Winter is nearly here and if you are considering selling and looking to get a great result for your property then you will love our 5 tips to host a great winter open home.
Your open house is your chance to show off the potential of your property and the season can impact how buyers feel in the home significantly. It is important to tweak your strategy to cater to the season you are selling in, this will set the scene for buyers and help them imagine how they will live in the home. Here’s our advice for creating a cosy environment for buyers in winter.
1. Candles
Candles are always a good idea all year round in our opinion, you can’t go wrong adding a beautiful scent in your property. In the cooler months in particular a candle can also create wonderful ambiance in a property and add soft lighting, especially on those dark dreary days. We particularly love spicy, smoky, and woody scents during winter. Cinnamon, pine, clove, amber, tobacco, patchouli, or bergamot are all great options. Candles can also help mask odours that tend to get trapped in the home during winter due to reduced aeration.
2. Winter décor
It’s important that your décor caters to the winter buyer and makes the property feel warm and cosy. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean you need to swap out key furniture items, you can simply create this environment with accessories. Adding layers with throws and cushions is the first place to start. Warm, fluffy, faux fur throws add warmth instantly. Cushions are also a great addition, again faux fur can work or rich fabrics like velvet or leather and colours like crimson red, burnt orange and olive green are perfect. Lighting is also important during winter, adding some additional floor or table lamps can add both ambient and functional light in your property.
3. Weather preparation
When it comes to your open houses, one thing you can’t control is the weather. You can help to mitigate it though, by preparing in advance. If you are expecting rain, then have a couple of clean towels and a door mat for buyers to wipe their feet ready to go. Add an umbrella stand at the front too so that buyers don’t drag wet umbrellas through your property. If it’s a cold day, then have the heating on and warm the house ahead of time so that buyers feel cosy when they arrive and want to stay longer. Make sure your gutters are clear to avoid any significant water run off which will might distract and inconvenience buyers coming to inspect.
4. Airflow and odour
In winter we tend to have our homes closed to avoid the cold escaping, but this can cause trapped odours which might not be obvious to us if we are living in the home. In the days before your open house, open all your windows and doors to get as much air flow through the property as possible and flush out those trapped smells. It’s best to do this ahead of time, not right before the open home so that you can appropriately heat the home too. Avoid cooking anything with a strong smell a few days before the open homes, as cooking smells can linger and be hard to clear.
5. Lighting
This might seem like an obvious one but it’s something that is often overlooked when getting a home ready for an open for inspection. There are few buyers looking for dark and dank properties so the more light you can add in the property the better. That means turning on all lights inside the property for the duration of the open home – even during the day. Adding lamps, as suggested earlier, will increase ambient light and warmth in the home too. Consider holding your open homes at times when the property gets the most natural light, this will depend on the aspect of the property and where the sun sits in the sky at certain times of the day.
For more information on how to increase the value of your home in winter, speak to one of our qualified stylists today.