When Selling Your Home, No Animal Odors Please

Animal odors can turn off potential home buyers and prevent your home from selling!  Animal odors are the top of the "Uh-oh" home selling list. 

Before you sell your home, walk through with a professional home stager and/or realtor who will give you an unbiased and honest opinion.  Pets are big culprits of bad odors, especially your beloved dogs and cats.  I have a very keen sense of smell and I can smell dirty dog, dirty kitty litter and cat urine a mile away. 

So what can you do?  When preparing your home for sale you need to bathe your dog at least once a week and wash your pets beds and blankets regularly.  If they sleep with you, you need to wash your bedding as well.  Air out your house!  If you have carpet you need to have it professionally cleaned to make sure the dirty dog smell is removed and neutralized.  I had one client who was selling her condo after three years of renting to a family with a dog.  The carpet was brand new when they moved in, but after 3 years and 3 professional carpet cleanings, the dirty dog smell remained and hit you like a brick when you entered the condo.  My client was forced to replace the carpet.  In the long run, this is worth the cost!

Keeping the kitty litter box clean and kept, if possible, in an out of site location is very important when selling your home.  Make sure it is cleaned out at least once a day.  Also, if your cat has urinated on carpet or hardwood floors, it is a must to have those surfaces cleaned and neutralized by a professional.  Cat urine smell is one of the most offensive smells to potential buyers. 

Other pets such as birds, guinea pigs and gerbils' can also create offensive odors.  It is imperative your pet's cage is kept clean and preferably set in a inconspicuous location such as in the basement or a corner of a bedroom.  You don't want the cage being one of the first items a potential buyer sees when entering the home.

And, don't forget the yard.  Make sure there are no dog droppings left as a surprise in the backyard!

Most animal smells in a home can be neutralized without spending a lot of money.  Do it now, before you put your house on the market.  If your house develops the reputation among real estate agents as the "dirty dog" house or the "cat urine house", your house will be last on their list to show potential buyers.

Remember, even if your potential buyer is a animal lover they are not a animal odor lover!!

 

Will Potential Buyers Love Your Wallpaper?

"I love my wallpaper!" – This is a comment that I often hear when conducting real estate home staging consultations.  I also hear, "I don't like my wallpaper, but I'm not going to remove it just because I'm selling my home”.  

The short and sweet answer to “will potential buyers love your wallpaper” is “NO”!

Removing wallpaper is one of the top items on my list of what home owners need to do before listing their home for sale. 

Wallpaper in every room, or even one or two rooms, is a huge negative to potential buyers.  Even buyers who like wallpaper will not like the wallpaper you have chosen!  Wallpaper is a personal decorative choice that buyers want to pick out for themselves.  It doesn't matter to them how much you paid for it, how in style it is, what top designer recommended it, or even if you saw it used in a room on HGTV.  The potential buyer only sees a huge project that will make a colossal mess, and, cost a lot of money to remove!

My recommendation as a Professional Home Stager is to remove your wallpaper and replace it with a neutral warm paint color.  Don't paint over it, because potential buyers will know you did - and painting over it makes it more difficult to remove.  I highly recommend hiring a professional to remove your wallpaper.  Removing wallpaper can be extremely challenging and by doing it yourself, you can end up damaging walls which, in turn, will create more headaches and expense for you.    

One of the main things to remember before listing your house for sale is that potential buyers have a wide variety of tastes and expectations.  Those tastes and expectations may vary greatly both geographically and demographically.  A house that can appeal to a large mass of potential buyers will be more in demand than one highly customized to a particular style. The more buyers who find a home attractive when it hits the market, the faster the home will sell!