Mistakes to avoid when selling your property
Mistakes to avoid when selling provided by our agency
Selling your house can be exciting and stressful, especially if it’s your first time. But, regardless of why you decided to sell your home, there are several pitfalls you can easily avoid to make your home selling experience ideal. Here are some mistakes you must avoid when selling your home.
Underestimating The Cost Of Selling Your House
While you should ultimately profit from the sale of your home, many home sellers forget about the costs associated with selling a house. For starters, you should expect to use five to six percent of the total sale price of your home to cover the commissions of both the seller and buyer agents. For example, if you sell your home for $300,000, you could pay upwards of $18,000 in commission.
Waiting to Sell
Spring and early fall are often the best times to sell a house, but that doesn’t mean you should wait months to put your home on the market. While December and August see the fewest sales, homes still sell every month of the year, says Anne DuBray, a real estate broker with Coldwell Banker Realty in Deerfield, Illinois.
Keeping Clutter
It’s tough to remove belongings while you’re still living in your house, but presenting each room and space in its best light means you’ll need to declutter in more ways than one. Please get rid of items you don’t need anymore, remove oversized couches and other large furniture that dwarfs the room, clear out closets, so they don’t look overcrowded, and put away decor that displays too much personal detail.
Skimping on repairs
Even minor defects can turn buyers off. For example, if they walk through your home and find loose doorknobs, leaky faucets, or wall dings, they’ll wonder if you’ve been neglecting more significant issues in the house. Completing a repair before listing your property can be more cost-effective than waiting for a buyer to discover the problem.
Skipping A Pre-Listing Home Inspection
Given the affordability of home inspections, there’s not much reason to avoid them. Getting a pre-listing home inspection will put your mind at ease as you’ll either know that your home is in sound condition or you’ll be able to tackle problems before homebuyers can bring them up during the negotiation phase. If an issue arises, you can either fix it or let buyers know and then make a concession during the negotiation phase by reducing the price of your home accordingly.
Not Staging Your Home For A Quick Sale
The main point of staging your home is to allow potential homebuyers the chance to picture themselves living in your space. They get to see a home with furniture and art that’s arranged in a way that highlights key features of your home rather than an empty house that echoes every sound. Staging your home pays off, too, as 21 percent of agents told the National Association of Realtors that staging a home increased its sale price by as much as 10 percent, making it a worthwhile investment.
Working Alone
Not hiring a real estate agent to represent you may seem easy to avoid paying commission, but you’ll miss out on a real estate agent’s market knowledge, contacts, and help with the process. Unless you have a real estate license, a real estate agent is key to a successful – and less stressful – home sale.
Home selling can become more difficult if you ignore the tried-and-true practices that have helped home sellers. However, even if you don’t make these mistakes, one of the most important aspects of preparing for a home sale is ensuring that you are mentally prepared and financially stable, even in less-than-ideal situations.
