How can I sell my house quickly? This seems to be the question on the minds of many people as this housing depression moves into it's third year. Now more than ever you may have to make some tough choices regarding the number issue in real estate home sales: price.
Before you can sell your house quickly you should consider several things, foremost of which is the open market value of your home. This is the number one mistake that home sellers tend to make when attempting to sell their house quickly : they price their home out of the open market range. Many people, including real estate agents, feel that it is prudent to "price in" some negotiating room and also even some repair expenses that may be found during the inspection phase. This is not a good policy, however, because these expenses or negotiations are supposed to be subtracted from the market value of the home, not added to it. Pricing your home above the range of the fair market value will not help you sell your house quickly, it will only delay the inevitable price point.
For example, if you are buying a home that has an open market value of $200,000 and it needs around $25,000 in repairs in order to be on level par with the other comparable homes that have sold at $200,000, then would you feel that the owners would be justified starting the list price at $225,000 in order to eventually get to the fair market value of $200,000? The short answer is 'no'. The long answer is still 'no'. You cannot add repairs that need to be done onto the price of the house because the price itself is assuming that the repairs are already done or allowed for.
If, however, you do have your home priced to sell at the fair market value and you have already allowed for expected repairs and allowances but you still have not had much luck in your pursuit to sell your house quickly, then there has to be mitigating factors contributing to this problem. These factors are too often overlooked by both homeowners and real estate agents. Make yourself a simple checklist detailing the actual state of your house. Make two columns, the first should contain all the positives about your house and the second should contain the drawbacks. Be honest here or else this exercise will be useless. You will need to consider several things when making your list such as: age, bedrooms, condition of exterior and interior (room by room, include flooring), neighborhood, location, noise level, windows, insulation, floorplan, flow, entertaining capacity, storage, decking, roofing, and anything else you can think of. I find that for my clients it is easier to physically go from room to room and do a self appraisal. Pretend that you are a buyer or home inspector looking at the house for the first time. Leave your sentimental feelings aside for this.
Now, after you have formed your list you will need to go do some legwork. In this step you will want to visit some open houses in the area or have your agent show you some competing homes so that you can see their conditions. This more than anything tends to bring sellers back down to earth regarding their price point because they typically will see homes in better condition on the market for less than their own. Remember, the whole point of this is to make you money and to help you sell you house quickly, not to insult your pride. But, a bit of the latter may be necessary in order to achieve the former. After all, sitting on your house waiting for it to sell is humbling enough, there is no need to prolong the experience. You might as well bite the bullet and price it correctly from the start so that you can sell your house quickly. You may find that this actually saves time because you have conditioned your sentiment to a certain price point from the beginning instead of being insulted by open market offers should you have an overpriced listing.
