When it comes to the housing market, every season has its own merits and flaws. With that being said, there are several factors that can improve the chances of selling a home in winter, the season of holidays and cold. We put our heads together for a while and came up with a quartet of especially noteworthy incentives that ought to attract winter buyers.
Central Heating
While this may seem like one of the most obvious features in any home, there are still some houses that lack a centralized means of heating. Even if a home features a handful of carefully positioned gas heaters along certain walls, a proper HVAC system that can fully saturate specific rooms, an entire floor or the whole house will always prove to be a compelling piece of real estate in the colder months.
Having a Fireplace
While central heating is all well and good, the presence of a fireplace tends to convey a message of coziness, warmth and age. If you have a chimney-style fireplace in a large room suitable for entertaining, so much the better for your prospective buyers; having a roaring fire greeting potential buyers that are likely irritating by cold temperatures can make a wonderful first impression.
Having a Hot Tub
While a luxury feature like a hot tub is always an eye-catching installation, that quality is far from the only thing they are good for. When the season of snow rears its head in your area, a hot tub can augment the same message that having a fireplace or well-installed central heating does-this is a home that will keep its residents warm and toasty during the coldest and darkest of times. Beyond the obvious signs of warmth and value, hot tub ownership can offer several other features that you can sell interested buyers on while you offer them a complementary soak to talk things over.
Hot tubs are a notable way of administering several hydrotherapeutic exercises that can restore sore or numb muscles to a loose, warm state. This can be especially useful for athletes or older residents.
Hot tubs make for an excellent way to socialize. Whether your prospective buyers are looking for a place for their whole family to relax, a way to entertain small groups of friends or even to confidentially discuss business matters-like negotiating your home’s sale price between their initial offer and your asking price, the perfectly heated and jet-blasted waters of a hot tub are the perfect venue.
Having Plenty of Light Sources
The winter months increase the amount of darkness people deal with and they also tend to cause people to become more emotional, for better or worse. By ensuring that you have a strong amount of light emanating from within your home, it can serve as a stronger beacon to prospective buyers. While this means that you are more likely to snag interested parties, having a prominent and attractive lighting rig, possibly bolstered by landscape lighting, means that you create a stronger level of emotional resonance from the buyers that come to your door to look around-when done right, you will have created the perfect ambiance to capture their interest and sell them the idea that you have the perfect house for those people.
So there you have four ways you can positively influence the chances of making a house sale in the winter months. Be mindful that while, on average, you will not gain as many interested parties as you might in the warmer months of spring or summer, having even one of these features can do wonders attracting that relatively smaller pool of winter-time buyers. Another benefit to putting your home on the market in winter is that you increase your odds of selling it sooner than you might in the warmer months, when you are more likely to encounter window-shoppers.