When you’re trying to get your home sold, you have to anticipate that buyers will want to see every square inch of it… and that includes the garage. For some home sellers, this can be a little vexing. After all, it’s pretty normal for garages to be cluttered, if not altogether disarrayed. As part of the process of selling a house, we’d recommend you spend some time cleaning, staging, and decluttering your garage as best you can. Here are our tips.
Want to Get Your Home Sold? Take Care of the Garage.
Clean it Up
First things first: Spend some time cleaning your garage and making it look as aesthetically pleasing as can be. If there are unfinished concrete walls, a fresh coat of paint may be in order. Likewise for walls that have been stained by pet urine. If you’ve got work benches, clean them off. And make sure you vacuum and dust, just like you would with an inside room.
Make Sure Your Car Fits
If you have so much stuff in your garage that you can’t actually fit your vehicle in it, that’s a problem. It means you need to either throw some stuff away, or rent an external storage unit. It’s important that you have your car in the garage during showings, because it helps buyers to better visualize how the garage space can be used and organized. If you can fit your car in the garage, it helps buyers see they will be able to fit their car in the garage!
Get Rid of Hazardous Materials
Something else we’d recommend during the process of selling a house: Remove hazardous materials from the garage. This includes antifreeze, heavy-duty cleaners, propane… basically anything you wouldn’t want to keep within reach of small children. Seeing these items casually adorning your garage can make buyers feel just a little jittery. It’s okay to keep a gasoline tank in the garage, but we’d recommend keeping it on the wall farthest from the home itself. (This is just in the interest of basic safety.)
Take Out the Trash
Actually, you’re probably better off removing trash cans and bins from your garage altogether, as they tend to be breeding grounds for mice and other rodents. If they accumulate any kind of moisture, they can also cause mold build-up. While you’re at it, make sure you don’t have any big stacks of paper in your garage. These, too, can attract different kinds of critters, which is definitely not what buyers want to see!
Mount Storage Solutions
One big concern that most homeowners have: Where can we put all our stuff? The garage can be an excellent storage space, but only if you keep it well-organized. Show your buyers how useful the garage space can be by installing some pegboards, hooks, and other storage solutions on the walls. Some cheap but sturdy shelving units may also be beneficial as you think about staging and showing your garage.
Declutter, Declutter, Declutter
There’s no big trick to it; you’ve just got to get rid of the clutter. That’s the only way you can really emphasize the space available in your garage. One thing you might do is go through the garage, locate any items you don’t need anymore, and donate them to charity. Of course, some items you’re better off just throwing away. You can try a garage sale if you want to get rid of stuff and maybe generate a few bucks in the process. And again, you can also invest in an outside storage unit, at least until you finish selling your own property. The bottom line: You’ve got to do serious decluttering if you want the garage to be an asset, not a hindrance, to your home sale.
More Tips for Selling Your Own Property
Staging the garage is an important step in the process of selling your property. But there’s much more to it than just that. That’s why we want to offer you a free seller’s report from SOLD.com. In it, you’ll get a personalized recommendation for how to list and sell your home, meeting your real estate goals as expediently as can be. Claim your report whenever you’re ready.
