5 Tips for Selling Your Home During the Holidays
Selling your home during the holidays comes with the inherent advantage of lower competition. But it also means you have fewer potential buyers since many buyers take a break from their home search during the holidays.
So what can you do to draw the attention of buyers even if they had planned to wait until the New Year to resume their search? Here are five tips for selling your home during the holidays.
1. Keep Your Holiday Decorations Neutral
There’s nothing wrong with decorating your home for Christmas while it’s on the market. But you do need to be careful about which holiday decorations you display.
Overly personal holiday decorations, like homemade ornaments, for example, remind buyers that this is not their home. And that’s the opposite of our goal to sell your house! We want buyers to feel at home the moment they walk through the door so that they can imagine themselves living here.
So pack away the personal keepsakes for next year. This year, stick to holiday decorations that appeal to a wide range of buyers. You can’t go wrong with naturals like pinecones, holly, and evergreens.
2. Price Strategically
With today’s online home search platforms, buyers can set a specific price range and receive notifications when a new home in their range hits the market. Generally, price settings go in increments of one hundred thousand, but in high-value markets like the bay area, you’re likely to see increments of a quarter of a million.
So if a group of buyers have their desired price range set for up to $2.5 million, and you set your price at $2.6, you’re going to miss out on that entire group because the online settings prevent them from seeing your listing. This is why you’ll often see prices like $2,495,000; it ensures that your listing gets shown to a wider audience. This is especially important during the holidays when fewer buyers are actively searching.
3. Make it Cozy
As the temperatures drop, buyers naturally become more interested in a warm and cozy home than in an open, breezy home. Yes, the buyers will likely live there year-round, so this isn’t logical, but buying a house is largely about having an emotional connection to a home. And when you come inside on a chilly, windy day to a warm home with fluffy throw blankets and a roaring fire, you just feel good about it.
Throw in the scent of freshly baked gingerbread or mulled apple cider, and you create a feeling buyers will want to recreate when they move in.
4. Light it Up
Holiday lighting isn’t just magical for kids. It can also be used to strategically highlight some of your home’s most desirable structural features.
You can use holiday lighting to draw attention to large windows, beautiful archways, and outdoor spaces. String some lights through evergreen garland and drape it along banisters. Or place a lighted holiday decoration in your original built-ins to bring your buyer’s focus to these impressive fixtures.
5. Select a Listing Agent Who Specializes in Real Estate Marketing
The most important tip for selling your home during the holidays is to choose a listing agent who knows how to market a home, even in a slower market. When there are fewer buyers, you can’t have an agent who simply sits back and waits for buyers to come to the house. You need an agent who will go out, find potential buyers, and snap them out of their holiday break from house-hunting.
The experienced agents at Sequoia Real Estate have been trained to use their industry connections with buyers agents to actively search for buyers for your listing. If you’re planning to sell your Bay Area over the holiday season, contact Sequoia Real Estate to get a listing agent who can guide you to a quick and profitable sale at any season.