Tips To Getting The Exterior Of Your Lakefront House Ready To Sale

So you are considering selling your lake house. It may be scary in these tough economic times and you may need to consider staging your lake house to make your home more appealing to prospective buyers and to get the price you desire. Staging your house is the act of setting up your house in such a manner that it is appealing to potential buyers.

To be really effective, you should look at both the interior and the exterior of your lake house. Here are three tips to get you started with the exterior of your lake house:

1. Go stand on the street to see what clients see when driving up to the house. Be aware that any negative impressions they get outside the house (landscaping not maintained or non-existent, peeling paint, etc.) is just going to make them think that the house itself has not been well taken care of. So even if you have spent the time and money to fix up the interior, it would all be wasted if the clients get a bad first impression as they drive up to the house.

2. As the prospective buyer is waiting for the Realtor is open the front door, what do they see? Will the buyers see nice potted and inground plants, clean and insect free corners in and around the front entry? Are your Christmas lights from still up in the middle of the summer? A good clean exterior keeps the positive energy flowing as they enter the interior of the lake house.

It will pay dividends to make the effort to clean and make the surrounding area look nice. Why not go ahead and put a fresh coat of paint on any furniture or accessories.

3. As your buyers enter the backyard, they will obliviously want to see the lake. Having a clean, well-maintained path to the lake with no overgrown trees or shrubbery will open up the view and allow the buyers to experience that lasting impression. You may even consider adding new picnic table or lawn furniture near the lake to allow them to sit, relax a moment and take in the view. Do you have a dock at the lake? If so, does it need some repair work?

And the biggest tip of all? Think of yourself as the potential buyer looking at your lakefront house for the very first time. What impressions do you get? Would you buy your lake house? What changes would you like to see made before you put an offer to purchase your house?

And don’t worry about spending a lot of money to get your house ready to sell you’ll recoup it when your house sells. Proper staging helps you sell your lake house in a shorter period of time and at the price you want.

Hubert Miles is the founder of Waterfront Houses USA, an online listing service that offers Lakefront Houses and Lake Houses For Sale available in the US and Canada.