Selling your house can be tricky and challenging, especially when it’s your first time. At times, selling a home might feel like an invasion of privacy because homebuyers will come into your house, look at the rooms and poke around. With no experience, it’s quite easy for first-time home sellers like you to commit a plethora of mistakes. However, with just a little know-how and guidance, you can easily avoid any mistakes.
So, we are here with an informative article on 5 common mistakes that home sellers must avoid while listing or selling their homes. Have a look!
Also Read: Top 5 House Hunting Mistakes That One Must Avoid
Mistake 1: Selling it by yourself
One of the biggest mistakes that home sellers usually make while selling their homes is not using the services of real estate agents. It can be a huge loss to try and sell your house without a real estate agent. Although the real estate agents will demand a heavy commission ranging between 5%-6% of the sales price of your house, it is probably not a recommendation to try selling your house on your own.
A good real estate agent will have your best interests at heart and help you set a competitive and fair selling price for your house. This, in turn, will increase your odds of a high-speed sale. Besides this, your agent will also have more experience negotiating house sales, thus helping you get more money on the sales than you could by yourself.
Mistake 2: Hiding major repairs and problems
As a home seller, do you think you can get away with hiding major repairs and problems in your house? Well, let us tell you that each repair and problem in your house will be uncovered once the homebuyer inspects the house. When you discover any repairing issue in your house, you have three options for dealing with that issue. You can either get the problem fixed ahead of time, list the property at a normal price and offer the homebuyer credit to get the issue fixed or price the property below market value to account for the issue.
You as a home seller must always remember that if you don’t fix the major repairs and problems in advance, you may end up losing a fair number of homebuyers looking for a house where they can turn the key in the lock and move right in. So, we recommend you have your house inspected by a home inspector before listing in order to avoid expensive surprises after your house is under the sales contract.
Mistake 3: Pricing it wrong
Whether you are working on house sales on your own or with a real estate agent, setting the right sales price is crucial. Most home sellers make the mistake of pricing their property wrong, which leads to low sales. So, you should never set unrealistic or high prices for your house because overpriced houses generally don’t sell.
Setting a price on the low side can help you succeed because, in theory, this will generate various offers and bid the price up to the actual market value of the house. In fact, pricing the property low can be a strategy to attract extra interest in your listing. Moreover, you can always reject an offer that is too low as per your expectations.
Mistake 4: Skimping on listing photos
Skimping on the listing photos is another mistake that home sellers must avoid while they are on the journey of selling their homes. As so many homebuyers look for homes online these days, you need to add clear and true photos of your house. All the listing photos that you will add must be clear and crisp. In addition to this, make sure to capture pictures of your house during the day when there’s plenty of natural light available.
If possible, try using a wide-angle lens as it will offer homebuyers a better idea of how the entire property looks! In addition, we suggest you hire a professional real estate photographer to get high-quality photos rather than allowing your agent to take snapshots on a smartphone.
Mistake 5: Not accommodating homebuyers
Finally, the last mistake that most home sellers usually make is not accommodating the buyers. If someone is willing to view your home, it’s your responsibility to accommodate them, even if you are not willing to do so or it inconveniences you. Besides this, you must keep your house clean and tidy so that it’s not dirty when someone visits. To be straightforward, a homebuyer would not care or know if your house was clean last week but what matters is if your house is clean before every single visit. So, it involves a lot of work but stays focused on the return that you’ll get.
Learning the right way to sell a house is very important. Make sure you get yourself prepared mentally and financially for unexpected scenarios, even if you don’t make any of the mistakes stated here. Also, if you avoid all the mistakes above, you will surely go a long way towards putting your best foot forward and achieving the sale that every home seller dreams of!
Also Read: Home Sellers Guide