2 minute read

Will Personal Style Help or Hinder the Sale of your Home?

Help or Hinder Will Personal Style THE SALE OF YOUR HOME?

by Gwen Holloway and Elena Sanwick, REALTORS®, LUXE Real Estate Group – Luxury Prescott

The benefits of home ownership are numerous, but one of the most desirable advantages is the ability to integrate one’s own personal style into each aspect of the home’s environment. Color choices, landscaping selections, interior fixtures, finishes and décor all give the owners an opportunity to showcase their own personalities and preferences. These style choices are personal and wonderful until it’s time to sell. Then the sellers must ask themselves: “Will my personal style help or hinder the sale of my home?” Three style choices that require rethinking/removing before the home is listed:

COLLECTIONS With affluence comes the ability to collect. Local luxury homes have featured collections of antique cameras, model fighter planes, miniature motorcycles, vintage gas pumps, Irish memorabilia, antique dolls, penguins — the list goes on.

While a room dedicated to a collection or a small number of items displayed throughout the home is interesting to potential buyers, collections that spill over into each room and dominate the décor can be a huge distraction. Less is most definitely more. PAINT COLORS Personal style is often expressed through paint colors, but chances are good that the potential buyers might not share the owner’s love of the primary palette for accent walls, for instance.

An interior painted in a soft neutral tone throughout will be pleasing to most buyers and present them with limitless possibilities so that they can easily inject their own tastes after closing. Repainting the interior is perhaps the simplest and most cost-effective update, often bringing tens of thousands of dollars to the sale’s bottom line.

ARTWORK Works of art can be personal and often have very special meaning or significance. However, just in case potential buyers are sidetracked by monkeys in business suits or Victorian nudes, it’s best to remove even slightly controversial artwork, as it only takes away from the star of the show — the home itself!

Neutralizing one’s style before listing a home can be painful. It requires a shift in perspective from the “home” to cherish to the “house” to sell. It may make it easier to think of the home itself as a canvas on which others may come to create their own environment.

The blanker the canvas, the more potential for different types of style, i.e. buyers!

This article is from: