RE/MAX Real Estate Cairns | Tips on Preparing Your Home for Sale
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CityLife REAL ESTATE
RE/MAX Real Estate Cairns
Tips on Preparing Your Home for Sale
Ray & David Murphy
: (07) 40 444 888
: www.remaxcairns.com.au
With many people considering selling their homes at the moment, there are a few tips and tricks that can help you prepare to maximise your sale price and secure a sale sooner rather than later. Buyers are looking for a home that is low maintenance, and they want to be able to visualise themselves and their family living there, so making sure the property is tidy, the gardens are well maintained and the house is de-personalised is key.
You don’t need to go to the extremes of staging a home, it can just be the little things that count such as putting out some fresh flowers and nice cushions on the couch. Your agent will make sure before they show a property, either by a private viewing or an open home, that the place presents well and most importantly of all in the tropics, that it’s cool.
Stock levels are still at an all-time low, so buyers at the moment are starting to become a lot more flexible with the prerequisite attributes they are looking for and even the areas they are looking in at the moment, but it does depend on whether they are an investor or owner occupier. The main thing all buyers in the marketplace are looking for is security – they want to make sure they’re not buying at the top of the market and in a really volatile market that’s going to chop and change quite quickly. Because Cairns is quite a buoyant market that hasn’t seen the peaks and troughs the metropolitan areas have had over the years, the market here offers buyers that security, and we are seeing that with the growth and confidence in regional areas currently.
Selecting the right agent is key to maximising your returns when selling your property. A professional real estate agent is not only a skilled negotiator but also a professional marketer, and it’s important that you get an agent who is skilled across all suburbs of Cairns because, with stock levels being at a record low, buyers will be looking at other options.
People have been nervous about the interest rate rises, but the benefit to our area is that even with interest rate increases Cairns is still super affordable compared to metropolitan areas. The interest rate rises will tighten the upper end of the market, with home repayments on $1.5 million homes blowing out, which is a real benefit to the more affordable homes from the $500,000 to $1 million bracket. Cairns is still super affordable, but with the cost to build increasing with material price hikes, the already established homes are starting to get a lot more attention in the marketplace. We don’t expect prices in the Cairns market to change much though even with the interest rate increases — we’re pretty safe here.
We are still seeing a lot of southern interest looking at Cairns, with one in three properties selling here at RE/MAX Real Estate to a southern buyer. We’re finding that there’s a lot more flexibility with working from home, and people are looking to move north at record levels. And I mean let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to live in Cairns?
