Here’s How to Prepare a Home for Sale in NOLA

by Deveney Marshall

Preparing to sell a house in New Orleans is a major undertaking, and even in a hot housing market there’s a lot that goes into it. Making a few key changes and rearranging a few key items could mean the difference of thousands–or tens of thousands–of dollars in sale price.

The home market in New Orleans is very good right now, with the median price in Orleans County, LA at $350k in December 2021, trending up 7.7% over a year ago. It’s a seller’s market, and we can help you sell your home in New Orleans, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do everything you can to make the most out of your property. There are things you can do to raise the price substantially–and sometimes the smallest things seem to matter the most.

Here’s what you need to do to sell your home in New Orleans.

Inspect Your Home and Prioritize Repairs

Before you put your home up for sale in New Orleans, put yourself in the shoes of a buyer and walk through your yard and home, inspecting every little thing, trying to see things not as the people who have lived there for years, but as people who are looking at it for the first time. What stands out to you as the biggest problems with your home? Are shingles starting to come off? Is the paint chipping? Siding sagging? Are there cracks in the windows? Broken tiles in the floor?

All of these things are going to affect a potential homebuyer’s impression of your home, and you need to decide if the cost to fix them now is going to make you more profit than if you didn’t fix them. Some repairs are easy–they can be covered with a coat of paint. Other repairs betray bigger problems–your roof is sagging and will need to be replaced.

Talk to one of the realtors at Rêve Realtors to get their opinion of what you need to repair before you put your home on the market in New Orleans. Prioritize what you can afford, what will give you the biggest bang for your buck, and then do the things to make your New Orleans house sell.

Work on Curb Appeal

One of the biggest things that you need to work on–that you might not think about–is curb appeal. You spend so much time inside your house that you may not notice that some bushes are overgrown or that vines are crawling all over the chimney or that there’s a weedy patch by the side of the fence.

SO MUCH of your potential homebuyers’ decisions to purchase your home in New Orleans is going to be based on their initial impressions when they pull up to the house and step out onto the curb. They will immediately be sizing up the home, long before they see the renovated kitchen or the new paint job in the family room. If they think the yard looks bad, they’re going to think the house is probably hiding some problems.

It’s a numerical fact that you get more profit for your house, dollar for dollar, working on the curb appeal of your house than you do working on the interior. If you have $3000 to spend and could either replace bad siding or put in a new bathroom shower and vanity, the exterior of the house is the way to go (in most cases). Again, your realtor at Reve Realtors will be able to guide you to sell your home in New Orleans, but there’s no underestimating how important the outside of your house is.

Minimize–Make it Feel Big

When you’re getting the interior of your home looking good, you should minimize as much as you can, even if it means putting some of your furniture into storage. You want your home to feel spacious. You want to give people the opportunity to imagine what it would be like living in your home, and the more space they have to stretch out and imagine the room with their furniture and their rugs and their decor, the easier it’s going to be to get them to buy your New Orleans home.

Depersonalize the House

Likewise, while you’re in the process of selling your home and having open houses and the realtor is bringing people through, you should depersonalize as much as possible. As mentioned above, people like to imagine that it’s their home–they don’t want to feel like they’re guests in someone else’s life. Selling your home in New Orleans means making some temporary sacrifices.

Yes, this is going to be hard, because it takes a while to sell a home and packing up your family photos is going to be a bit of a pain, but it really can make all the difference in the world. Homebuyers won’t be looking at the people who are currently living there–you might not even be at the home during the open house at all–but they’ll be picturing their own family portrait above the fireplace. It makes it less personal to you, but more personal to them. And that makes it easier to sell your home in New Orleans.

Touch Up the Paint–But Only if Necessary

Touching up the paint in the house is a great idea, but you have to be strategic. If you have a wall that is discolored because there was a leak in the ceiling, and you’ve just painted one wall to cover up that stain? Savvy purchasers are going to catch on that you’re trying to hide something.

Not every room needs a new coat of paint. Some do, and you should follow Rêve Realtor’s advice in which ones could probably use it, but don’t think you need to remodel to sell your New Orleans home.

If you do repaint, statistics show that going for something hip and trendy is NOT the way to go. Stick to neutrals. Maybe the new homebuyers are just going to come in and repaint over your taupe with scarlet, but you’ll get more interest when people see possibilities than when they see problems. And taupe can go with a lot of things, while scarlet can only go with a few. Don’t give your potential homebuyers a list of fixes–the knowledge they’re going to have to repaint a trendy room to match their tastes will be a mark against you.

Keep It Clean And Add Little Details

We know that the open houses and showing the home can go on for a long time, and it can get draining, but you must do everything you can to keep the house clean so that, with little notice, potential homebuyers can come take a tour.

And there are little things you can do to make the home feel more like home. Fresh cut flowers are always welcome, and there’s nothing better than something baking in the oven. Avoid incense and chemical air fresheners, but keep it pleasant and inviting. That’s the way to sell a home in New Orleans.

Conclusion

Following the above steps will get you started on the process for selling a home in New Orleans, but involving Rêve Realtors will ensure you’re on the right track. We’ve helped sell hundreds of New Orleans homes, and can bring this expertise and experience to help sell your home, too.