3 Tips for Getting Your Home Ready to Show Without Spending Much Money

So you wanna get your home ready to show, but you don't have much money to do fancy things like hiring a professional stager or renting a bunch of posh furniture that you'd never in a million years dare sit on? It's OK, it's not really that difficult to prep your home for showing with the things you already have -- you just have to think like a buyer. Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Give your landscape a haircut

If you're not a stylist, this might be a terrible suggestion, but improving your home's curb appeal is the no. 1 thing you can do to attract buyers. Once they're already in love with the outside of your home, they're going to be far more likely to want to come inside. Tidying up your landscape not only improves your home's overall enticement score, it can also be important for someone who's trying to get a mortgage to buy the property.

Even though it's not supposed to make a difference, the way your home presents itself can influence how an appraiser sees it, and may result in a lower appraisal. Simply cutting back bushes away from your house, trimming trees that are touching the roof, keeping the lawn mowed, and putting some extra mulch out for your plants can really refresh the whole look.

2. Declutter and enhance your living space

Everybody, everywhere, will tell you to declutter your home before listing it. But what does that mean?  

I've been in a lot of homes as a real estate agent, and what I can tell you that works is to eliminate everything that's not absolutely necessary this week, including decorative furniture you rarely use. Put it in storage, get it off the property, make your house look huge. Your house is probably bigger than it feels because you've been living in it so long and have managed to collect a lot of stuff -- we all do that.

Once you've successfully decluttered, you can spend a few bucks on some nice coordinating pillows and throws that are very "Live, Laugh, Love" and some nice fake flowers to bring a little cheer back into your home, but in a vaguely generic way. People want to see your home as a home, but they don't want to see you in it, if that makes sense.

It's not about you, of course, it's about them and their imaginations, but if you want to sell your house, you have to remember that you effectively don't live there anymore, but every potential buyer does (or should be able to see themselves doing so).

3. Let in the light

No one ever believes me until they do this, but cleaning your windows and the glass shades on your overhead lighting and replacing the bulbs with brighter options can really make your home feel open and airy. It's like magic, removing all those years of nearly transparent grime. Glass shades can go directly into the dishwasher to save you even more time.

This is so important for your house showing well because it makes it feel clean. Even if you know there's a year of dog hair in the carpet pad, all that light and those sunbeams coming in from outside just feel…different. If your buyer is using a mortgage to buy your home, it'll help them, too, as the illusion of space is something even people who look at houses constantly feel acutely. Plus, it can affect the more subjective parts of the appraisal by encouraging appraisers to grade your home's condition slightly higher than they might if it was a dark pit.

Getting your house ready to show doesn't have to be expensive

You can go all out, hire designers, change the carpet, paint all the walls, and rebuild the kitchen before your next showing, or you can do what most people expect you'll do and make your house tidy and neat, and deceptively large. Everything you do from this moment on with your home will be with the sole purpose of luring in a buyer who will see it for what it has always been -- a great place to call home -- and set their sights (and their new mortgage lender) on it.