Every home seller wants two things: a quick sale at the highest possible price. Neither of those desires is unreasonable, but in order to achieve those goals, you'll need to do a few things to make you home more saleable and different from your competition--all the other homes for sale in your neighborhood and price range.
First, look at the outside of your home, since that's what prospective buyers will see first. If you've ever bought a home, you know that you passed up potential homes simply because they looked shabby and unkempt from the street. It's just a quirk of human nature that makes a person think that if a home looks bad from the street, it will be just as bad on the inside--so don't let your home make a negative impression on the outside.
Keep the lawn and landscaping as well-manicured as possible. Keep perennials looking good, and if possible, plant some nice-looking annual flowers to dress up the appearance of your home. Make sure your front door creates a warm, inviting feeling. If it needs a coat of paint, do it. Paint is cheap, and the rewards will be worth the effort.
The kitchen and bathrooms are crucial to making a favorable impression on potential buyers. They'll be spending a considerable amount of time in each of them, so they'll be looking at the kitchen and bathrooms with an especially critical eye. Paint can help immensely in these rooms, as well as making sure that the faucets don't leak and that everything looks fresh, livable, and odor-free.
Of course, the rest of your interior rooms need to be neat, clean, and clear of clutter to make them look bigger and more appealing. Again, if paint is needed to brighten a room, do it, using colors proven to attract your specific buyer's profile. If the buyers want to change it, that's fine, but you want every room in your home to make a favorable impression from the very beginning.
You don't have to spend a huge amount of money to make your house appealing to potential buyers. However, as the old saying goes: you only get one opportunity to make a good first impression. So walk around your house, inside and out, and try to look at it as if it's the first time you've ever seen it. What things do you see that would make a less-than-favorable impression on YOU if you were looking at them for the first time? Those are the things you want to address--long before the first potential buyers pull up in front of your home.
