Home Focus Edition #6 ☀️ Summer is the season to sell

Welcome back from holidays, staycations, finding a park at Balmoral or just a few weeks of less emails and no kids sport to rush off to! As far as I know I'm pretty sure you can continue to say Happy New Year until the 31st January, so Happy New Year!

In our office James won best holiday destination taking a trip with his family to Antarctica - which looked incredible. You can check out some photo highlights on his Instagram: @jamesdorron - but wherever you spent the break - I hope it was really relaxing and rejuvenating for you.

Myself and the OG Partners Team are back on deck for a big 2024 and I'm super keen to help share some of my insights into the state of the property market but also some valuable insider tips and tricks about all aspects of buying and selling your home, moving house, upsizing, downsizing, investing and more this year.

Let's start with Summer.

There's no doubt about it, Summer is a great time to sell.

Over the 42 years we've been selling properties, there's no denying that right along with all those new year's resolutions to get fit and stop drinking, January is often the time people are reassessing their priorities and that includes their living arrangements.

We see this consistently each year with an influx in the number of inquiries online and over the phone in the first two months of the year with people looking for properties to buy.

So if selling is even remotely on your mind at the moment, here's some of my top tips for getting your property prepared for the best sale result in this fabulous warm weather.

Summer is all about showcasing your homes summer living features, so let's start with the small things:

✔️ Spruce up your garden with a budget friendly DIY tidy up or pay a gardener to come and do a more comprehensive job if required

✔️ Gurney the front paths, the driveway and all paths around the home

✔️ Book a council clean up and go room by room decluttering, storing, donating, disgarding or selling any unwanted items and organising closets and pantries (be ruthless 🤣)

✔️ A lick of paint makes a massive difference! If you're on a budget we can help you decide where a fresh coat of paint will make the biggest impact

✔️ Get the house washed. Particularly if it has already been painted in the last few years a house wash is much cheaper than a paint job and the house will look brand new!

✔️ Take a look at your house from the street.  What's your curb appeal like? Do you need to make some repairs to garage doors or front gates or letterbox?

✔️ If you have made a firm decision to sell, staging is something you will want to seriously consider (it's easier than you think).

To some sellers staging can seem expensive and unnecessary but I always encourage my clients to think of the long game here.  The point of staging your home its to increase it's appeal to more buyers, and hence get you a better price for it.

Late last year I listed a beautiful federation semi near Neutral Bay that was gorgeous in it's day but the elderly owner had gone into care and her son was managing the sale for her.

The property had not been renovated in years but needed to be sold prior to Christmas.

I advised my client to clear all the furniture out of the home, paint the internal walls, give the garden a once over and stage it with all new furniture of which the OGP Team organised and managed the entire process. Easy for the owner.

He did it and the property was transformed. With the clutter gone, fresh paint, a tidy, open garden complimented by furniture that showed the homes potential, people not only felt good but fell in love with it when they walked in.

The home sold in 3 weeks. In fact there was so much interest, we had to bring the auction forward by a week and, more importantly, it sold for 10% more than we initially forecast, which is a significant sum when you're talking about millions of dollars.

I'm no genius but that's a pretty good return on investment.

The important thing is, don't be daunted by preparing your home to sell. That's my job to help you.

We're always happy to have an obligation free chat to guide you in the right direction if you have any questions at all and we have a supplier team of the best tradies in the business on call 24/7.