20 Steps to Help Sell Your Home

As a homeowner you can play an important part in the timely sale of your property. When you take the following steps, you’ll help us sell your home faster, at the best possible price.

Make the Most of that First Impression
A well-manicured lawn, neatly trimmed shrubs and a clutter-free porch welcome prospects. So does a freshly painted – or at least freshly scrubbed – front door. If it’s autumn, rake the leaves. If it’s winter, shovel the walkways. The fewer obstacles between prospects and the true appeal of your home, the better.

Invest a Few Hours for Future Dividends
Here’s your chance to clean up in real estate. Clean up in the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen. If your woodwork is scuffed or the paint is fading, consider some minor redecoration. Fresh wallpaper adds charm and value to your property. Prospects would rather see how great your home really looks than hear how great it could look, with a little work.

Check Faucets and Bulbs
Dripping water rattles the nerves, discolors sinks and suggests faulty or worn-out plumbing. Burned out bulbs leave prospects in the dark. Don’t let little problems detract from what’s right with your home.

Don’t Shut Out a Sale
If cabinets or closet doors stick in your home, you can be sure they will also stick in a prospect’s mind. Don’t try to explain away sticky situations when you can easily plane them away. A little effort on your part can smooth the way toward a closing.

Think Safety
Homeowners learn to live with all kinds of self-set booby traps: roller skates on the stairs, festooned extension cords, slippery throw rugs and low hanging overhead lights. Make your residence as non-perilous as possible for uninitiated visitors.

Make Room for Space
Remember, potential buyers are looking for more than just comfortable living space. They’re looking for storage space, too. Make sure your attic and basement are clean and free of unnecessary items.

Consider Your Closets
The better organized a closet, the larger it appears. Now’s the time to box up those unwanted clothes and donate them to charity.

Make Your Bathrooms Sparkle
Bathrooms sell homes, so let them shine. Check and repair damaged or unsightly caulking in the tubs and showers. For added allure, display your best towels, mats and shower curtains.

Create Dream Bedrooms
Wake up prospects to the cozy comforts of your bedrooms. For a spacious look, get rid of excess furniture. Colorful bedspreads and fresh curtains are a must.

Open up in the Daytime
Let the sun shine in! Pull back your curtains and drapes so prospects can see how bright and cheery your home is.

Lighten up at Night
Turn on the excitement by turning on all your lights – both inside and outside – when showing your home in the evening. Lights add color and warmth, and make prospects feel welcome.

Avoid Crowd Scenes
Potential buyers often feel like intruders when they enter a home filled with people. Rather than giving your house the attention it deserves, they’re likely to hurry through. Keep the company present to a minimum.

Watch Your Pets
Dogs and cats are great companions, but not when you’re showing your home. Pets have a talent for getting underfoot. So do everybody a favor: Keep Kitty and Spot outside, or at least out of the way.

Think Volume
Rock-and-roll will never die. But it might kill a real estate transaction. When it’s time to show your home, it’s time to turn down the stereo or TV.

Relax
Be friendly, but don’t try to force conversation. Prospects want to view your home with a minimum of distraction.

Don’t Apologize
No matter how humble your abode, never apologize for its shortcomings. If a prospect volunteers a derogatory comment about your home’s appearance, let their experienced Realtor handle the situation.

Keep a Low Profile
Nobody knows your home as well as you do, but Realtor’s know home buyers – what they need and what they want. We will have an easier time articulating the virtues of your home if you stay in the background.

Don’t Turn Your Home into a Second-Hand Store
When prospects come to view your home, don’t distract them with offers to sell those furnishings you no longer need. You may lose the biggest sale of all.

Get Help
When prospects want to talk price, terms or other real estate matters that you are unsure of get help. We offer a menu of services so you only pay for what you need…

Understanding Your CMA

A Competitive Market Analysis (CMA) is an important tool to use and understand when pricing and buying homes.

What exactly is a CMA? It is a comparison of prices of recently sold homes that are similar to a listing seller’s home in terms of location, style and amenities. Generally how it’s done is that the subject home’s neighborhood is searched for similar homes (active, sold, pending, expired, etc.) in the last 6 months. A quick report will show you pertinent information about other homes such as size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price and price per square foot. As long as homes and lots are similar, the price per square foot of the SOLD homes is a good indicator of where other similar homes will be sold at.

CMAs are a very good indicator of pricing in most cases, but some provide more reliable information than others. The smaller the area searched, the more similar the homes and the more recent the data, the more reliable the information. Knowing this, you should ask anyone doing a CMA for you:

• Did you just search my neighborhood?
• Some areas in my neighborhood vary greatly (custom/non-custom, age of homes, etc.), did you just include the areas most similar to mine or did you search the entire neighborhood?
• Did you look at the homes individually to ascertain that they were good comparables?
• What is the time frame of the search? Six months to a year is ideal.
• Were there foreclosures or short sales included in the search?
• Were there closing costs paid that weren’t taken into account?
• How reliable do you feel like this CMA is?

We offer a CMA as a optional service to our clients, but often we will recommend a fair market value appraisal when we don’t feel that there are enough similar homes that have been recently sold. Obviously we want our clients to get the most money possible, however we do want you to sell. We value our success rate and since we don’t receive a commission on our flat fee MLS listings, we tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear!

If you decide to consider a 6% real estate agent, it is a good idea to meet several and ask for CMAs. You will most likely hear different suggested listing prices. An inexperienced agent may not know how to properly do a CMA, or an unethical agent can skew the data simply by modifying the search. You’ll want consider an agent’s motivation when you receive CMAs. A newer agent or any agent in today’s buyer’s market may desperately need the commission and advise you to price lower for a quicker commission. While another agent may tell you what you want to hear knowing that he or she needs the listing for advertising and leads. Pricing your home correctly is crucial to selling. Make sure you trust the person advising you.

What is the MLS?

The term MLS stands for “Multiple Listing Service” and is a database of properties currently on the market in the area. It’s only available to Realtors and not to the public. The MLS allows participating Realtors (which includes virtually all Realtors in the area) to list their homes for sale and agree to share in the sales commission of the properties.

The MLS feeds data to many sources including Realtor.com, most broker and agent websites, and many large franchise sites like remax.com. The exposure your FSBO home will get with our service will increase your chances of finding a buyer faster. And remember, the faster the better. Buyers are less likely to make a low offer on a newly listed home that’s price right for the current market!

This also means that if I list your property on the MLS with our Flat Fee service, and an agent finds a buyer for your house, that buyer’s broker is entitled to a commission at closing. With our MLS Flat Fee program, you set the selling commission up front, so the buyer’s agent always knows how much they are earning to sell your home.

It’s important to note that the MLS is not the same as Realtor.com. The MLS is what Realtors use to list homes and can only be accessed by licensed Realtors, while Realtor.com is the public website used by consumers to search for homes.

The big advantage to you, as the seller, is that every single broker and agent participating in the MLS has an incentive to sell your home. This effectively puts every agent in the area to work selling your home! The first place a buyers agent looks is always the MLS. There is simply no better way to gain instant and widespread exposure for your home than listing it on the MLS.