Choosing to sell your property is one of the critical financial planning decisions that’ll have a long-term impact on your journey to being financially stable. Whether you’re moving to a preferable neighborhood, relocating for work, or making space for a growing family, you need to take action to ensure that your house is ready to sell.
However, selling your property can be challenging and stressful. If you’re a first-time seller, it’s easy to make mistakes. Strangers, or potential buyers, will visit your house to check it. They may even criticize your property and offer lower than your listed price. Also, there’s a risk that your property will stay on the market for much longer than you anticipate, especially during an economic downturn.
The good news is that, before selling your house, you can easily search for tips and suggestions that you can put into practice to help you sell your property regardless of the current economic situations that are outside your control.
Therefore, consider this checklist of tips and suggestions below to ensure your investment property is ready to list on the market.
1. Research The Market
Understanding the market where you plan to sell your property can help make a wise decision about the best time to sell your property. While real estate agents can give so much guidance and support, property sellers like you can do a bit of research of your own to determine the situation of your local real estate market. For instance, you can search for the data that most brokerages provide. Brokerages present quarterly market reports showing the most significant market state in the context of what’s selling, for what price, and how quickly.
Furthermore, it’s essential to look at various outlets, such as community websites, local news, and even written blog posts about your area. These platforms can give a more comprehensive insight into the market than your real estate agent due to their different perspective.
2. Conduct A Property Survey
Like a detail level survey, a property survey is an abstract diagram of angles and measurements that shows your property lines—such as land, features, and structures—that you legally own. It may look like a sketch drawn from a bird’s eye perspective and may even look simpler, like boundary lines with their different dimensions. However, property surveys can also show more details and include improvements to your property, utilities, and topography.
You don’t necessarily need a property survey to sell your house successfully. But you can expect this handy piece of paper to be an excellent visual aid for interested buyers. A property survey could also be essential to clarify any issues over your boundary lines or easements on your property. Hence, if you’re selling your house, you may consider a property survey to avoid problems like boundary encroachments. Apart from that, you may also want to consider getting one if you’re doing any home projects like planting trees, building a fence, and adding a patio and deck.
3. Carry Out An Inspection
Home inspection serves multiple purposes, such as telling buyers about any essential repair requirements that may impact their interest in buying your property. Selling a property often leads to back-and-forth negotiations about price changes or repair demands. However, getting a home inspection before selling your home can help you take advantage of these types of negotiations.
Generally, your buyer will want to carry out a home inspection themselves, even though they’re aware you had one carried out already. So, while you assumably can’t miss such a home reinspection to move the deal forward at a quicker pace, you can gain more confidence that they’re not going to come across huge issues that seriously slow down the sale.
4. Hire The Right Agent
Hiring the right real estate agent can help you get assurance throughout the entire selling process. A real estate agent has a face-based approach that involves gathering similar recent home sales within a specified range and reviewing your home versus these to decide a reasonable asking price. Real estate agents with no biases and emotional attachment to your home can guide you in selecting a competitive price that suits the real estate market in your local area.
Furthermore, working with an agent can help you gain property selling knowledge that only real estate experts can provide. It doesn’t mean handling the home selling process on your own is impossible. But, considering that a real estate negotiation is presumably one of the most significant negotiations you’ll ever make, it’s logical to leave the ins and outs to an expert to ensure everything goes smoothly.
5. Clean And Declutter
Decluttering is one of the most critical efforts in preparing your property for sale. It has significant benefits that help sell your property faster at a reasonable price in a competitive market. Notably, it makes your house look bigger and cleaner. Therefore, ensure to keep only the essential things, get rid of unnecessary stuff that restricts traffic flow, and modify your decor with just enough scenery.
Also, clutter-free homes with simplified scenery tend to have higher perceived value. Meanwhile, homes with too much clutter tend to appear untidy and chaotic. So, although the house may be clean, the impression from buyers will be the opposite. That explains why a decluttered home is more appealing to buyers. Apart from being comfortable inspecting your home, it’ll also make buyers envision themselves living in your house.
6. Set A Reasonable Price
When it comes to setting a reasonable price for your property, you should combine a factual assessment of your home with a realistic evaluation of market conditions. Instead of winning the negotiation with a buyer, you should price your property so that you can maximize that request, and more potential buyers will want to take a look. Also, prevent yourself from making biased decisions. Furthermore, you could set a reasonable value and then refuse to negotiate. However, it’d be better to leave room for negotiation by asking a bit higher than you expect to get. That would be 5% to 10% above the price of comparable properties.
Conclusion
Overall, carrying out a few actions before selling your property is essential to ensure a less stressful selling process. So, make sure you prepare yourself for unfavorable scenarios by implementing the tips and suggestions given above.
