How To Sell Your House Fast
How To Sell Your House Fast
When it comes to selling your home, you ideally would like to sell your house quickly for cash at a price you feel acceptable. In real life, this rarely happens. A cash buyer wants a better price so there are some inherent conflicts that exist. When selling you basically have four options:
- Sell your home yourself
- Sell your home through a conventional full service Realtor
- Sell your home through a limited services real estate company to try to save some commission
- Sell your home to an investor that may be local or a nationwide investor or pool of investors
Which way you choose depends on your situation. One thing for sure, not all options are created equal. Let’s cover each in detail.
1. Sell your home yourself
Selling your own home by yourself is a job and an adventure. The first thing you must do is get to know your market and where you fit into the competition currently on the market as well as the prices homes like yours have been selling for. It’s often very difficult for a homeowner to be brutally honest with themselves regarding their own home. They often are in denial about their condition, their location and the emotional attachments sometimes don’t allow the clarity to properly stage and price a home to sell.
Secondly, it’s vital to understand that people who come through your home will often say kind things to you during a showing, never to be heard from again. Your job (which is now a real estate professional) is to get their name and phone number so you can follow up with anyone that has seen your home. You’ll find out what Realtors experience… they may not return your phone calls even though they seemed to like the home. It’s part of the process.
When someone is viewing the property, give them some space. Don’t follow them around, tell them all of the good with none of the bad. Everyone knows a home has some bad attributes. When a seller tells me they want to be present during showings, I won’t take the listing. I’ve had too many sellers early in my career dominate the showing making the buyers uncomfortable to speak their mind and that in itself changes the entire dynamics of the showing towards the negative.
Third, you’re the marketer. Create a web page about the home or have one created. Make sure they use keywords that buyers searching for a home in your area will use to you have on page optimization done property so your home can be found on the internet.
When you run advertising, only use the local papers that people use to find houses to rent or homes for sale. Don’t use the weekly newspaper that people read for local news information. You’re wasting your money.
List your home on one or more for sale by owner website on the internet for broader exposure.
Hire an attorney to handle the contracts and negotiations. Make sure they’re a real estate attorney. Not someone that spends all their time litigating criminal cases.
Selling a home is a big job and as a for sale by owner, you’re going to be negotiating with buyers face to face which, for most people, compromises their negotiating power. Sadly, when a strong buyer asks a seller; “what’s the lowest price you’ll take” the seller normally answers and gets stung by their own words. A Realtor will simply say, make an offer because as a third party, we often don’t know what the lowest acceptable price is and frankly, it changes all the time. He who speaks last… loses. Remember that!
If you need to save the commission and still want the ability to have a sound online presence, there is an alternative. Using the online “For Sale By Owner System” is a very viable alternative that has saved owners over 1 Billion dollars since 1999. Click on the banner below to learn more:
2. Selling Your Home with a Conventional Full Service Realtor
Working with a conventional real estate agent to sell your home is the most common choice for people. Full service simply means that these agents will take care of all the details, showings, advertising and closing coordination. It’s by far what most people choose to do as they don’t have the time or expertise to pursue the process themselves.
What most people fail to understand is that most of the time a Realtor doesn’t cost you much money at all when compared to selling a home by themselves as a for sale by owner. How can that be true? Because the more demand you create, the better price you’ll get. Obviously, demand creates price strength and listing with a top agent will allow this to take place.
When most people sell by owner, the first thing they do is discount the price to account for not having to pay commission, thereby playing Realtor for free. Next of course, the buyer comes in and discounts even further because he knows you’re not paying a commission. Your job then becomes convincing the buyer you’ve already come down in price. You can see where this will lead… can’t you?
Top agents can help you in multiple ways when trying to sell your home. They can advise you on pricing, helpful improvements, proper staging, professional showings and feedback, offer presentation and negotiation and closing coordination bringing all the details together to have a successful closing.
Details handled, a higher price and a successful closing. Sounds worthy of your consideration don’t you think?
Lastly, if you’re facing a short sale, your agent can coordinate much of the communication that needs to take place with your lender to gain the short sale approval to get the closing done. With a top agent, you’re getting much more than meets the eye on the surface and sacrificing little if anything at all on price.
3. Sell your home through a limited services real estate company to try to save some commission.
Have you heard of limited services real estate companies? It may or may not be an option. It really just depends on how much time you have to work at selling your home yourself with some assistance and exposure of a multiple listing service from a limited service real estate company.
Depending on what you pay will determine the amount of work the company does or you do yourself. Essentially, you have a menu of services available at different prices. Do you want to show the home yourself? Have buyers call you directly? If so, you may get a commission discount and so on.
This certainly is an option if you want to save some money and have the time to devote to the process, but if you don’t you’ll likely want a full service company.
In my experience, I would say that 20-30% of the people that try this method succeed. Many ultimately list with a full service agent as it becomes too time consuming to do showings, open houses etc… still without selling. These agencies exist in most markets. Usually you can find them in your local advertising and they’ll have information about their limited services and reduced commissions for consumers.
4. Sell your home to an investor that may be local or a nationwide investor or pool of investors.
If you have to sell fast and are willing to discount price, even in the event of a short sale, there are investors that you can talk to that may buy your home for cash quite quickly. For some people this is an option, for others it’s the last option.
What this option does do is present a ready, willing and able buyer very quickly. You will be discounting the price to these investors, so be prepared for this kind of offer.
If this is an option for you because you just want to unload your property in this most difficult market, then simply click on the link below and you’ll be taken to their brief application page. Upon completion, they’ll be in touch to hear more about your property and your situation to see if it’s a fit for their investors.
