Great ideas for selling your home. Tips to help you have a successful transaction.
When it comes to getting your home ready for sale, you already know you should paint, spruce up the house and yard, and get as much clutter gone as possible: it's an excellent time for a garage sale. Get rid of the stuff you won't be moving. Many times buyers go back to the real estate office and only talk about the mess they've encountered and don't think about the wonderful amenities.
Choose a seasoned realtor. You're not a guinea pig to be experimented with, so if you're in a hurry don't be somebody's first sale.
Respect your realtor's knowledge of the area's market and experience in marketing strategy.
He'll place ads about your home to get the most effective response and run a comparative market analysis of your home. This compares properties in the area to yours: those on the market, pending sale, expired listings and sold.
Square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price and number of days on the market will give you an idea of what's happening in your area. Use this information with your realtor's advice to figure out a price for your home. Expired listings are homes that haven't sold, possibly because the price was too high. Your best comparisons are to sold homes listed on this form.
When the home is listed, leave the refrigerator, range oven and washer and dryer off the listing contract. When it comes time for the sale, these items can be used as bargaining chips to get a slightly higher price.
Your cousin's home in Palo Alto, CA will appraise differently than yours in Prescott, AZ. That's why an appraiser from one area of the country doesn't appraise houses in another. Every area has its own value system.
Help your agent put together a notebook buyers can browse through while looking at your home. Enclose pages in plastic and have a map of the home's lot, past utility bills and pictures. Include local information such as utility company's names and phone numbers, school district info and whatever else you think a person new in your area would need to know. When the house is sold, this book will be appreciated by the new buyer.
Many prospective buyers only have a limited time in the area if they are from another city or state. Have your home ready at all times to be shown. Don't miss out on a buyer by asking for a few hours of time to run around with a vacuum cleaner and a feather duster before it's shown. You can do all that while they're on their way.
Have all valuables out of sight. Buyers will be escorted through the rooms with their agent. You have no need to be there. The buyers need to freely look at the home and may say things you won't like. Perhaps the color of the rug is not to their liking or they say the wonderful mural you've painted hits them wrong. Go for a walk and count on being gone about 45 minutes.
The smell of freshly baked bread or cookies adds ambiance to a home being shown. It transfers the property in the client's mind from the realm of 'house' to 'home'. You want them to start seeing and feeling the property as theirs and the senses play a large part in this.
Now, if for some reason you stay in the house while the prospective buyers are looking, go outside. Putter in the garage or sit in the backyard. Make sure the kids aren't around and the pets are in an area away from the action. The buyer needs to stay focused.
Be loyal to your realtor. He's invested a lot of time and work into selling your home. He's done a lot of research on the property and made many calls to the title company and other real estate offices. He'll also search through his extensive files and databases for customers that have expressed interest in finding a home like yours.
Here's something surprising: Your agent may NEVER show your home to anyone. If you're wondering how this could be, think of it this way. Your agent's job is to get as many qualified buyers as possible to your home. To do this, he'll put out advertising, call other agents in the area and market your property aggressively at every opportunity. Would you rather have one agent showing your house and knowing about it or put the entire multiple listing service of realtors to work selling your house? In many areas this can be anywhere from 200 to several thousand realtors. If your agent is not showing the house and you're getting other agents with their customers checking it out, it's a result of your agent's 'behind the scenes' work.
Some sellers go into negotiation at sale time with the thought they need a certain price for their house since the house they've been looking at is a little out of their league. That has nothing to do with the property value of your home. Keep that in mind and be realistic.
An agent may bring you an offer lower than what you expect. The worst thing you can do is say, "Forget it. It's an insulting offer and I'm not counter offering." Look on the bright side and figure it this way - you have an offer. The deal making process has started and you now have a chance to tell a buyer what you really want. This is your chance to come to a meeting of the minds and get what you want - a sale. It may take several counter offers back and forth but hopefully, a sale is about to happen.
Most title and abstract companies give a hefty discount for going back through them when it's sale time again. This can keep hundreds of dollars in your pocket by checking it out.
