When it comes to selling your home, there are many mistakes you can make. In fact, 84% of first-time sellers admit to making mistakes that have cost them money.
Selling your home isn’t an easy process, and there are things you need to do and things you definitely shouldn’t do when the time comes to place your property on the market so you have a better experience and get as much money as possible.
If you want to know what you should avoid, read on for some common mistakes homeowners make when selling their property.
Asking Too Much
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is pricing your home too high. Sure, you want to get the most money possible for your home, but pricing yourself out of the market will have the opposite effect. Around 70% of the interest in a new home on the market comes within the first three weeks, and with it taking anywhere between 10 and 25 viewings to find a buyer, interest will be drastically reduced if you put too high a price on it.
You want to remain competitive while not underselling yourself, so working with a good realtor who knows the area and has priced and sold similar properties can help you price your home accordingly.
Listing Too Soon
It takes time to get a house listed for sale, and rushing into things before you are ready will mean your house might not get shown off in its best light. To get your home ready for sale, you need to prepare it for viewings, which can take some time.
Before the listing, you need to consider aspects such as decluttering your home, depersonalizing it slightly, taking care of minor repairs and maintenance, freshening the decor, giving it a deep clean, and so on. If you’re wanting to get the best price, you want the place to look good, and minor repairs are vital, as is making sure your home is shown off in the best light and is clean and welcoming for people who come to view it.
Ignoring Curb Appeal
Your home’s curb appeal is one of the things that impact how easy it is to sell your home. These days, it’s not just the physical curb appeal you need to hide but the digital one too, which is where the above point comes into play too.
For digital curb appeal, it is the pictures and videos they see online. So once you have taken care of repairs and cleaned your home and you are ready to take pictures; you need to make sure you have a photographer or videographer who can take the right images to show it off.
Physical curb appeal is how good your home looks from the curbside. Seeing a property for viewing for the first time doesn’t begin inside. It begins outside. If your house looks messy, tired, worn, scruffy, etc., this won’t give off an excellent first impression and will put buyers off before they set foot inside.
You can remove clutter building up outside, give the patio a jet wash, de-weed and mow the lawn and flowerbeds, get that garage door repair and installation you have been putting off, you need to clean the windows and doors etc and make the outside of your property as pleasant as the interior for a good first impression. If you don’t make an excellent first impression outside, pulling things back inside will be hard.
Choosing The Wrong Realtor
You want a realtor solely dedicated to your interests and not working both sides of the fence trying to sell your home and sell to a buyer. This conflict of interest might be good for them, i.e., double the payments, but it won’t be good for you as they won’t just be thinking of getting the best deal for you as they will be trying to secure a good deal for the buyer, too.
Choose an agent who is experienced in selling homes in your area, has your best interests at heart, can offer you everything you need in terms of advice and support, and has a good track record.
Ask family and friends who they choose and look around at reviews to see what other sellers think of the service they received. Don’t be afraid to meet a few realtors before deciding who to go with. You want to be able to build a rapport with this person to help you get your house listed and sold for the best price, and you can’t find this person by going with the first person you come across.
Bad Timing
Now, timing the real estate market isn’t easy, nor should it be something you are doing. However, listing at the wrong time can be detrimental to your selling success. So what do you do?
You list when you are ready. Selling and then moving into rented accommodation simply to get the house sold or to wait for prices to drop before buying again will be a bad idea as this can mean you are in between homes and less likely to move forward quickly. It’s a risky game to play and one that might come off well for you.
Make sure you have all of your finances in a row, pre-approval for a remortgage if you need one to move forward, and you have options to move to should you sell quickly. You are actively looking for homes to move to and are ready to strike should the right opportunities present themselves instead of waiting for the market to change.
Over-Developing Your Home
Every single home has a maximum resale value regardless of the work you do to it. While it might seem like you can add anything to your home and recoup your losses when you sell thanks to property shows, it doesn’t always work like that.
There’s a certain limit people will pay for property in different areas, and over developing your home and making changes can cause your house to exceed the value you are willing to pay, make it harder to sell, or result in you selling for a loss.
If you are making changes to improve the home and your standard of living only, then it’s likely you were investing for the long term, and having to sell wasn’t on your cards. But carrying out extensive work simply because you think it will get you more money when you sell can be a dangerous game if you exceed the value people are willing to pay.
Showing Buyers Yourself
You’re the best person to show off your house as you know it so well, don’t you? Wrong. As you live here, there is every chance that you could become too emotional when selling the property. You could tell the buyers every single detail that they don’t even need to know and put them off.
Buyers want to be able to see themselves living in your home, and if you are there telling them stories about the house, they won’t be able to do this. You need a third party with no emotional attachment to the building to host the viewings to allow the buyers to gain just enough information but not too much to put them off making a decision. This is where an experienced realtor comes in as they will have the answers to the questions the buyers need to know and can present the house in a different light to boost the chances of making a sale.
Selling your home isn’t easy, and if this is the first time you are doing so, there are many mistakes you need to avoid for a successful experience. This post ran through just a few of them, but if you can avoid making these big ones, you will have a much better experience when the time comes to pack up and move on.
What do you think?