Top 5 Home-Selling Mistakes You Should Avoid

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Top 5 Home-Selling Mistakes You Should Avoid

While actually finding a buyer may be significantly easier in a seller’s market, the ultimate goal of selling any home is not just to sell it, but to get the best price for it. In a competitive seller’s market, you may have a number of offers to choose from, but the question is, are they really the best offers you can get? To make sure you are really getting top dollar for your home, here are 5 selling fails you don’t want to make.

1. Failing To Price It Correctly

Setting the right price for your home is something of an art and science in and of itself. The science is in assessing the market to determine a fair market value for your house. That is fairly straightforward. The art, however, comes in understanding the mentality of buyers. As much as you may not like to see it this way, your home is a product you are selling. Setting the right price for your product is as much about looking at what the competition is offering as it is understanding what motivates buyers to buy in the first place.

2. Failing To Prep Your Home

If you were to sell a car, one of the first things an expert would tell you to do is to have it detailed. While your car may be used, it will be new to the person buying it and that’s the impression you want to give them. When selling your home, you should do the same thing. “Detailing” your home can include repainting or touching up peeling paint, tidying up landscaping and adding small, inexpensive touches to make your home look welcoming. Inside your home, you want to repair any chips, scratches, dents, dings, nicks or squeaks. clear away any clutter and leave only the most neutral pieces that will show your home off in its best light, not your personal style.

3. Failing To Market Adequately

Any time there is competition for a product, it increases prices. This is just as true in the housing market as it is anywhere else. To command the highest price, you need the most potential buyers to want your home in particular. To get the most potential buyers, you need to create the largest pool of buyers to pull from. This means listing your home in as many places as you can, with high quality photos and videos that show your home off in the best light to attract as many buyers as you can. Open houses, showings and careful staging of your home for both can all go a long way towards driving competition for your home. The important thing to keep in mind is that buyers are emotional. The more you can tap into that, the better the price you can get from your home.

4. Failing To Fix Or Reveal Any Issues

While there may be no major issues with your home, even small issues can make buyers wonder if there’s something they don’t know. Home inspectors are generally thorough, but even they don’t catch everything. Before you put your home on the market, you might consider getting a home inspection of your own. Once you know what an inspector is going to find, you can decide whether to fix the issues yourself – which in some cases, may involve a major home remodel – or simply reveal them to buyers and adjust your asking price accordingly. Just getting to the point of a buyer getting an inspection in the first place can be a long and costly process. If they find something in the inspection that makes them balk, you may have to start all over from square one.

5. Failing To Detach Emotionally

Perhaps one of the hardest things for sellers to do is to go from viewing their house as a home to a mere commodity. In the same way that buyers are emotional, so are sellers. In some cases, you may not like the buyer or the plans they have for your home and you may end up turning down a lucrative offer as a result. In other cases, you may reject an offer that you feel is too low, when in reality it is a fair offer. Your emotional attachment to your home may lead you to set an unrealistically high price for it and then get frustrated when you aren’t getting any offers. Here are some tips to help you take emotions out of the equation when selling your home.

Selling a home can be a long, exhausting, emotional roller-coaster under the very best of conditions. Under the worst conditions, some houses can end up sitting in a stagnant market for months or even years. Sometimes, however, certain homes can sell quickly in even the flattest of markets. While there are no guarantees when it comes to real estate, there are certainly things you can do to help ensure your home moves quickly and commands a handsome price.

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