Selling your home can be a complex process. If you miss certain deadlines or fail to prepare for work you need to do later, you could make some very costly mistakes.
Don’t allow inexperience or stress to get in the way of your moving plans. By following some important steps, you can keep your plans moving forward in an orderly way.
- Consider selling quickly to an investor
- Choose the date you want to sell your home
- Choose whether you’ll be selling with a realtor or by yourself
- Research a price
- Get the home ready for showing
- Create listings on all the major real estate engines
Consider selling quickly to an investor
As you’ll see in our guide below, selling your home can be complex, costly, and time consuming…depending on how it’s handled.
An alternative to selling the home yourself or selling with a realtor would be to sell to an established local real estate investor.
A real estate investor is someone who will handle the entire closing process for you – up to and including handling all repairs, paperwork, closing costs and fees, and more.
Why sell to a real estate investor?
Selling to an investor allows you to sell your home in a fraction of the time it would take to sell your home on the MLS, or to a realtor. It also allows you to skip the headaches and hassle of scheduling home showings, cleaning the home so people can walk through, managing closing deadlines and dates, handling fees, etc.
Investors also often pay in cash, which means the money gets into your hands far more quickly than the traditional closing process would allow.
If you’re interested in seeing what a real estate investor has to offer, the first step would be to request an offer on your home. Doing so involves filling out a quick online form and will take only a few moments. After that, the investor will call you directly and ask some questions before determining what they can offer for your home.
Many sellers find selling to a local investor like We Buy Houses Mass to be a far easier and cost-effective way of selling your home.
But before making that decision for yourself, let’s examine the process of selling your home yourself, or to a realtor, so you can make an informed decision.
When you’re selling a house, make sure you work through all these steps in order:
Choose the date you want to sell your home
Setting dates is an important first step in selling your home. Knowing when your plans will be finalized will help you avoid a lot of stress throughout the sale.
As far as efficiency is concerned, many real estate experts agree that spring is the best time to list a home. This is due to a number of factors, including how much more appealing homes look in spring surroundings, and how eager buyers are to close before school starts.
You may have trouble with dates after this point. People don’t like to move during the winter or when school is in session, so plan to list your home in the spring if you want to get more offers.
Choose whether you’ll be selling with a realtor or by yourself
The next choice you need to make is whether or not you’ll be working with a realtor. A realtor can be expensive, but they can also offer pretty much all the services you need to sell a home fast.
If you choose to work independently, you’ll be on the hook for some of the steps that can normally involve input from a realtor, such as:
- Researching a price
- Choosing places to post ads to your listing
- Preparing the paperwork that will be needed for the property transfer
- Knowing the laws that apply to selling property
- Providing the right names to home features
Even with these advantages, you don’t have to hire a realtor to ensure a fast home sale. Some of the next steps will go over how you can do some realtor work on your own.
Research a price
Before you start accepting offers, you should make some decisions about the price. Pricing your home on your own can be difficult, and how you do it could play a major role in the time it takes to sell your home.
Prices that are higher than expected may scare off serious buyers, while low prices for fast sales may suggest to buyers that the property has an unseen problem.
Start by doing property searches in your area. Use Zillow, Redfin, or some site with MLS listings. You want to look for homes for sale nearby that match your home in terms of:
- Location
- Square footage
- Number of bedrooms and bathrooms
- Yard size
These listings can give you an approximation of how much your home might be worth to the market. If you’re selling a premium home, an expert’s opinion is likely worth the cost.
Get the home ready for showing
Once you have listed the property, you may get dozens of requests for showing. This is why it’s important that you have your home prepared before you move to the step of creating listings.
This is not a step that can be taken lightly. If your home doesn’t create the right atmosphere for house hunters, you will likely have to wait far longer to move the property. Your home needs to be ready to look like a show-home at a moment’s notice. That can take some serious preparation, including:
- Removing excess clutter from home and putting it in storage
- Replacing family furniture and artwork with neutral-colored rented furniture
- Cleaning up minor marks of damage such as pavement cracks and scratches
- Purchasing decorative items to add extra emphasis to good home features
- Refreshing lawn care as often as possible
These preparations can be time-consuming, but they are essential if you want a home to make the right impression on buyers, as this will control how quickly your home sells.
Create listings on all the major real estate engines
Listings are profiles for your property that share details, images, and methods to contact the owner. You can post listings for free on many of the biggest real estate sites, as they consider your listing part of the value they offer to visitors. You should make sure your listing appears on:
- Realtor.com
- Redfin
- Trulia
- Zillow
You may also find some local opportunities to post a listing. For example, there are many sites that focus on certain states, cities, or even neighborhoods, which may give you access to more attentive local buyers.
Sell Your Home Easily
Selling a home on your own doesn’t need to be difficult. It’s just a matter of making important choices and then preparing for them. Decide when you want to sell your home and whether or not you’ll be working with a realtor, or whether you’d prefer to take a quicker and more hands-off route by selling to an established local real estate investor.
If you’ve decided to do most of the work yourself, focus on developing a price, preparing the home for showing, and creating listings. If you’ve decided to sell to an investor, fill out a quick online form to receive a quick and fair cash offer on your house.
Whichever option you choose, you’ll be on your way to selling your home!