3 Tips to Sell House

How to Sell Your House in a Slowing Market

Sell House Tips in a Changing Market; There is one thing you can count on in the housing market and that’s change. During a sellers market staging takes a backstage. In a buyers market staging becomes more important. In any market, we think it’s important to present a property for optimal selling conditions. For residential properties, this always includes the property being prepared so that potential buyers can visualize themselves in the home. Our team moves through this whether it’s a seller or buyer market because it helps maximize the sale price.

How to Tell If It’s a Sellers or Buyers Market?

A seller’s market has six months of inventory or less. A buyer’s market has more than six months of inventory available.

The following outlines 3 tips you can do to help get your home ready to sell. In addition, we explain what our team does to help you get ready to maximize your sale price.

Sell House Preparation

You may be planning to sell you home in six months to a year. If this is the case you may want to invest in a few key repairs and upgrades in order to boost your homes value before the sale event.

Similar to selling or trading in a vehicle, you have a stronger negotiating position if you’re selling with little to no repairs needed. You can expect that with each major repair recommended by the buyers inspector the buyer will try to leverage the repair for a discounted price. If you want to maximize your selling price then you will want to eliminate buyer leverage points.

However, not every seller wants to put the time, energy and budget into repairs and upgrades. You may just want to sell your house now.

In that case we take an efficient, professional approach that still includes preparation but not a full repair and upgrade phase.

Tip #1 De-Clutter

De-cluttering is an essential part of staging a home. If you think of your home like an art canvas, de-cluttering is clearing the canvas so that potential buyers can envision themselves in your home. If the canvas is full then they won’t see themselves in the painting and won’t want to make you an offer. Your canvas has been filled with a beautiful painting. However, this painting needs to be cleaned up, organized and packed away to move to it’s new home.

Our Concierge Service

Our team works along side of you. We provide consulting to help you know what to pack away and what can remain. De-cluttering is one of the hardest things our clients have to do. It can be physically and emotionally draining. We walk with you through your home several times to help clarify what needs to be packed away. If buyers are distracted when they tour your home they won’t be making you an offer.

Tip #2 Interior Face Lift

Investing a little money before the sale of your home is smart. The amount you spend getting your home cleaned up and giving it that new home smell will pay off big time. These items include new paint throughout, replacement of any and all carpet and power washing the exterior. It’s also a good idea to make sure your gutters are clean and repair any and all small items that you’re aware of.

It’s Hard to Sell a Stinker

80% of human communication and decisions are based on smell. Homeowners may not realize it but their home has a distinct signature smell. Be aware that if you smoke, vape or have animals your home will have a negative smell. This is the case no matter how clean you are or how clean you keep your animals.

An important aspect of staging a home is to scrub it clean. If a buyer doesn’t like the smell of your home you have an 80% chance they’ll pass on making you an offer. Smells cling to fiber which is why you’ll want to be sure to replace all of the carpet in your home. In addition, paint cleans and freshens everything up visibly and in relation to smell.

Other items that can harbor smell are throw rugs, area rugs and fibrous furniture and décor accessories. Removing as many of these items before taking it to market is especially important.

Our Concierge Service

We clean your home before the photo shoot, before the open house event and after you’ve moved out for your buyers final walk-through! After your de-cluttering, paint and new carpet it’s time for our team to get to work. We come in with a professional cleaning crew. Our job is to help you through the hard work of packing everything up. Our professional house cleaning team makes your home sparkle in preparation for your home’s photo shoot. Your home is our run way model. We make her shiny clean for the big photo shoot event.

Tip #3 Exterior

It’s important to trim and clean up your landscaping. This is especially important in the front. Having the lawn cut, landscaping edged and trimmed will communicate that you’re a homeowner that has maintained the property. If you have bushes and trees along the property line you may want to consider thinning them out. This helps clean it up and makes your property look larger. Be sure to remove any dead trees. This preparation phase presents a good opportunity to initiate or renew termite treatment. Hiring a professional company to do this will add value for buyers.

Our Concierge Service

We provide a curbside polish. We power wash your front porch to help give it that squeaky clean look and smell. This is the first impression space for all of your potential buyers. We add new fresh mulch and put in nice happy plants that will help make guests feel happy and alive as they step up to your front door. No sad thirsty plants on our watch!

Real Estate Professional Help

If there is any discrepancy with your square footage we’ll have our team come in to create a documented professional measurement. This will help answer questions buyers may have when it comes to your actual square footage. This also provides a measurement for each room that helps buyers know if their furniture will fit. Sometimes listing agents will simply put “owner stated square footage”. We like to provide a professional and verified measurement to back up the adjusted square footage that is stated on your home listing.

Additional Staging

It may be that after all of this preparation has been done that you have a house that needs to be professionally staged. If this is the case we’ll review options with you to plan out the best course of action. Full staging requires that you completely clear out the house. Once your home is empty our home décor team will get busy filling it with the right furniture and home décor that makes the most sense for the style of your home and the current market trends.

Our Concierge Service

Pre-List Campaign

It’s vitally important to test the market before listing your home. Performing a full market analysis isn’t enough to nail the perfect sale price. The market changes week over week. This means that if you had the correct sale price last week it might not be correct this week. This is especially true anytime you’re changing from one selling season to another.

A perfect example of this is if you’re selling after the summer season has ended in your area. There are many variables that shift sale prices at that time. One such variable is knowing the inbound buyer market. If you have strong inbound buyers from areas that are still in their summer season you may be able to take advantage of an extended summer sale season.

Regardless of what season you’re selling your home in you still need to perform a market test before solidifying the list price. This helps remove the guess work. Our Anchorty Formula always includes a complete market test. We understand that numbers don’t lie.

Position Price to Market

It’s important to position your home’s sale price according to the market. Just like stock prices, home prices cannot argue with the market. If you do, you won’t like the outcome. There are three outcomes to the market test to help gauge correct price positioning.

Sell House Market Test Result: #1

The list price is correct. This usually happens when we list the home just slightly under market value. Many times in this situation when we perform the market test we’ll receive multiple agent requests to show the home. Buyer interest is high. This is the best opportunity for a multi-offer situation and will benefit you the most.

Sell House Market Test Result: #2

There is some analytic data showing interest but little to no direct contact from buying agents. This is a mid-risk market result. The best response in this situation is to adjust the list price down before taking your home to market in order to shift into the Number One scenario.

Sell House Market Test Result: #3

Crickets. Nothing worse then crickets when it comes to selling your home. Good thing we always perform a market test! Because of the pre-list campaign, there’s no loss at this point. Your days on market home listing clock has not started ticking yet.

You have several choices.

• You can substantially drop the list price and go to market.
• You can incrementally drop the list price and extend the market test.
• You can take it to market as-is and expect not to sell until you adjust the price to what the market will bear.
• You can make improvements to your property and list after that is complete.

Testing the market is key to a successful sale. We analyze the data to help you decide the best list price and then test the decision. Being flexible and knowing what to expect helps take the guess work out of the process.

Home Sale Action Plan

Whether you’re planning on selling as soon as possible or in the next year, our Home Sale Action Plan keeps everyone on track. The right preparation makes a big impact on how successful the sale of your home is. It’s never to early to get started. Call us today to schedule your consultation: 615-334-0120