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Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 5:40 AM

Selling in this market

Sellers should fix every little thing broken, paint the entire house (inside and out), install high-grade carpet, and go heavy on curb appeal.  Spend some real money and do it right.  That gets you in the game.

Next you should hire an experienced agent, one who was around in the early-1990s, who can help determine the right list price, provide ample marketing, and can talk sensibly about a challenging market so buyers are comfortable with it and still buy your house.   You’d be crazy to try it yourself, even an agent with 5-6 years experience will struggle because they’ve never seen anything like this – they have only known good times.

Then make it easy and convenient for buyers to buy.  Show with little or no notice, have a lockbox, make house available for open houses on the weekend, etc.  Sellers (and agents) will find out real quick that buyers aren’t going too far out of their way to look at your house – it’s really comfortable on the fence!  You have to reach out now and make it easier for them to take a look, otherwise forget it.

Then once you get an accepted offer, remember you’re not done yet.  The buyers will do an inspection, and if there is something broke or not to their liking, they are going to ask you to fix it.  Come on, be realistic here, if you had to replace a couple of GFCI outlets and a few other items, would it kill you? Is it worth it to do something for the buyers in order to keep the deal together? Absolutely!  At least give them a money credit to keep the deal alive!

It’s different now, it’s a buyers’ market, and if you, or your agent, thinks you can boss around the buyers ("if they don’t like it, then too bad, we’ll get another buyer"), be prepared – the next one is going to be just as un-motivated as the first one.

P.S. You stand the best chance of selling in the first month you’re on the market.  Don’t think it’s going to get better, later – it doesn’t, it gets worse.  The number of days you have been on the market is published, and after 3-4 weeks you become stale and buyers wonder how come nobody else bit, and will lower their low-ball offer even more.  Make the deal early on while you can take advantage of the urgency of a fresh listing!  If you were a buyer, and saw that a house was on the market for 30, 60, or 90 days, wouldn’t that impact the price you offered?

 

 

Posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 5:40 AM in Thinking of Selling? | 11 Comments » | Print Print You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Reader Comments: 11 Responses

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    stefanie | November 3rd, 2010 at 4:18 pm

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