Selling Your Home
How to succesfully sell your home...
For the best possible price, in the least amount of time.
If you are considering selling your home For Sale By Owner there is a link addressing that method after this section.
The most important piece
Is first determining your goals, sounds simple right, well it is. However, this part is usually where the home owner may feel reluctant to share this information with the agent who will be working tirelessly to achieve your goals. Of course getting top dollar and as quickly as possible is the ultimate goal, other underlying pieces of the puzzle are important. For example if there the reason you are selling your home is because your job is transfering you to another state and you need to sell your home within 2 months, this changes everything. Your agent will need to know this information to properly develop a marketing plan which includes the biggest piece of the puzzle, pricing strategy.
Determining your asking price
By attempting to list your home for sale with an asking price that is above what the market indicates is big gamble that rarely pays off. Statistics show that the longer the home is on the market the less that it sells for. By starting off too high with an asking price of "let's try it and see what happens" is a big mistake. In fact homes which are properly priced according to the market often sell for higher than asking price. Why is this you ask? When you price your property too high, buyers are not interested and find more appropriate priced homes. After a period of time you change your price however now you are growing stale on the market and you may now be asking closer to what the market will bear. However, as time goes on your home becomes subject to the stigma that "something is wrong." In fact nothing is wrong with the property it was the price. As time contiues and the asking price continues to adjust an offer finally comes in, about 3-5% lower then what you are currently asking ( which may be 5-10% below where you started and perhaps 5% below where you should have started). You have now learned the painful lesson of overpricing your home. You not only have recieved less for your home but it took much longer then it should have. Sure getting a little more money sounds like it may be worth the gamble. However, anyone who has gambled and lost will tell you it was not worth the extra time and energy it took to maintain the house for endless open houses and showings, disturbances at dinner and much more.
Here is how it should have happened. When you price your home according to the market, or perhaps even slightly less, you get attention. At the early stages you get plenty of attention and when your property is priced right or better than, you will most likely see an offer sooner. These offers typically are higher since the buyers who are looking at purchasing your home realize others may be interested in your home. In fact sometimes others are and you are more likely to see multiple offers in the early stages of selling your home and rarely if you home has been on the market for several months.
Would you like to have your local agent perform a free market valuation of your property? Click here.
Marketing
Of course you have to have a sign in the yard right? It does help, but signs hardly ever account for selling a home. In today's world of real estate, close to 90% of home buyers start looking on the internet for homes to buy. Your web presence is more vital then ever considering buyers spend less time in a car searching. So these days the sign in the yard has become the landmark for these buyers when they want to do a drive by after viewing the home online. Or if they do stumble upon the sign they will most likey grab a flyer and if they are still interested proceed to the internet for more details. Classic techniques of signs and flyers still work however the internet has changed everything. YourPlaceForHomes agents understand this and is exactly why they are part of our team. Take a look at some of the tools your local agent has and ask them how they can market your property for sale.
There are of course many other pieces to consider when selling your home. Choose the representative who will do the best job for you. If you are considering doing the job yourself... Read our For Sale By Owner section. It also offers some more insight in to what our agents do to sell your home.
