Pretty Much A No-Brainer. So Why Do So Many Sellers Forget to Follow These 8 Top Tips From Seller’s Edge™ When Selling Their Home in Any Market?
How Do You Make Your Home Stand Out When Selling?
At Buyer's Edge, all our real estate agents are exclusive buyer's agents. We work with homebuyers, never sellers, in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Our buyer brokerage real estate company never takes listings. Nonetheless, our past buyer clients often ask us to share our top-selling tips when they are ready to sell their homes. We've worked with hundreds of buyers in our 33+-year history. With nearly $2 Billion of home purchases under our belts, we can honestly tell folks what selling tips can make a HUGE difference. It's a no-brainer!
Selling a Home Tip #1: How to Find the Best Listing Broker?
What is the First Thing You Should Do When Selling?
Interview a Minimum of Three Listing Agents
Work with an honest, experienced, full-time, knowledgeable real estate agent.
Interview a minimum of three listing agents and make sure the home is listed in the Multiple List Service on day one. Work with an honest, experienced, full-time, knowledgeable real estate agent with an excellent reputation in the real estate community. They should have outstanding communication skills, be easily accessible, and a tech-savvy marketer. With text, email, and cell phones, there should be no excuse why a listing agent shouldn’t be accessible 24/7.
Choose the listing agent that loves the profession. The best listing agents are those who love what they do. Make sure your listing agent is a tough negotiator – one who always negotiates hard on behalf of their sellers to sell their homes on the best possible terms.
Selling a Home Tip #2: Price Your Home Right
Price Your Home Correctly
Work with a listing agent with a history of
pushing the market price of properties up.
Work with a listing agent with a history of pushing the market price of properties up. Sellers should work with agents that have a pulse on the current real estate market conditions. An excellent listing agent has a history and motivation to consistently raise the bar on the homes and condominiums that they list for sale. Ask them to show you the statistics of their sales - the original price, the final sales price, and the days on the market. Whatever you do, don’t believe the listing agent who recommends that you shave 15% to 20% off the price to get stampeded by buyers and multiple bids. What if no one shows up for the Multiple Bidding War Party and you get a full-priced offer at a 20% discount? Lovely! Terrific for the listing agent and the exclusive buyer’s agent – but not so great for the brilliant seller! Price your home right from the 3 Guesstimates that you got from those realtors you interviewed. You’ll get multiple bids from crazed buyers without being discounted by 20% if your market dictates it.
Clean, Declutter, and Depersonalize
How to Make Your House Look Good to Sell?
Selling a Home Tip #3: Clean, Declutter, and Depersonalize
How to Make Your House Look Good to Sell?
Your home should have the ambiance of a 5-star hotel. Wash the windows, tear down dusty, light-grabbing drapes and let the sunshine in. Increase the wattage of all your dull light bulbs. Refresh, paint and replace the carpet when necessary. Your home should be so fresh and spotless that buyers believe they can eat off the floor! Like a luxury hotel, your home doesn’t have laundry, wet towels, filled trashcans, or yucky toothbrushes. Walk-in closets, linen closets, and kitchen shelves must be decluttered, perfectly organized, flawlessly folded, color-coded and alphabetized! Clear every counter of all debris. Remember you have no mail, dog leashes, cat odors or bowls of plastic fruit, or crunchy dog food. In fact, you don’t even own a barking Doberman or a yappy Shiatsu! Minimize trinkets and clutter off dressers and end tables. Remove all pictures of your famous Great Aunt Eleanor or your family standing arm and arm with “President You Name It.” Your perfect buyer may not be a member of your political party.
Selling a Home Tip #4: Stage Your Home Inside and Out
Stage Your Home
Yes, it takes a lot of work, but it makes a huge difference!
There’s a ton written about staging and curb appeal to help sell a home fast. (Don’t forget the backyard or balcony!). Yes, it takes a lot of work and tons of blogs on how to stage your home, but it makes a huge difference! A good listing agent will advise you on this. Your home should tell a story when the potential homebuyer approaches the front door. After all, the front door of a home is where love, luck, laughter, and joy will flow in and out each and every day a homeowner lives there. Some say that these first few steps towards the front door are just the beginning of a magnificent journey for the homebuyer and future caretaker of the property. They will live there, add their love story and then pass the home on to another happy buyer down the road. Don’t miss this opportunity the first-time buyers walk through your front door!
Use a Professional
Make your home stand out.
Selling a Home Tip #5: Use Professionally Shot Photos of Your Staged, Picture-Perfect Home
When selling a home, our listing agent should use a professional photographer for all promotional pieces, brochures, videos, and Multiple List Service MLS submissions. Now that your home is immaculate, the pictures should reflect its beauty and perfection. Top-selling dollars are at stake!
Make it Easy to Show
Naptime, dinner time, party time, shower time….. If you have a door and a lockbox, and you want to SELL Secrets to Selling a Home in MD, VA, DCyour home as quickly as possible - open it.
Selling a Home Tip #6: Make it Easy to Show.
Just do it! Naptime, dinner time, party time, shower time….. If you have a door and a lockbox, and you want to SELL your home as quickly as possible - open it. If you think your house is “oh-so, super, duper fancy,” then, by all means, remove your grab-and-go valuables, but don’t make it difficult to show. That’s one of the reasons you’re paying your professional listing agent and her highly efficient assistants a small fortune. They can supervise showings. An international cash buyer may only be available a few hours to see fancy, schmancy properties while they’re in town taking care of their tremendously important business. If you or your listing agent snoozes, your “oh-so, difficult, $7,500,000 home to show” may sit on the market for another 220 days while that impulsive, international, cash buyer negotiates a contract for his daughter and his new son-in-law on another luxury, estate property down the road. True story!! Make it easy!
Selling a Home Tip #7: ON DAY ONE - List Home on All Major Online Portals like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. Put it in the MLS!
“Pocket Listings” - Avoid This Costly Mistake When Selling your Home.
“Pocket Listings”
Avoid this costly mistake when
selling your home in the DMV
It’s so simple; don’t you want ALL QUALIFIED buyers to see and bid on your home when marketing your home? That’s the only way you’re assured what the true market value is. Remember, the list price is only an educated Guesstimate from your experienced listing agent! If you don’t want to get the highest price at the best possible terms for your home, go ahead and sell it directly to a builder or to a buyer the listing agent’s brokerage company has before it hits the market. That way, the listing broker who determines the list price can get both the buyer and seller sides of the transaction. Didn’t you want to hire a real estate agent to represent and protect your best interests throughout the entire process? Yes, dual agency is legal in most states, but it doesn’t make it right.
Selling a HomeTip #8: Place Fresh Cut Flowers Throughout the Home
Welcome Home
Flowers express to others that you love your home,
and you hope they will too.
Flowers are like icing on a cake. They tell your guests and potential buyers they’re welcome in your home. Flowers express to others that you love your home, and you hope they will too.
Save These 8 Secrets to Selling Your Home Faster, or at the Highest Price, and with the Most Qualified Homebuyer.
Are You Looking for “How to Sell Your Home” Bonus Points?
Here are a couple more home-selling tips from Seller’s Edge™! While cleaning and organizing everything in your home to stage it perfectly to put it on the market, don't forget to wipe down and clean the tops of the furnace, water heater, and air conditioning unit/compressor.
Ensure all the light bulbs in your home are working and the same color. Soft white is generally best.
First impressions are critical. Everything outside the home should be flawless for potential buyers as they walk up to the house and cross the threshold for the first time.
Lastly, consider cleaning the roof professionally if it has any discoloration. Homebuyers do notice these things.
Seller's Edge™ Tips for Selling Your Home in Any Market
