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It’s not all about how to sell your home for a great price. You usually would like it to sell fast as well. Having your home languish on the market for weeks or months does you no good. According to the National Association of Realtors, the average time a home in the U.S. stayed on the market before selling in 2006 was 4 weeks. In some areas, that time was even longer. In any case having your home sitting on the market while you look for a new home is analogous to torture.

What can you do to ensure your home sells fast? Aside from reasonable pricing, it’s all about the presentation. Just like in retail sales or in a restaurant, attractive presentation will make all the difference. Just as your dinner at Spago looks a whole lot better than the chow you picked up in the army chow line, how your home looks to prospective buyers will make a major difference in the time your home is on the market. Due to this phenomenon, companies that specialize in home staging have thrived in the past few years. Many of the things they do you can accomplish yourself, if you’ve got a $1,000 and a few weekends of spare time.

One of the keys is the overall condition of your home. If your home has holes in the walls and is in pretty miserable state of disrepair, you may have your work cut your for you. On the other hand, if your home is in basically good shape, you’re ready to go. Just like in the restaurant analogy, how your home looks the first time the prospective buyer lays eyes on it goes a long way to making sure it will move into the “sold” column relatively quickly. There are a few things that affect this right off the bat. Realtors call this “curb appeal”. Be prepared to put in few weekends of really hard work; the kind that will make you feel like you’ve been through a Marine Corps boot camp.

Home sales success rule #1 – Make sure the prospect sees a nice front yard – The first thing a buyer sees when they pull up should be a neat, tidy yard. Get rid of all debris, mow the yard for Christ’s sake, and do a bang up job of weeding and edging. A few yards of new beauty bark goes a long way here. If your porch is looking rather long in the tooth, spend a day repairing, repainting and refinishing it. I guarantee the first buyer that puts their foot through a rotten board in your front porch will not offer your top dollar any time soon.

The front door is vital in the overall appearance of your home. You want it to be inviting. Repaint it and maybe even put in shiny, new door hardware. In some cases you can even make a case for replacing it with a new one. If you’re handy, you can replace it in a couple of hours. Pre-hung doors are available at the local mega home improvement warehouse for a few hundred dollars, maybe less during a sale.

If the sidewalk leading up to that front door is missing chunks and cracked, you may be able to replace it for minimal dollars too. Concrete is pretty inexpensive, and if you can build a form out of 2x4s and round up some rebar, you can make a beautiful new sidewalk. Paving stones are another option here. They are pretty reasonable if you look around. . (See yesterday’s post about how to get building materials for free for some insight) It will probably cost you more to haul the old sidewalk away than to put in your new one. Remember, the operative word is “inviting”. You want people to come into your house with a warm feeling that says “I’m home.” If you’re lucky, they soon will be.

Home sales success rule #2 – Clean everything like you’ve never cleaned before. - All the tricks and hard work on the curb appeal won’t mean squat if a shambles greets the unsuspecting buyer when they walk through the front door. Clean the inside of your house from top to bottom. As important as cleaning dirt from the surfaces is a complete de-cluttering of every room. There should be nothing to detract from the appearance of any of the rooms.

In addition, stacks of crap, even neat stacks, raise the hackles of buyers and make the room seem smaller. When you’re trying to sell your house, small rooms don’t help. To assess the success of your cleaning efforts, have an outside observer, such as a neighbor, friend or relative come over and take a look see. Often they’ll spot problems you might miss due to your familiarity with the house.

If you have rooms with too much furniture, or an eclectic collection of furniture that matches neither itself nor your home, haul it away, have a yard sale, or store it before the first potential buyer opens the door. Some homeowners simply have too much furniture and could stand, for the purposes of selling their house faster, to get rid of some of it. As with clutter, less furniture can also make a room seem larger.

Home sales success rule #3 – Paint all rooms – unless you recently painted, paint every room, including trim. Paint can be your best friend in a home sales situation. It can make all manner of sins disappear. Make sure you clean the walls thoroughly first, lest any dirt or grease show through the paint when you’re finished. In addition to the fresh, new, look, paint will give your house a fresh, new smell. That freshness makes buyers subconsciously feel welcome and at home.

One note regarding painting: nothing too outrageous. You want to appeal to the maximum number of potential buyers. Great colors are lighter shades such as off-white, light tan, light taupe. You can try to create nice touches such as painting one wall a different color as an accent wall, but make sure you consult someone who knows color first.

Home sales success rule #4 – Depersonalize it. – That trophy your kid won for their karate tournament a few years ago may still make you proud, but displaying it won’t help you sell your home. You want to make the buyer feel as if it’s their home, not yours. Pack away most of your family photos, and definitely don’t have them lining the halls. Another bonus you’ll receive when you remove the photos and posters from the walls is that you’ll see where the walls have faded and how badly you really need that repaint after all.

You may want to consider hiring a home staging firm. They can sometimes make a huge difference. These companies are well versed in such subtleties as furniture arranging and paint colors. The better home stagers are experts in buyer psychology. If your home is more than a few hundred thousand dollars, the money you pay a home staging company is a comparative drop in the bucket. Just watch one of those shows on TV where the buyers laugh behind the seller’s backs for a reason to hire a home staging company. They may not be right for everyone, but home staging has dramatically increased in popularity for a reason. As you would when shopping for anything else, be thorough. Look around, and get recommendations.

The bottom line is that for a month's worth of weekends and few thousand dollars, if your house needs a bit of work, or a weekend and couple of nights after work if it doesn't, can make all the difference when you are trying to sell your house. Good luck!