Ten Important Tasks to Complete Before Selling Your Home (Unnamed Real Estate Blog)

Ten Important Tasks to Complete Before Selling Your Home

Selling your home can be a very stressful endeavor. If you do a simple web search looking for help, thousands of conflicting bits of advice await you. If you aren’t a real estate professional, it is very hard to know how to prepare for such an important action. Follow these tips, though, and you will be well on your way to a higher contract price and considerably less stress.

• Step up your home’s curb appeal
This is a step that a lot of people take for granted, but it should be one of the very first things that you do before trying to sell your home. The assumption is that it is simply not worth the time and money to go through with the cosmetic repairs to the exterior of your home. You need to remember, though, that this is the first thing a new buyer will see. The small amount of money you’ll spend on landscaping and minor exterior repairs will be paid back to you greatly.

• Update your interior
You probably love the design of your living room and kitchen. You’ve been living in it for years and have grown accustomed to it. But in the time you have been living there, styles have changed and progressed, and buyers are looking for modernity in the fixtures and features of your home. Just as with the exterior, every dollar you spend updating will come back to you with more come contract time.

• Un-clutter your house
Living in your home means accumulating personal possessions. You have souvenirs from vacations, pictures of friends and family, and all of your personal collections of trinkets and mementos. They are the items that make this home to you, but they just look like clutter to someone who does not know their history. Package these up and spring for a storage unit until the house sells. Buyers want to see the possibilities of what they can do to the house, not the decisions you have already made.

• Know your home’s weaknesses
You have lived in your house long enough that you take certain things for granted. There are certainly tasks that you always meant to take care of, but never got around to, and have now forgotten about. A potential buyer, however, is not going to forget about these shortcomings, especially when the house down the street does not have them. Step back and assess what you need to do to bring your house to the same level as the similar houses that are for sale in your neighborhood.

• Get a home inspection
This is a buyer’s market, and they all know it. Anything you can do to make the process easier for a potential buyer is a step in the right direction. Most buyers are going to know prior to committing to purchase if there are any serious problems with the home. This means that they are going to have to pay for a home inspection once they’ve gotten far enough in the decision making process. Make this easier on them and yourself by finding out up front anything that you may have missed, and saving the buyers the time and money of having to get one themselves.

• Know the surrounding area
You need to get an idea of what a potential buyer is walking into when they come to look at your house. You probably have a good idea about your neighborhood, but how will it look to someone coming into it for the first time. Spend some time driving around and re-familiarizing yourself with your neighborhood. Make a list detailing what makes it a great place to live.

• Get an Appraisal
Like the home inspection, this is something that anyone who buys your house is going to have to get at some point. They are going to have to pay for an appraisal just to get mortgage approval. But, the appraisal can serve as a great benefit to you as well. You need to have the right price on your house when you list it, and without the help of a professional, you’ll just be guessing. Save yourself that trouble by going ahead and getting an appraisal up front. Just make sure it is an FHA appraisal so that any potential buyer will be able to use it for their financing.

• Use a Realtor
Especially at the height of the housing boom, it was very fashionable, and sometime quite effective to forgo the use of a realtor and list your home for yourself. This is not the housing boom, though. We are in the midst of not only a recession, but also a mortgage crisis. Buyers are increasingly hard to come by. You simply do not have the expertise or the available resources to actively market your home. The money that you spend on the realtor will definitely translate to a higher sales price.

• Be prepared to pay for the closing costs
Selling your home is going to very competitive. There are considerably more homes for sale than there are people buying homes. You need to do everything you can to make the purchase as easy as possible for any potential buyers. It has become close to a selling necessity to agree to pay for the buyer’s closing costs, and you’re surely better off if you do.

• Be flexible
Again, you need to remember that this is going to be a tough task for you. You need to do your best to eliminate your emotions from the equation. Forget that this is the home you love, and try your best to think of it as nothing more than an investment. It will be so tempting to outright deny any offer that is lower than what you think your home is worth, but try and remember how much it is going to cost you to continue to make your mortgage payment each month. It doesn’t take very months of sitting on the market to make up for any potential loss that you thought you were better to pass on.

Selling your home is going to be a difficult task. With the right preparation and by following these simple steps, however, you will find that it will go a lot smoother than you expected.