Seven Easy Steps To Sell Your House

Sell Your Home

Selling your house can be done in seven easy steps.  The hard part is there are 12,931 difficult and annoying things you have to do between the 7 easy ones.  Ok, so I made up the 12,931, there may be more.  Seriously though you can help yourself with these 7 following things:

1.  Emotionally move.  The difficult part is emotion heart strings.  This is your home.  Your crib, your baby.  Your colors, your nest.  Stand in the front yard and look at your “baby” and emotionally move to your next home.  Imagine seeing your property as another house.  After all you will be the one that carries the memories of this place with you.  Your home is in your heart not in those walls.

2.  Consider competition.  Size up your opponent.  It’s game time.  Who are you up against and what are their weaknesses and your strengths.  Try to objectively look at your competition as a buyer just moving to your area.  Yes, you have better neighbors and you planted tulips in the front bed, but your house is used and built in the late 80’s.

3.  Clean.  Give your place a bath is the best thing.  Scrub walls, baseboards, pressure wash the walk and drive, windex the light fixtures, let’s get this place looking sharp!

4.  De-Clutter.  You are moving anyway.  Rent a storage space, pay for a dumpster, time to donate clothes, furniture and items to charity.  Open up the floor plan!

5.  Consider time.  While on a trip last week , I watched the Pawn Stars on cable TV.  People brought in items that they could have sold on their own with effort, but many sold for much less because it was easy and fast cash.  Many times the pawn store operators would not purchase a valuable item because they thought it would take too much time and floor space to sell.  Moving is ranked as one of the stressful events in someone’s life.  What is your expected time frame to get this done?

6.  Advertise your property.  Trulia, Zillow, Craigslist, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Newspaper, Open House, Flyers, Homes.com, YahooHomes.com, …. you get the idea.  Ted Turner said it best “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise”.

7.  Put it in writing.  Got the buyer?  Great, put it in writing and call your nearest title attorney.  If you have a spare moment I encourage you to visit a court room near you that is working real estate transactions.  The judge asks for and only considers the “meeting of the minds” in agreement before him/her in “writing”.  All the ‘he said”, “she said” matters not in a court of law.   Protect your time and money and get the deal in black and white on paper.

Selling your house is easy, if you can follow some of the suggestions above.  My observation is we under value our time and we are very emotional creatures.  If you can put yourself in the buyers shoes then you will be well on your way to letting go and selling your house with ease.