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First impressions do matter and if you want to increase the value of your home, if you
want to get the best purchase price that you can get then increasing your street appeal
and what your house looks like from the street and what it looks like as people walk up to
it, those first impressions matter. How do I know they matter? I know because when my
parents were selling their house we had the real estate agent come over. Already he has
done his valuations before he came to the house and he walked into the house and he
was like "oooh it actually looks a lot better than it appears from the outside" and then
he went on to explain to us how first impressions matter. If you don't have good first impressions
than a lot of people actually won’t get pass the front door and won’t look at the
property at all and a lot of people won’t bid on it. Because a lot of people when they're
walking into a house they get a feeling they get a sense straight away, they are buying
emotionally and if they don't get a good emotional sense about wanting to live here then they
close their minds of and it's like they don't see all the good parts of your house on the
inside. So getting a good street appeal is extremely important so that's what today I
wanted to discuss- ways to increase the street appeal of your property.
Hi I'm Ryan McLean from OnProperty.com.au where I teach people like you how to find
positive cash flow properties all over Australia and take their investing to the next level.
So, what are these ways that we can increase our street appeal about property. Really simple
stuff that you can act on to make your property more appealing.
Tip number one is to paint the house and to paint it a modern color. So a lot of people
when they're thinking about selling their property they don't actually want to do anything
to it to make it look great and there's the color that they painted it ten years ago and
they haven't changed anything in that time. Often outdated colors, paint that's peeling
off, paint that's faded just makes the house look ratty, just makes a house look tardy
and doesn't make it look as high caliber as you want it to look and isn't going to command
the highest price. So simply by painting your property or paying someone to paint for you
with the modern, great, neutral color is going to work to your advantage.
Tip number two is to paint or fix the roof. This is something that I learned when my parents
sold their place and I was helping them renovate. It's been a month doing out that property
and spent about $1, 000 to $2, 000. That property ended up selling for $800 025. Now, with the
roof on that property (it was a corrugated iron roof) and it had started to discolor
and show a bit of rust. Did had holes in it, it wasn't a really dodgy roof because it had
just been replaced a few years earlier but it wasn't looking its best. So what did we
do, well we painted the roof the white that it was and made it look great. And so by painting
the roof and covering up the rust or the discoloring that may have occurred from rainfall over
the time you can help protect the roof and can also help the roof look a whole bunch
better. Now obviously you're not going to paint tiles if you have tiles on your roof
but maybe you want to go ahead and just fix some of those broken tiles that are available.
Look, it's not a huge thing but if people see broken tiles on a roof then they may start
looking for other problems on the property. But what you want to do is try and narrow
it down, the amount of problems that people are going to see. Let's face it that every
property has some problems but you want to obviously make your have as little as possible
when selling it so it makes a great first impression.
Tip number three is to have an inviting fence so that might mean putting up a new picket
fence, it might be painting your current fence, it might be putting hedges up or putting bushes
up to make your fence look just a little bit nicer. There's better gardening web sites
and stuff out there that can teach you about making your fence look great. But having an
inviting fence is an very important part of improving your street appeal.
Tip number four is to make a clear path to the door. So rather than just having gardens,
rather than just forcing people to walk through the driveway, then through a muddy puddle
to get to the door, create a path where people can walk along and they can experience the
front of the house when they're getting started. You might want to put flowers down along that
path, you might want to make it some nice pebble creek or whatever it may be but by
making a clear path to the house you can then focus on making that path and awesome experience
so that people imagine themselves walking down that path every single day of their lives
because they love it so much and then they're going to buy your property.
Tip number five is to add colors with flowers. This can be done really inexpensively. Flowers,
if you can get at Bunning’s or Flower power or your local nursery, aren't that expensive.
Obviously there's some flowers that are going to be very expensive, if you want to decorate
your entire garden with orchids then you are probably going to be out for a few thousand
dollars but you can get very affordable very cost-effective flowers for your garden that's
going to help you out. So your ‘the best buy’ is probably somewhere like Bunning’s
or Flower power or your local nursery. But by adding color right when you’re open for
inspections, then you are going to just add that vibrant and have that great street appeal.
