If you plan on selling your home this winter — or any winter, for that matter — then you’ll also need to plan on hosting interested buyers for home showings. And, unlike hosting home showings any other time of the year, winter showings usually require some extra preparation.
If your home is based in a cold climate like ours in downtown Toronto, then there’s a great chance you receive quite a bit of snow and precipitation during the winter. And as you might’ve guessed, hosting winter showings can get messy because of it.
However harsh your winter climate is, however, snowfall should never be a reason not to list your home, especially if it’s an opportune time in the market to sell. All you need to do is go through a few additional preparatory steps to make sure you can keep your home clean between buyer appointments.
For our advice on how to do just that, here’s how you can go about keeping your home clean during winter showings.
Clear Your Walkway
If you’re worried about your visiting guests dragging snow, ice, and everything not-so-nice into your home during winter showings, then the first thing you can do to prevent that is to reduce the opportunity for them to drag mess into your home in the first place.
If you own a single family house, that means grabbing a shovel and clearing off the walkway up to your front door. If the snow, slush, and ice aren’t there to begin with, then your visiting potential buyers won’t bring it in with them.
This is also a good safety practice and will help those visiting buyers feel more secure entering your home during a winter showing, which is definitely something that will work to your advantage as a seller. To make things extra safe, regularly throw down a generous sprinkling of salt on your walkway to prevent ice from building up and give visitors some more secure footing.
Every successful home sale starts with a professional estimate of its current market value. To find out what you can expect to receive for your home right now, head over to our What Is Your Home Worth? page here.
Set Out A Nice Welcome Mat
There’s almost nothing as inviting as a fresh welcome mat at the foot of your front doorstep — actually, you’d be surprised just how much a brand-new mat can transform an entryway. However, the use of a new welcome mat in this instance is two-fold.
Not only will it make your front door look much more inviting (and therefore, your home more enticing for buyers), but it will also give them an opportunity to wipe their snow-covered boots off before entering your home.
Remember what we said about salt above? Well, without a welcome mat at your front door, you can be sure a lot of that will end up inside your home if your potential buyers can rub it off on something before setting foot inside.
No matter what stage of your home sale you’re at, we can help you navigate your transaction for success. Find out more about the steps and procedures we recommend you take before you list and while your home is on the market here:
Make Boot Trays Mandatory
Here in Canada, it’s safe to say that the majority of households will politely ask their guests to remove their shoes at the front door, which is the next practice we strongly recommend you take when hosting winter showings.
While you won’t be home to enforce this rule in person, what you can do is set out a polite sign requesting all visitors (buyers and their agents) to remove their shoes and boots and set them aside before entering your home. This is a pretty common practice in the real estate industry and should come as no surprise to your potential buyers.
To make sure those soaking-wet shoes don’t end up leaking all over your entryway floors, set out some stylish rubber boot trays for them to leave their shoes in. If you set your sign up well, your trays should be quite intuitive for visitors to use.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve reconfigured our entire approach to hosting safe home showings. Find out what we’re doing differently on our related post, “Sellers: What To Know About Hosting Home Showings”.
Clear Off Your Coat Rack
In the worst of winter weather, shoes and boots aren’t the only articles of clothing that get covered in wet snow. Chances are, your visitors’ winter jackets and coats will also have quite a bit of pesky precipitation on them too.
To ensure none of it drips off their coats and onto your floor while potential buyers tour your home, clear off your coat rack at your front door so they can hang theirs up — and if you don’t already have a coat rack, make sure you get one.
Cleaning and decluttering your home is a preparatory task you should’ve done well before this stage of your sale, and this includes stowing away extra coats and jackets, especially in highly visual areas like your entryway. Plus, when your visitors hang up their own coats and jackets upon entering your home, they’ll get a subtle sense of how it would feel to do that if they owned the place themselves.
At Sidorova Inwood, we’ve refined our approach to selling a home down to a streamlined process. Find out more about the way we can help you sell your home for its top value on our Selling With Us page here.
Crank Up The Heat
Up until this point, you’ll have requested your guests remove both their boots and winter coats right after they’ve just come in from the cold. In doing so, it’s only polite to make sure they’re nice and warm afterwards.
So, invest an extra little bit into your energy bills this month and knock the heat up a degree or two in your home during scheduled winter showings. You don’t need to leave your heat on until you sell your home, just when you know visitors will be coming around to see your place.
This will encourage them to remove their messy jackets and coats at first, and in addition, it will help them to feel comfortable, cozy, and at home while walking around your home. The more you can make potential buyers feel comfortable in your home, the better chance you have of them submitting a bid.
Need somewhere to hide out between your winter showings? Read up on The Best Spots In The West End To Cozy Up Over Winter here!
Clean Between Showings
Lastly, if you have sufficient time between your scheduled winter showings to return home and do some quick cleaning, we strongly recommend doing so.
Even if it’s just a quick wipe-down of your floors or a speedy rearrange of your welcome mat and boot trays, making your home feel as brand-new as possible ahead of your next scheduled visit is well worth the effort.
You don’t need to feel obligated to mop the floors several times a day while hosting winter showings. However, if there is a big mess — perhaps because someone ignored your charming signs — then it might be handy to have something more heavy-duty than a few paper towels on hand to deal with the puddles.
Can’t wait to get your home showing-ready this winter? We can show you how. All you need to do is Book A Seller’s Consultation here.
