6 Tips to Get Your Home Sold for Top Dollar
You want the most money for your home when you sell, right? Well, you don’t exactly have to have the best house on the block, or live in the most desirable neighborhood in the city. While that would certainly help, there are certain strategies you can put into play in order to gain a leg up on the competition and sell your home for top dollar.
Consider employing the following 6 techniques to get the biggest buck for your home.
1. Keep Your Motivations to Yourself
There could be a bunch of different reasons why you want to sell your home. Maybe you’re looking for a bigger house, or perhaps you got a new job in a different city. Or maybe you simply can’t afford the upkeep in your home, or are going through a divorce.
Whatever the reasons for you wanting or needing to sell, keep these motivations to yourself. The last thing you want is for a buyer to get their hands on information that could put them in the driver’s seat when it comes time for negotiating a final sale price.
For instance, if the buyers find out that you’re desperate to get the home off your hands because your new home is closing soon, they might be more inclined to throw a low-ball offer your way. When asked, just say that your housing needs have changed, and leave it at that.
2. Price the Home Right
It’s crucial to do some research first before establishing the listing price of your home. Price it too high, and you’ll scare off a lot of buyers. Price it too low, and you might walk away with a lot less in your pocket that you initially intended. Pricing your home on either extreme is dangerous.
The typical buyer looks at anywhere between 5 to 20 or more homes before they settle on the perfect one. This means that they have a lot to base their comparisons on while they’re considering your home. If your place doesn’t stack up well in the price range that you’ve established, your listing won’t be taken seriously by potential buyers and their agents.
The result? A listing that will just linger on the market, becoming more stale by the day without any interest or offers.
3. Make it Easy For Agents to Show Your Home
Buyers usually need to see your home in person before they buy it. This means that showings will need to scheduled in order for people to make a visit. Don’t make it difficult to show your home by setting tight timelines for showings.
For instance, limiting showings to weekends only or only after 6pm on weekdays will severely limit the pool of buyers that will be able to visit your home. Instead, make showings available on all days and times throughout the week.
In addition, have your home ready for showing at all times so you don’t need to request too much notice before a showing. Some agents may want to see the home within a couple hours notice. Instead of shunning them, give them the green light. The more showings, the better.
4. Offer Incentives
You might have found a buyer who is struggling to decide between your home and another that they are interested in. In this case, consider offering incentives to make your home the more attractive option. To motivate buyers, consider enticing buyers with things such as paying for closing costs, making repairs, or providing credits for upgrades after closing. You might even consider pre-paying for internet or cable services or covering property taxes for 6 months.
When the going gets tough, offering up incentives like these can really pay off.
5. Stage Your Home
Buyers need to be attracted to your home, and need to feel some sort of emotional connection to it before they bite the bullet and put in an offer. This all starts with making a solid first impression when the buyer first walks through the front door.
Making your home as visually appealing as possible is a critical step in the home selling process. Improving curb appeal and enhancing the interior of the home will help garner a lot more attention, and hopefully stimulate a lot more interest and offers.
6. Hire a Good Real Estate Agent
Having a good agent on your team can make a huge difference in your home selling experience. Not only can seasoned realtors help you sell your home faster, they can also help you squeeze the most money out of the sale possible. Agents who are well-versed in the home selling field know a thing or two about what it takes to market your home and attract masses of home buyers.
They have the negotiating skills necessary to fight for the highest price possible, and they are an invaluable resource throughout the entire closing process of the sale. The money you may spend hiring such pros can come back to you in spades in the final sale price, and in the money you would have otherwise spent in carrying costs for a stale listing.
Every home owner wants to get the highest dollar figure when they sell their property. But you can’t sit back and relax while your home is listed for sale, hoping that a buyer will come along and offer you the moon.
Instead, take action and try putting a few techniques at work to help you sell your home quickly, and for an amount you can be more than satisfied with.
