14 Essential Tips For Selling Your Home Quickly
10 Essential Tips For Selling Your Home Quickly
Are you looking to get your current home on the market and sold as soon as possible? Here are some essential, must-read tips to help you out!
Keyword(s): selling your home
What if you were making simple mistakes that are keeping you from selling your home?
It’s already difficult enough to sell a house. In fact, home sales are now at their lowest point in over two years. Various factors, including economic forces, are making it hard for the average consumer to afford a house.
Of course, “hard” is not the same as “impossible.” If you’re interested in selling your home and selling it quickly, there are proven techniques you can use to make the sale.
What are these tips, and how can they better help you sell your home? Keep reading to find out!
1. Set the Right Price
One of the biggest keys to selling your home quickly is set the right price. Of course, doing so is often easier said than done.
If you’re interested in selling your home fast, then you need to set a competitive price. To make sure the price is fair, look at what comparable local homes are selling for and use this to set your own price.
It’s also worth considering the condition of your home. Have you made enough renovations and additions to command a higher-than-average price? Or is the home more of a “fixer-upper” that might require you to sell for a lower-than-average price.
To really make a quick sale, you can always list your home for a bit less than other homes are going for.
2. Selling Your Home: Never Expect the Asking Price
What’s the biggest rookie mistake when it comes to home selling? The biggest mistake you can make is expecting to get your full asking price.
Most potential homebuyers like to negotiate. So when they see you are selling a home, they are unlikely to offer to buy it at full price. More often than not, customers will be interested in negotiating the price down a bit.
As a seller, this puts you in the difficult position of finding the “sweet spot.” That means setting a price high enough that you will make a profit once someone negotiates the price down. But the initial price still has to be low enough to help your listing stand out from the others.
One thing that can make your job easier or harder is the current status of the market. If you’re in a seller’s market, you may not have to be as careful when setting the price. But if you’re in a buyer’s market, you need to be doubly careful when setting the price!
3. Make Improvements That Add Value
How much is your house actually worth? That answer always has one answer: “what buyers are willing to pay for it.”
Therefore, when it comes to home selling, you should focus on making different improvements that increase the perceived value of your home. For example, replacing an old garage door can transform how your home appears from the outside. And while an entire kitchen renovation is too costly, it may be worth considering changing out fixtures, resurfacing cabinets, and replacing countertops.
These little improvements shouldn’t break the bank. By making these improvements, though, you can make buyers think your home is worth that much more, and this can help you make a quick sale.
4. Focus On Curb Appeal
While renovations inside the house are great, the real trick is getting people interested in the house in the first place. Toward that end, you should focus on little things you can do to improve the curb appeal of your home’s exterior.
At the bare minimum, this means washing your windows and powerwashing your front porch and siding. Make sure your driveway looks clean and uncluttered, and keep the lawn mowed each weekend.
Consider throwing a fresh coat of paint on the outside of house to help it stand out.
5. Staging: Make the House Look Less Personal
It’s very important to stage the inside of your home. When prospective buyers visit, you want to make sure they can see themselves living there. That’s why most in real estate recommend cleaning and decluttering the house before you list it.
While you’re at it, though, here’s a bit of less common advice: you need to make the house look less personal. That means taking down family photos, children’s drawings, and religious iconography.
All of those things make this house your home, but they also make it harder for buyers to imagine themselves living here. By making it easier for them to thing about life inside the house, you can make it easier to sell your home as fast as possible.
6. Don’t Forget Needed Repairs
So far, we have focused a lot on improving the visual aspects of your home. But if you really want to make a quick sale, you also need to make a few needed repairs before you list the house for sale.
What kinds of repairs? If your walls or floors appear damaged, you need to fix them. The same goes for a leaky roof or running sink. And if you have any appliances on the fritz, now is the time to sell them.
If you really don’t want to do any of these repairs, you can always sell your home as is. But these repairs won’t take much time or money, and they can help you to get a much hier price on your home.
7. The Right Time to Sell
You can’t always control when you have to sell your home. But if it’s possible to wait a bit, you may find that your house sells much quicker during certain seasons than others.
For the most part, you should avoid selling your home during the winter whenever possible. This is the slowest time of the year for home sales every single year. And things reach their slowest point over the holidays when everyone is busy with traveling and family celebrations.
