When selling your home, there are a million different things going through your mind. You need to finish up that retiling project you started a year ago. You need to finally clean out the attic and shed. You need to repaint the walls your kids scribbled over as toddlers.
While the laundry list of tasks to complete before your house is ready to go on the market may seem endless, there’s one important step you may have overlooked: preparing your lawn and garden.
The importance of curb appeal truly cannot be emphasized enough. Having a well-maintained landscape could mean the difference between a flood of offers and a complete dry spell. Prospective buyers won’t get a chance to see the beautiful job you’ve done renovating your home if they never make it past the brown patches in your lawn.
When you’re preparing your home for sale, don’t forget your lawn and garden. Here are a few things worth knowing.
Make Sure This is Done Before Selling a Home
Lawn
Not only is your lawn one of the first things that a prospective buyer will notice, it is also the largest feature of your landscape. If your lawn is unhealthy, tending to it is a much larger task than simply pulling a few dead plants.
Prospective buyers may be deterred by an unhealthy lawn because it foretells a massive undertaking to revitalize the entire square footage of your property.
If your lawn is in a sorry state and you’re preparing for a home sale, you have a few different options for mitigating this issue.
Installing an irrigation system is a simple way to ensure that your lawn will be nurtured back to health. Irrigation systems like in-ground sprinkling can be programmed so that you don’t have to worry about keeping the lawn watered while you’re juggling everything else you need to do before putting your house on the market. You can rest assured that your lawn will be a lush, attractive landscape in time for showings.
If all else fails and you’re quickly nearing house-showings, you may also want to consider sodding to replace the parts of your lawn that are beyond repair.
Trees
While the lawn of your property takes up the most square footage, your trees are the features that often stand out the most to a prospective buyer.
When someone looks at a home, they’ll be sure to consider whether or not they’ll have an expensive tree removal project on their hands in the near future.
Take inventory of the trees on your property. By hiring a certified arborist, you can ensure that your trees are properly evaluated so that any tree removal (or tree planting, possibly!) can be handled before a potential buyer lays eyes on your property.
Tending to the trees on your property helps reduce the risk that your landscape deters a potential buyer.
Garden
First and foremost, it is vital that you conduct a thorough sweep through any garden beds to remove unsightly brush and dead plants. Aside from the obvious aesthetic issues, a flower bed gone grey might lead a potential buyer to believe that there are issues with the soil or that you, the current homeowner, aren’t responsible enough to tend to the details of your property. If it doesn’t completely turn away a buyer, it may give them cause to low-ball an offer.
By wowing your prospective buyers with vibrant colors and tidy shrubbery, the first impression they have of your home is one of beauty and organization. Start off on the right foot with your potential buyers. It may even lead them to view the rest of your home in a positive light.
Preparing to sell a home is a highly emotional experience. You deal with the stress of paperwork, numbers, and the myriad of little to-dos that creep up along the way. All of this is compounded by the fact that leaving a beloved home can be incredibly painful, even if you’re moving on to bigger and better things.
As difficult as the moving process is, ensuring that your physical home is sufficiently prepared isn’t a task you should have to accomplish alone. The experienced professionals at The Parke Company are skilled and available to aid in the process of preparing your home for sale.
Give us a call (615-350-6033) or contact us online today to see how The Parke Company difference can work for you.