For the most part, selling your own home involves a whole lot of legwork. There are adverts to be designed and put up, open houses to be attended, and then you have to deal with all those people who only pretend to want to buy but don’t qualify. If you think about it, you might be tempted just to let an estate agent handle it all.
But sometimes, agent fees can go up to 6%. That means that if your house sells for £200,000 then at a 6% commission rate, you might be losing out on £12,000 or putting up that £12,000 from your own pocket.
I don’t know about you, but £12,000 sounds like a good payday for me. Perhaps, it may be worth all the hard work that comes with selling your own home. If you think so, then here are some tips to help you get off on the right path.
Prepare yourself mentally
Make no mistake, in many cases, this job is tough. It takes time, a lot of energy, a great deal of market knowledge, and then you have to suffer some of the most annoying ‘potential buyers’ that you can imagine. But if you hang in there, you just might come off with some valuable know-how.
Run your research
Read up on how you can make the most of this experience. You will need to learn the local market and all the clearly stated rules that govern the buying and selling of your own home in your location. You also need to know how to get the right customers, how to attract the best prices and how to legally close a home sale.
Staging and advertising
There will be a lot of advertising to be done if you are going to attract the right kind of buyers. Feel free to try everything at this point. Think of things like:
- Online adverts.
- Having a ‘For Sale by Owner’ poster outside your home.
- Posting your listings on all the major online property sale portals online.
Once you have sufficiently gotten the word out there, it is time to stage your home and ensure that any potential buyers looking to view it will be impressed. Clean up, make the necessary repairs, get rid of all the clutter and for the love of money, give the place a good paint job.
Get the pricing right
This is a crucial step in selling your own home. Not pricing it correctly could mean that the house stays on the market for a very long time. And the longer the house stays on the market, the lower its value gets. This means that you want to sell it as fast as possible and the only way to do that is to price it correctly and in keeping with the current market value for your kind of home in that particular location.
If you’ve been following me long enough, you know I like recommending property meets, because these are easy places to meet investors familiar with your area. What better way to learn about pricing then talking to someone who has actually bought and sold property in the place you are selling?
The two easiest property meets to attend (at least in my opinion) are the PIN meetings of Simon Zutshi and the Community Meetups of Rick Otton, because they have free attendance, and these events are held monthly at different cities, so it’s easy to book an event relatively close to where you stay.
Once all this is done, it is time to review the offers you get and restructure the pricing if you have to do so to make the sale. As mentioned earlier, it will take time, it will be hectic and you will probably wish that you hadn’t made the decision to sell it yourself at some point. But once you make that sale…what a rush. You will most likely be hooked and that is how you become a property mogul.
Tags: how to sell property, how to sell your house, how to sell your own home
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