Clean, Clean, Clean
First, prepare your home for the market. Maximize your home's appeal by fixing every little detail including chipped paint, leaky faucets, and holes in the walls. Next, prepare it for showing. Scrub your home inside and out, make it shine; be sure to concentrate on your kitchen and bathrooms. Buyers expect a used, lived-in home, but the brighter and more un-cluttered your home looks, the more appealing a buyer will find it.
Having A Marketable Listing
When listing your home for sale, you want it to appeal to buyers. You need to make it marketable. Three factors determine a home's marketability: price, financing, and time. If time is an important constraint, be willing to lower the price. When pricing, try an old retail trick and drop the price $10. It makes the difference look much bigger between $400,000 and $399,990, for example. Finally, offer attractive financing options, as financing can make or break a sale.
Pricing Your Home
Understand the market conditions to establish the best asking price. You don't want to set the price too high or too low. The value of a home is determined by supply and demand; a buyer's market has more homes for sale than buyers, and a seller's market has the opposite. To find out which one you're in, ask a professional. The final consideration for setting your price is realizing the exact amount you want to take home after all closing costs are paid.
Real Estate Marketing
Today's technology offers many new ways of marketing to give your home exposure to more potential buyers than ever. First, to maximize your potential for success, it is important to market to three tiers: brokers, neighbors, and buyers. To effectively target all three tiers, hold open houses, make flyers, advertise in newspapers and magazines, send e-mails, and utilize the Internet.
Offer Incentives
Offering a higher commission for the sale is a little-known tactic useful for quickly selling your home at a higher price. Losing an extra 1% to add to commission is a 14% raise for your agent, and that looks really attractive to agents bringing buyers to your home. You can also offer allowances for buyers, such as a kitchen remodeling allowance (allowing a buyer to select one of your given remodeling packages), a new carpet allowance, or a new appliance allowance. |