Long story short? Try to sell before winter or wait until the spring. If you must sell during the winter, though, here is one minor consolation: you won’t have as much competition from other sellers!
8. Inspect Before You List
If you’re interested in selling your home fast, you should consider certain steps that make things easier for prospective buyers. And one of the best things you can do is to have your home professionally inspected before you list it.
Buyers enjoy when homes have already been inspected because it means they won’t have to inspect the home at their own cost. And as for sellers, getting the home inspected before you list it is a great way to avoid running into any nasty surprises.
Incidentally, when you ask buyers to pay for their own home inspection, they may end up discovering certain issues with the home that allow them to ask for a better price. In this way, paying for an inspector now could help keep you from losing quite a bit of profit when you try to sell your home!
9. Throw in Freebies For Buyers
Part of why selling a home is stressful is that most sellers have never had to do it before. Therefore, home selling may feel very intimidating. But instead of overthinking things, you can use tried and true sales methods, including giving customers “freebies.”
What kind of freebies? We’ve already covered one freebie: paying for an inspection rather than asking buyers to do so. By emphasizing this fact in your marketing, you can help make buyers feel like they are getting something “extra” out of the deal.
Other freebies include paying for closing costs and/or offering to fix any minor issues that buyers discover. With the right combination of price, presentation, and freebies, you can sell your home very quickly.
10. Hire a Professional Photographer
When you think about selling your home, you probably think about intense negotiations with prospective buyers. Before you can negotiate, though, you need to get those buyers interested. And that means putting the kinds of photos in your online listing that help your home to really stand out.
If you are a trained or otherwise skilled photographer, you may be able to handle this on your own. Otherwise, we recommend hiring a professional photographer that understands the importance of lighting, staging, cropping, and so on.
The trick here is to make sure others see how amazing and downright magical your house really is. The right photos are the key to this, and hiring a professional photographer can increase buyer interest in your home in a big way.
11. Create a 3D Tour
Usually, the point of great home photos is to get people inside the door. However, buyers are increasingly interested in getting a tour of the home via their computer. That is because 3D tours of homes for sales are becoming very popular.
These 3D tours are very popular because they give the full flavor of walking through the home in a way that simple photos cannot. And they allow very busy people who might not otherwise be able to make it to things like open house events to still see what the interior of your home looks like.
In some cases, a good 3D tour can help you make a sale that you otherwise wouldn’t make. That’s because buyers trust these tours, and adding such a tour makes you seem like a more trustworthy seller.
12. Be Ready to Move (Very) Fast
You’ve probably heard horror stories of homes that take forever to sell. But ask yourself: are you really prepared if the exact opposite happens?
Sometimes, all of the hard work a seller puts in pays off quicker than they are expecting. You may get offers from very interested buyers almost as soon as you list the home. But if you aren’t ready to respond to those offers in a speedy manner, some (maybe even all) of those offers may fall through.
What can you do to prepare? Make sure your seller disclosures are filled out and that you have paperwork to prove recent repairs, renovations, and even little things like utility bills that buyers may wish to inspect.
It doesn’t take very long to get this paperwork in order. And once you have it, you’ll be prepared to move as fast as a buyer is ready to move.
13. Don’t Let Emotions Get in the Way
Is this your first time selling a home? If so, you might not be prepared for the emotional aspect of bidding farewell to your home. But if you’re not careful, that emotional aspect can prevent you from selling your home fast.
How so? Well, imagine that a prospective buyer requests that you make certain repairs or renovations. Some sellers see this as an insult to their home…a house that, in their heart, is already perfect.
Unfortunately, you can’t make a quick sale when emotions get in the way. It’s important to make peace with the fact that your house is now simply a product you are trying to sell. And making the sale is all about improving that product and giving sellers what they are looking for.
14. Hire the Right Real Estate Agent
What if just one of our home selling tips could make all the rest easier? Well, here it is: make sure you hire an experienced real estate agent to help with the sale.
The right agent should understand your local market. They will be able to help you set a competitive price and market your house in a way that buyers will respond to.
Good agents also have enough local connections to make everything from inspection and repair much easier. With their help, you can focus on selling your home and beginning the next chapter of your life.
Sell Your Home Today!
Now you know our top tips for selling your home fast. But what if you could sell your home right now?
We specialize in buying homes and making all-cash offers to sellers just like yourself. Are you ready to sell your home and move on with your life? In that case, all you have to do is contact us today!