How to Maximize Your Home's Curb Appeal Before Selling

GUEST POST BY KRIS OTT, THE BRIGHT SIDE SPOKANE

Selling your home comes with a lot of moving parts. The right realtor, the right price, the right timing. You've probably thought about staging the interior, fresh paint, decluttering the closets. All of that matters.

But here's what gets overlooked more often than anything else. The exterior.

A buyer forms an opinion about your home before they walk through the front door. Before they see the kitchen you renovated or the master closet you organized. They form it from the street, in about four seconds, based on what the outside looks like.

I am the owner of The Bright Side, a professional exterior cleaning company serving Spokane and North Idaho. We've worked on hundreds of homes right before they hit the market and seen firsthand what a clean exterior does for a listing. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how to stage your living room but I can tell you exactly what to do outside before your first showing.

Here's our honest advice on what's worth doing and what you can skip.

 

House Washing

Those black streaks running down your siding. The greenish gray tint on the north facing walls. The algae buildup under the eaves that you stopped noticing three years ago. Most buyers will notice all of it immediately.

The good news is that almost all of it comes off with a professional soft wash. Soft washing uses low pressure combined with a professional cleaning solution that kills algae and mildew at the root instead of just blasting the surface. The result is siding that looks the way it did when you moved in, not streaky and questionable.

Beyond the appearance, organic growth on siding holds moisture against the surface and can raise questions during a home inspection about the condition of the exterior. A soft wash before listing eliminates the question entirely.

Our basic house wash starts at $475 and covers homes up to 2,500 Sqft. If you’re trying to sell at or above asking price this is one of the highest return investments you can make before the listing goes live.

 

Window Cleaning

Clean windows do two things for a home sale that nothing else does.

From the street they make your home gleam. Light reflects differently off professionally cleaned glass than off windows that have been through a Spokane winter. It's subtle but it's real and buyers notice it even when they don't know why the house looks better than the one down the street.

From inside they change how a buyer experiences the home. Looking out through clean glass at the yard, the view, the neighborhood, that's where a buyer starts imagining living there. Dirty windows put a literal film between the buyer and that moment.

We always recommend cleaning both interior and exterior glass before a listing. Every pane, track, frame, and screen. It's the detail that ties everything together and it costs less than most people expect.

 

Roof and Gutter Cleaning

This one isn't about curb appeal. It's about the inspection.

When a home inspector gets on your roof and finds moss, lifted shingles, or clogged gutters it goes into the report. That report goes to the buyer. The buyer uses it to negotiate the price down, request repairs, or walk away entirely. What would have been a $700 roof cleaning becomes a negotiating point that costs you thousands.

Moss on a roof is also increasingly flagged by insurance companies during remote inspections using drone photography. A buyer trying to get homeowner's insurance on a moss covered roof can run into problems before closing that have nothing to do with the structure of the home.

Clean the roof. Clean the gutters. Remove the inspection finding before it exists.

We offer documentation and a 1 year warranty after roof cleaning, in the event it is brought up in the inspection phase. This warranty is on the home, not the owner. 

 

Concrete and Driveway Cleaning

Be honest with yourself about your driveway.

Oil drips from the car. Grease from the grill that landed in the wrong place during a summer barbecue. Tire marks, fertilizer staining, years of general accumulation. To you it's background noise. To a buyer seeing the home for the first time it's the first surface they walk across and it's forming part of that four second impression.

A professionally pressure washed driveway and concrete area looks dramatically different from one that's been hosed off. The before and after on a concrete cleaning job is one of the most visually obvious transformations in exterior cleaning. It's also one of the most affordable.

For homes with rust staining from irrigation systems or fertilizer staining from planters, professional rust removal using F9 products can eliminate stains that pressure washing alone won't touch. We're one of the few authorized F9 applicators in the Spokane area and this service surprises most homeowners who assumed the staining was permanent.

 

What You Can Skip

Not everything needs to be done before a listing. Here's what we'd put lower on the priority list.

Full exterior painting unless the current paint is genuinely peeling or severely faded. A soft wash often restores the appearance enough that painting isn't necessary and a fresh paint job before listing can actually raise questions about what you were covering.

Fence replacement unless the fence is structurally compromised. A professionally cleaned fence looks significantly better than most homeowners expect. We've cleaned fences that were scheduled for replacement and the owners kept them.

Landscaping overhauls. Tidy and clean beats elaborate and expensive every time for a home sale. A pressure washed walkway leading to a simple well kept yard outperforms an elaborate landscaping project in terms of buyer impression.

 

The Bottom Line

Exterior cleaning before you list your home is one of the highest return investments you can make per dollar spent. A house wash with window, roof, gutter cleaning, and driveway pressure washing for most Spokane homes seems like an investment. On a home listed at $400,000 that's a fraction of a percent of the sale price and it directly affects the first impression every buyer has before they walk through the door.

We work with homeowners preparing to list throughout Spokane, Spokane Valley, Liberty Lake, Post Falls, Coeur d'Alene, and surrounding Eastern Washington and North Idaho communities. If you're preparing to sell and want an honest assessment of what your home's exterior needs before the listing goes live, call or text us at 509-464-9461 or request a free quote at thebrightsidespokane.com.

We respond same day. Also we have worked with Alyssa enough that she can point you in the right direction for what needs done on your home, before you even need to reach out to us! No up sells, no fluff, just honest people helping the everyday person.

 

 

About The Author

Kris Ott is the owner of The Bright Side Spokane, a locally owned exterior cleaning company serving Spokane and North Idaho. The Bright Side specializes in pressure washing, soft washing, house washing, roof cleaning, window cleaning, and holiday light installation for residential and commercial properties. Fully licensed and insured in Washington and Idaho. 110% satisfaction guaranteed.

thebrightsidespokane.com | 509-464-9461