Tip number six is to have a well-manicured lawn. So this might mean lay new turf or might
mean simply mowing your lawn or might even mean fertilizing your lawn and just making
your lawn look great. You obviously want to do this in the lead-up to your open houses
and listing your property. You don't want to wait until the end of the day and then
you are like " Oh my gosh, I got open house tomorrow, I need the lawn to look awesome."
So try and get to this ahead of time, head down again to your local Bunning’s or your
local nursery, get some fertilizer for your lawn, spread it on there, make sure it's constantly
trim so it's nice and lush and try to give it as much sunlight and as much help as possible,
get out there at nine and water it if the water restrictions allow you to and just make
that lawn look green because people for some reason love grain lawns. They want to have
that epic lawn were everyone in the neighborhood is like "oh my gosh his lawn is amazing"
Okay, tip number seven is to attend to the median strip. So the median strip is that
part outside of your fence that isn't technically your land but because it is in front of your
property you need to maintain it. So by tending to your median strip and making a median strip
appealing you can increase the street appeal of your property. That might be, again, planting
some flowers or planting some hedges in the median strip, obviously mowing the lawn, making
the lawns look great... But tending to that area as if it was your own house because that
is the first thing that people are going to walk on, the first thing that they're going
to see so you want it to be well maintained and well kept.
Tip number eight is to make sure the neighbor’s lawn is nice too. This idea I got when I was
living in Miranda in Sydney I used to walk to the shops because it was close enough to
the Westfield that was there and I used to walk past this house and it was just fully
overgrown lawn, like so overgrown that there was basically no path left, like all the grass
was all over the path and people would just never cut their lawn and never took care of
the house. I was walking past one day and the house next door to this disgusting house
was for sale and I notice that these neighbor’s lawn had been fully mowed, that they had actually
snip it and they had cleared the path so now there was no grass on the path anymore. And
this person was smart enough to go out of their way and to mow the next door neighbor's
lawn for them and to clear up their median strip as well and make next door look appealing.
The fact of the matter is people don't want to necessarily live next to a dirty and old
and a grimy house and they going to devalue your property if the house next door is discussing
or it looks like it has people that they might have issues with. People want to live next
to nice people. So if your neighbors aren't taking care of their lawn at least take care
of the median strip for them and maybe even offer to mow their lawn for them as well before
you open house just so that everything around your house looks great. I used to mow my neighbors
median strip because he never mowed it and it got really long with some really fast growing
grass and I got a couple of beers out of it. I wasn't selling but, you know it's something
that you can do. So I had to think about mowing my neighbor's lawn as well.
Tip number nine is to have an attractive front door. If you've seen the movie Notting Hill,
what color is the front door in the movie Notting Hill? If you don't know the answer
to that, you obviously haven't seen the movie- the answer is blue. It is a blue door and
I use that to make the example that blue doors, not bulbous, doors in general make impression
and so you want to have a nice door that people can open. When my parents were selling their
house the door was old, it was ratty, it had it for twenty years and so we replace it with
a new one with on beautiful glass in it, frosted glass so you still had the privacy and it
just made such a difference to the house as you entered but it also made such a difference
the property on the inside because it let so much light in as well. So go ahead, get
a new door for your property, if possible the bigger doors, people love them at the
moment- the ones that are actually wider than a standard door, makes you feel like you're
in a mansion, look into those as well. So getting a nice door is definitely something
to look into too. Tip number ten is to add privacy to your property.
I find it amazing that people don't do this because it's something that's so important
to me, so important to my wife, so important to my friends as well...is that we live a
life with no privacy online but when we're at home, when we're playing with our kids
we want to have as much privacy as possible. So if you can do this in such a way where
you can make the front lawn look great or even in the backyard where you can add a level
of privacy so that might be putting up wooden screens, that might be planting some trees,
there's many different things that you can do to add privacy. But by adding privacy,
making people feel like this is their, that they're not being stared at by a thousand
people every time they go outside can help to make a great impression.
