6 Tips For Selling Your House

If you are selling your house you probably have a ton of questions regarding the process and are experiencing a lot of stress about not getting your house sold or having to accept an offer that’s much too low. To make things a bit easier for house sellers, we’ve gather a few tips that you should have a look at if you want to sell your house.

Research the Local Market

Your local market will determine the price you can set for your house. Make sure that you do enough research on how the market is for your neighborhood. Even when nationally the market’s not so hot for sellers this doesn’t necessarily mean that the same applies to your local market. Go to open houses in your neighborhood and talk to the agents to figure out what the market’s like. If there are more buyers than sellers on the market, you should set your list price rather high. If the market’s not so great for sellers however, you may want to price the house a little under market value.

Set Your Price Based on Prices of Comparable Houses

Have a look at list prices of similar houses in your neighborhood to determine the list price for your house. Compare with houses of similar size with the same amount of bedrooms, bathrooms and other similar features (such as age, garden size, etc.). Also make sure to look up what houses are actually selling for. There are websites that collect this kind of data. Knowing the real prices that houses are being sold for will help you determine whether an offer you get is realistic or not.

Determine if You Need a Real Estate Agent and/or Lawyer

If you have a lot of time, know a bit about finance and real estate law, you may want to consider selling your house on your own and that way save on commission and legal costs. If however you lack time and don’t have much financial and legal knowledge, you should probably get a real estate agent to help you with the sale of your house and perhaps a lawyer in case any legal issues pop up.

Clean Up Your House

Before actually putting your house for sale, you want to clean it up completely, inside and out. The better your house looks, the more you’ll be able to sell it for. Get any small repairs that you’ve been putting off done. You may even want to consider repainting, since this could significantly increase the price you could sell your house for.

Market Your House

The more interested buyers you get for your house, the better your chances of getting a good price for it. In order to attract as many buyers as possible, you need to market your house. You should promote your house by putting it into different online listings, buying ads in local classifieds, distributing flyers and even creating a website for it. If you have a real estate agent, they should do all this marketing for you. You should also hold open houses so potential buyers can come have a look at your house. Very interested people may want to have a look at the house earlier, which you should allow of course.

Reviewing Offers and Closing the Deal

If everything goes well you should be getting a few purchase offers for your house. Carefully examine all the offers and decide whether you will accept one of them or make a counteroffer. Your real estate agent can help you figure out if any of the offers are good and if it would be wise to make a counteroffer.

Once an agreement is reached between you and the purchasing party, the deal can be closed. It will usually take a few weeks for the deal to be finalized, during which the buying party gets their finances in order and you make your house available for inspection, negotiate about any repairs that the buyer may want you to get done, and move out your belongings.

Zane Schwarzlose is a writer at Colley and Colley, LLP, a personal injury law firm in Austin, Texas. Zane hopes he won’t have to sell his house in 20 years or so.