When selling a home, you want to get as much money as you can for it meaning you have to prepare your home to be sold. Many sellers focus on the inside, which is obviously important but when a potential buyer pulls up to your home the first thing they are going to see is the outside and the lawn. Taking the time to do some landscaping and outside maintenance can add a lot of value to your home. We have had clients who show up to a home and don’t end up even going inside because of how disgusted they are by the outside. Not only is an unkempt lawn work for the future buyer, but it also shows potential buyers that if the outside is unkempt, then the inside could be easily just as bad or worse. About a month before you sell your home, take the time to do a little bit of yard work such as trimming overgrown bushes, pick any weeds you might see, rake up any leaves and add a new layer of mulch.

I recently just went through all the above maintenance listed, not because I am selling my home, but because it’s good to take care of your lawn and to keep it maintained throughout your time living there so that when you eventually do think about selling, you won’t have to do much work at all. You can easily pay someone to do this work for you, but once I got the estimate I decided it was best to just do it myself and plus I would feel accomplished in knowing I did it myself. As you can see the picture on the left was the front of my house before I did the work. The bushes are overgrown, weeds are popping out everywhere, you can barely see the rocks outlining the area and overall, I just felt like there was too much going on.

The first step I took was to use my electric hedge trimmer. The bushes were way overgrown so I trimmed them down a lot and then I shaped them how I wanted. Next, I had to pick up everything I had trimmed off which was a lot more than I thought and took up two whole garbage bins, so before you start make sure your garbage bins are empty. Next, I took a step back and looked at the area and still felt like there was too much going on so I actually ended up getting rid of a few bushes, so you could easily see some of the pretty ones in the back. I then started pulling all the weeds I could. Now it was time for the mulch. I did my research and found that weeds will still easily come up, so a good idea is to use cardboard or newspaper and lay it down in the whole area. I just grabbed some cardboard from the recycling center. After that I went to the store and bought mulch, which is fairly cheap. I ended up having to buy more bags, but in the end this area used 7 bags of mulch so if you have an area bigger or smaller than this, keep that in mind. I laid down the mulch and spread it evenly, so it was about two inches thick. Then I took out all the rocks since they had kind of been buried and re-laid them. The last step I did was moved some of the rocks closer to the plants since I had cut down a few and put new soil and grass seeds in the other area.

This project took me less than a week and I feel that my yard looks so much better. If I had been selling my home and a buyer saw my yard before hand they might have still been interested in the home, but now that I fixed it up it would be more appealing to them. A few other tips to make your yard more appealing when selling is to clean your gutters, power wash your home to make it cleaner looking, clean your windows and even paint the outside of your front door or replace the house numbers in order to make your house look newer and stand out to potential buyers.

If you are thinking about selling your home or have any questions about real estate in Greenville, South Carolina or the surrounding areas, please give us a call at 864-438-5050 and we will be happy to assist you. Visit www.GreenvilleRealEstateHub.com for more information on local real estate.