How to Sell Your Home at the Highest Price
Making a mistake in selling a home can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost profit. Often home sellers make the same mistakes over and over. Avoiding these mistakes is easy and takes little time and effort on your part. Take the time with your home sale and follow the guidelines in this report.
1. Distress Selling: At times, selling quickly is unavoidable. That’s when knowing the right techniques to sell your home, without looking desperate and making yourself a target for low bidders, really pays off. Know all there is to know about your market before listing and work hand in hand with an experienced real estate professional. Ensure that you are comfortable with the Realtor’s report regarding fair market value and expected sale time. Ask your Realtor for comparables in your area. A normal competitive market analysis is several pages long and should provide you with all facts from the last six months’ activity in your price range.
2. Best Home in the Neighborhood: Your home is one of your most personal possessions. Don’t be blind to the flaws and needed cosmetic improvements. This will cause over valuating of the home, hurting it’s chances to be sold. Listing with an experienced agent gives you a well-informed third eye that will help you not only in your pricing, but will give you general suggestions to help your home achieve it’s “top dollar” in today’s market.
3. Limited Home Viewing: Buyers want to view a home on their own time schedule. Keep your home “broker ready” which means within an hour, an agent can show your property. A lockbox is critical to convenience for prospects.
4. Restrain Emotional Decisions: Don’t allow a few hundred dollars, that will mean very little in the long run, ruin a sale. Take a look at the big picture and react rationally. When I price a home, I make a list of the inclusions and exclusions, however, sometimes a refrigerator or some such item is important to the buyer in a tough negotiation. Keep your head - make a sound business decision.
5. Make Cosmetic Improvements: Prospects make up their minds within the first twenty minutes. First impressions can make all the difference in selling your home. Spending $1,200 on new carpet might add another $4000 to the price of your home. Get an objective point of view from your real estate professional. New carpet not only increases your value, and bear in mind, also makes your home sell faster. So many buyers transferred here have little time to make changes in the house before moving in. Anything you can do to make your home look better than the competition, should bring you a higher price and a faster closing than your competition.
6. Disclosure Property Flaws: Property disclosure laws require sellers to list any flaws required by our State, however, sometimes it is a good idea to get a pre-marketing inspection from a building inspector, which is a once over from an unemotional professional who tells you what a buyer will be looking at in a building inspection. If an inspection does not come out good, many times the buyers are looking to renegotiate a price after you have already been off the market and thus have you at a disadvantage point. Review any issues that need to be attended to BEFORE you go on the market.