Putting your house on the market is never an easy decision, especially if you’ve been in the home for many years.
Once you’ve made that decision, though, it’s important to make the process as painless as possible. So, we’ve compiled what we believe to be the best tips to getting your house sold quickly no matter where the market is.
Tip #1: Don’t overprice
The majority of listings that have high days on market are usually due to the homeowner overpricing the property.
Even when a realtor recommends a certain price point by doing comps, homeowners tend to choose the highest of them to go with.
This usually results in the home being listed for a much longer time period than needed.
Look, here’s the reality:
If your home stays on the market for 360 days, you’ve paid 12 months of mortgage on a home. Consider that the amount of money you’ve LOST in your purchase price, especially if it’s vacant.
It’s often better to make a much quicker sell by reducing the price slightly and more quickly, so as to not have it sitting many months.
Additionally, the more days on market a listing has, the worse it appears to prospective buyers. They’ll often wonder why the home was left so long with no purchase and will automatically assume there’s something wrong with it.
Tip #2: Vet your realtor
Not all realtors are equal.
The things you really want to check out are how well they market the property and how much effort do they put into it.
Pictures/video are HUGE when it comes to marketing a property on the MLS or in other channels. If the pictures suck, so does your house.
Make sure you use a realtor that always gets professional photography done for their listings. Phone photos are not acceptable.
You need proper lighting and equipment to get the right shots and your realtor is likely not a professional photographer — and that’s going to hurt your listing.
Videography is equally important. Having a virtual tour of the home, 3D tour, and/or aerial shot via a drone can work wonders when it comes to attracting buyers.
The last piece here is looking at what your realtor does to market homes aside from the MLS.
Excellent realtors use their Facebook profile as a way to market properties.
Top tier realtors additionally use Facebook ads to market properties to a certain demographic or target radius.
Tip #3: Not all buyers are equal
Similar to how there are different flavors or realtors, there are also different flavors of buyers. It’s important to know which one you are really targeting.
For example, if you have a home that is part of a bigger complex (think condos) but yours is on a lakefront, your comps may be units that are not on the lake front.
This means that your comps are potentially inaccurate. And other homes that are around the lake may be worth a LOT more.
When there are homes around a lake that are worth $500,000 to $1,000,000 and your condo is worth $125,000 compared to the units around you, there’s a massive gap.
People who can afford those more expensive homes might be willing to pay a premium on your condo, dump another $100,000 into pimping out that unit, and still come out several hundreds of thousands under the other lakefront homes.
But you won’t see that if you’re purely doing comps against other similar units nearby that aren’t on the lakefront.
Armed with this information, you may choose to target a very specific audience, which will get your $15,000 – $20,000 more on your property than if you were just marketing it to a standard audience on the MLS.
Now, if you don’t have time to work with a realtor and list on the MLS, then you might consider working with an investor instead to get your house sold more quickly.
There are definitely ways to move a property super fast, but there’s a cost to it: don’t expect to get full market value.
