Home Selling TipsSelling a home in a difficult market requires expert help from professionals. In today's market, you need to have it all - location, quality, price -- and a lot of luck. A real estate manager we know characterizes the current market as "a price war with buyers and a beauty contest with sellers". The sellers are staging and spiffing to try and get the most money they can, while the buyers are waiting for the next 33% price reduction.
With 4 and 5 times the normal number of houses for sale, what can you do to improve your chances of selling this year? (Note, we didn't say this month. Everyone's confounded!) All you can do is be the best: the best on the block, the best
value, the best price, the best condition, the best lot, etc.
Start by making sure everything works in the home. You can use our Step 1 guidelines (found here ) and really give the home a good going over. Major problems with any of the systems, structure or mechanicals can spell disaster -- deals have fallen through for less. You don't need to buy a new furnace, for example, just make sure the one that's there works and has some useful life left in it. We recommend that you declutter next. By organizing your home, it will appear more spacious and even more so if it's decluttered as well. And clean. Buyers are looking for spotless homes these days. Check out our Step 2 tips ( Clean, Organize and Declutter ) for more tips on how to impress buyers with your cleanliness and spaciousness. The next step is to make sure your home is staged properly. We've put together all our best staging tips on this site for you to follow and you can start by reading Step 3 ( Design to Sell Fast! ) for special tips and techniques on home staging. The next step is to find a really good agent and stick to a marketing plan that either you or the agent creates. No one can afford to "wait for something to happen" these days. Just putting a home in the multiple listing will not guarantee a sale like it used to. Your marketing plan should have specific action items every week your home is on the market. We know hundreds of real estate agents. The ones that are proactive are the ones you want to interview. If their only interest is getting a listing and hoping someone else sells it, then you need to keep looking. Find out who has the customers in your town, not necessarily who has the listings. Pricing has become a really big problem in some areas of the country. There simply are not enough recent and relevant "comps" to get a good idea of what price a home should be listed at. Foreclosures are skewing pricing and will until the inventory of foreclosed homes gets smaller. If you can price just below market, you might have a chance of selling your home in a reasonable length of time. If you don't have that luxury, you might be in for quite a wait. Other ideas that have been used successfully in this market are seller financing, raffles, sale contingencies, prize giveaways and adjusting the selling broker's commission upwards. Any of these can work, it's just a matter of how much pain you want to bear. It is our hope that we can rewrite this section a year from now and tell you to just find a good agent and wait until the offers start rolling in. Right now, however, it is a numbers game. Few buyers. Many sellers. Not a lot of wiggle room on either side of the table.
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