to do that is to keep the grass freshly groomed – don’t forget the edging – and plant beds freshly mulched, says John Merrill, editor of Landscape-America. According to Merrill, you should trim overgrown trees and shrubs that may have looked ok when they were planted, but now may have become too large.

Make sure the lawn is neatly mown and edged. Flower beds should be mulched (avoid Cypress mulch for ecological reasons).

During the growing season, make sure to add some potted flowers on either side of the entrance. This is particularly attractive even if planted in over-sized clay pots. Keep these plants well watered. Click here for additional landscape tips.

Creating curb appeal

You must grab a buyer’s interest from the curb if you want to sell the home for top dollar. Home buyers will sometimes refuse to go into a house with an unkempt yard, sagging doors or peeling paint. In fact, home shoppers will often develop an attitude toward your house within the first 15 seconds of seeing your property. That attitude is then reinforced (rightly or not) by everything else they see, if they decide to look further, from those first 15 seconds. So, even if you can’t afford to paint the entire exterior, get that front yard and entry into tip-top shape before putting your house on the market.

Creating curb appeal is one of the best ways of improving your chances of making a quicker sale. Most people make a judgment on the property as soon as they see it based on what they see. If they see overgrown shrubs, dirty windows, stained gutters and peeling paint, they immediately have made a negative snap judgment about the property without ever seeing the inside.

Personality Plus

Engaging the senses generates a feeling in the mind of a potential buyer. If there is no engagement, then prospective home buyer will have no feelings about your property. No feelings is almost the same as negative feelings.

Obviously, you don’t want to engage negative feelings or no feelings about your house. You want to help buyers remember your house as the one that felt like it was coming home for them. That is the personality you want your house to exude.

Engaging those senses, particular those of sight, should begin when the prospect first arrives at your property. They should be able to see the entry clearly. That entry should be inviting and everything else in the front yard to help lead the eye to the entry. Those are positive images you can embed in the prospect’s mind by the way you stage your lawn and landscape.

With a tightening real estate market, the home seller needs every advantage in their favor without over spending. Giving your house some favorable memory power is key. That means lots of personality without the person.

In other words, you want a house that is memorable from the prospects view, not your view. You want to remove your own personality from your property. Let home-buying prospects, without too much imagination, see themselves sitting in your living room. If they can sit down at the kitchen table and can see themselves sitting there on a Sunday morning sipping a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper, you’ve done your job. If, in the house showing process, all a prospect can see is you, then you’ve failed BIG TIME! Don’t put your house in that position.

How you maintain and design your home’s exterior is as important as its interior. The front is the first thing people see upon arrival. You want to make that a good impression from the street.