Staging a Home For Sale During The Holidays

While the holidays are a favorite time of year for millions, it’s definitely not their favorite time to buy a home. The housing market plunges between the months of November and January as people put turkey dinners, tinsel and trees on the top of their lists and house hunting on the bottom. However, if you really need to sell during the holiday season, it does have a few advantages: shoppers are typically more serious and the competition is calmer. If you are committed to putting your house for sale at this most wonderful time of the year, consider these tips:

1. Decorate your home festively, but don’t go overboard and cover up important features. Also, put treats out for buyers and crank up the heat for a cozy winter escape.
2. Post top-quality photos and videos of your house on the web. Many buyers do their shopping from the warmth of their homes when the weather is bitter.
3. Make sure your curb appeal is striking! Keep fallen leaves raked and snow neatly groomed.
4. Get yourself a reliable real estate agent and seek out serious buyers such as work re-locators.
5. As always, price to sell!!

October sales - How to Sell a Haunted House : HGTV FrontDoor Real Estate

via frontdoor.com

Some houses give off a weird vibe. Scott Fladhammer, a real estate agent in Fort Wayne, Ind., was asked by a snowbird to sell her furnished but otherwise empty house. That in itself wasn't odd, but the neighbors' reaction to the home was. Everyone warned him that it was haunted. Seemingly sane people insisted that they had looked through the windows and saw mysterious objects moving throughout the house.

Upon opening the front door, Fladhammer thought that they might have a point as wall-to-wall black mold greeted him. But it wasn't long after that he learned the plumbing had burst, and the basement had flooded. Furniture had indeed been moving; it was floating in the water.

But other times, it's harder to explain away a house's behavior. Jonathan D. Nicholas, the national president for the Council of Real Estate Brokerage Managers and based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, recalls showing a woman a house and coming to a room, where she suddenly said, 'I have to get out of here, I have to walk outside,' and she did. Nicholas followed her and on the front lawn she tried to explain her behavior. "I just kept seeing red," she said, "and all I wanted to do was kill myself."

Nicholas later asked the seller, who said that a murder had taken place in the house.

It may be a problem that one only thinks about during the Halloween season, but if you're trying to sell a haunted house, it's a dilemma every day of the year. Fortunately, if you have a house that the community believes -- or that you believe -- is haunted, there are some steps you can take:

Step 1: Don't get spooked by the law >>
Step 2: Give eerie rumors the ax >>
Step 3: Call in the ghostbusters >>
Step 4: Rest in peace after last-resort tactics >>

Start off my 31Days of Trick-or-Treat - Sweepstakes : HGTV FrontDoor Real Estate

• Sweeps Main
• Entry Form
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Spooky Sweepstakes

Enter once per day for your chance to win $3,000 in cash to "trick" out part of your home or to "treat" yourself to a down payment on your next home.

Enter Daily Through Nov. 1, 2011, at 5 p.m. ET

via frontdoor.com