Autumn is the second-best season to sell your house (with spring being the best). Everyone’s home from holidays, the kids are back at school and people are thinking about being in a new home for Christmas. Plus that, the evenings are still long enough (in September anyway) for after-work viewings. It’s warm enough to view a property and then spend an evening walking through the neighbourhood or dropping into the local pub garden to check out the residents.
If you’re getting ready to sell now, then you’ll probably be on the market during autumn, so here’s how to make the most of it.
Tidy up the garden
The leaves are falling, so make sure you rake them up. You should also cut back any excess growth that went on in the summer and may be obscuring windows or other external features. Get rid of dead flowers and clean up any garden furniture.
Get some autumn kerb appeal
You need orange and yellow blooms, as well as some pumpkins and squashes, for your front garden or porch. Put your autumnal flowers in pots and arrange your pumpkins around them.
Clean the windows
The summer makes things dirty! There’s dust, leaf matter, greasy fingerprints from the kids… Book a window-cleaner and get everything sparkling again. It looks better from the outside and it lets more light in, which is essential as the nights draw in.
Clean your fireplace
There’s nothing more autumnal than the smell of the first woodfires! If you’re lucky enough to have a working fireplace or a burner, get the chimney cleaned, brush down the fireplace and crank it all up again. If your fireplace is decommissioned, find some autumnal props – pinecones and pumpkins – and arrange them artistically.
Use seasonal accent colours
Again, it’s the red, orange, yellow and gold. Invest in some new cushions, bed linens, maybe some prints and even some knickknacks to make viewers feel autumnal.
Let there be light
The nights will be drawing in, so there’ll be more shadows and they’ll be wider. Open curtains, pull up the blinds and turn on as many lights as you can. This is why you should always clean the windows! Eliminate all dark corners.