Tip number eleven is to create noise reduction. If you are on a busy road then obviously a
drawback of your property is going to be the noise and the traffic. And so this is going
to be a drawback regardless of whether you create noise reduction or not. But if people
are looking in this price range and saying "okay well you know I'm happy to look on a
busy road by creating noise reduction" so when they walk into the property the noise
goes away, well automatically they're thinking "this is great, it's almost like I don't even
live on a busy road at all." So you can do this by, you can use bushes, you can use fences,
there's many different things that you can do to create noise reduction in your property
and so definitely consider that if you are on a busy road.
Tip number twelve is to install outdoor lighting. Now this is something not many people would
think about and I can understand why they wouldn't. But what happens is when people
are interested in a property they're going to drive by that property probably late at
night probably after work or maybe they'll do a sneaky jump over the fence and look in
your windows when you're selling your property but more often than that, interested buyers
are going to be looking at property at night or doing drive-by just to show it t their
friends or whatever. So by investing in an outdoor lighting, something that's going to
make your property look beautiful something's going to make you garden look amazing you
can actually increase the appeal of that property and those interested buyers who are coming
around and looking at it at night are going to be amazed and when they show their friends
their friends are going to be amazed and then they are going to be more likely to buy it.
I remember when my mom was selling a property that I was living in at the time, it was a
unit. I went down to the...it was on for sale, they had some open for inspections, I get
down at night to get something from the car and there's some people, they are like poking
their heads around in my garage and in under cover area and that was interested buyers
in the property. It was nine o'clock at night or ten o'clock at night, it was pretty late
but they're scoping it out because they were interested and they were making offers. So
people do look at night, I have proof of it so do your best to make you property look
great at night. Tip number thirteen is to create an inviting
space in that front yard. So that might mean putting some pot plants out, it might mean
getting some outdoor furniture I like if you have a really nice front porch getting some
chairs for that front porch. By creating an inviting space you're helping people to imagine
themselves in that situation. And what you want to do is get people imagining themselves
in that property and so then obviously they are going to make offers and want to buy the
property. So make the space as inviting as possible.
Tip number fourteen is to ensure low-maintenance. I've been to many properties and even though
the garden has been lovely it's extremely high maintenance garden and it's a massive
turn off for me. But in most situations where there is a high maintenance garden it's actually
not well-kept and it's not looking as good as I know that it could look and I just look
at it and I think "oh my gosh, this is going to be so much work to bring up to speed and
to maintain" and unless that's your target market (people who love gardening) try to
make it as low maintenance as possible. Beautiful garden but not a garden that you have to do
a lot to, not a lot of weeding, not a lot of trimming, whatever. Try and make it as
low maintenance as possible. And last tip, tip number fifteen is to clean
up the mess. It still amazes me when I go to open houses and there are toys on the front
lawn or there’s rubbish in the backyard and people just haven't cleaned up properly.
Put stuff away, if you got a garden shed just chock all your stuff in there and don't let
buyer see it, especially in the front lawn, even in the back lawn, you don't want people
staring at and looking at all your kids dirty toys or the yoyo or the bike that's been there
for 10 years that you haven't a moved that has weeds growing up it. Clean up the mess,
get rid of it, keep it all sparks keep it all just a nice garden; again we're trying
to get people to imagine themselves living in there.
So there you have 15 tips, 15 ways that you can increase the street appeal of your property.
Pretty easy actually, a lot of these tips and techniques aren't very hard to implement
and aren't very hard to do. And by increasing the street appeal of your property you are
going to increase the chance that your property will sell faster and increase the chance that
your property is going to sell for a higher price. If you want more videos, articles or
podcast just like this one then head ova to OnProperty.com.au or you're in you're on your
mobile phone go to pca.im which is my short link which will redirect you there. So until
tomorrow when the next episode comes out, stay positive!