Image via WikipediaSelling your house is a very important transaction for most people. You have probably heard commercials say it to the point of nauseam, "Buying a house is the biggest investment you will ever make." While I disagree that buying your house is the biggest investment you will ever make, I do believe that it is a big purchase and certainly a big transaction. Now when it comes to actually selling your house, I know from personal and professional experience that this event can be overwhelming at first. However, to keep your head from exploding as your hit the "pre-selling-my-home" panic button, our team has put together the 5 following action steps that we believe every home seller should take before attempting to sell your home. So before you go out there and spend $5,000 at Lowe's or Home Depot buying items to make small repairs all over your home and before you start cancelling trips to the lake so that you can be available for the OPEN HOUSE weekend, take the time to read this article...it may save you lots of time, and it may help you realize a lot more profit on the sale of your actual home. Avoid the costly mistakes, read this article, take some notes, take some action and then let's go sell that house!
Sit down with your partner (if you are not married, sit down with somebody you can trust) and write down your chief motivations for wanting to sell your house:
Grab an energy drink your caffeinated beverage of choice . Turn off the cell phone. Turn off the distractions and the endless chatter of the world and really ask yourselves, "Why do we want to sell our home?" Just asking you this question and sincerely answering it can be enlightening for most humans. Over the years you might be surprised if I told you all of the stories of people who "thought they wanted to sell their house because they wanted to down-size," but ultimately decided not to. You would not believe the numbers of people that thought they wanted to buy a larger house because everyone around them was buying a bigger house, only to subsequently discover that they were more at home right where they were at. Their expenses were comfortable. Their cash-flow was healthy, and they really did not want to move after all. As a successful entrepreneur, I am a doer. I get things done. I make decisions. However, when it comes to buying or selling a house, I would sincerely urge that you would be a "thinker" and then be a "doer." Whatever answers you come up with, write them down, sleep on them and then look at your pad of paper the next morning. Are the answers on the paper really how you feel? If so, do it. Sell your house now. If not, call off the dogs and don't sell your house.
Determine where you want to live after you sell your house:
If you are selling your house so that you can construct your dream home , this is going to be an exciting time for you. If you are selling your house to move into a larger one, this is going to be an exciting time as well. If you are down-sizing you might be feeling a little hesitant or nostalgic about the whole transaction. In the end , you might be super excited to down-size from that big house. I don't know where you will be at emotionally, but I do know that you need to be prepared for where you are going to live after you sell your house. Well, what if you sold your house in 3 days? Where would you live then? What zip codes to you want to live in? Do you want to buy a home in Voorhees? Do you want to buy a home in Haddonfield? Do you want to buy a home down the shore? Do you want to rent a house while your dream house is being built? Do you want your kids to live near a nice school district? Will you put your kids in a private school that you want to live near? Do you have a dog that you walk daily? Do you want to live near a bike path or the Cooper River park system? Do you want to live under a bridge while your build your house (I would not recommend that)? Really my friend, the answers to these questions are going to be unique to you, and it is our goal here that you will not ever put yourself in a situation where you are forced to buy a house in a rush of emotion after selling your house. We don't want you to ever feel pressured or rushed to buy a house in the next 10 days. Because when you have to buy or sell based on motivation, you are not going to be able to negotiate the best deal. Remember this, "a motivated buyer or seller will not be a buyer or seller who is negotiating from a position of strength."
Call Team Clyde (Stephen & Donna Clyde) at RE/MAX Connection and setup an interview with our team:
Obviously I have an extreme bias when it comes to recommending real estate teams, because I am a proud part of Team Clyde at RE/MAX Connection. However, all puffery aside I can tell you this. Team Clyde will generate results for your real estate. When you hire our team you will not just be hiring a broker. You will not just be getting a person in a suit with a liscense and a glamour shot on a business card (although Donna and I do look good on our business cards). When you hire Team Clyde you will be hiring an entire crew of web developers, social media experts, professional photographers, professional videographers, web optimizers, award-winning marketers, selling professionals, real estate consultants, commercial real estate experts, home buying experts and internet marketing gurus. Literally you will be hiring an entire team instead of just one person. I know that it might be hard to grasp why this is so important, so I will give you a specific example:
Normally when you enlist the help of an agent in South Jersey, he or she will come out to your house in a luxury vehicle. He or she will be wearing fine clothes . He or she will be going over a questionaire for you and then he or she will be putting together a listing agreement for you to sign. When you sign the agreement, you will be agreeing to pay a 6% commission to the real estate agent. If the agent brings the buyer and the seller together he or she will get the entire 6% commission. If the agent does not bring the buyer, you will be paying this agent a 3% commission and you will be paying the agent that brings the buyer an additional 3% commission. The real estate specialist you choose will take photos of your property using a consumer grade camera. These photos will then be uploaded to the multiple listing service MLS by the agent. The agent will then put together a hand out for you. The agent will then put a sign in your yard. The agent will then wait for someone to call him or her from the sign or from the MLS listing. This is how 90% of the agents work. The agent will then attend innumerable breakfast networking opportunities and events in the community in an attempt to drum up more listings. This is how most of the agents work. Will the agent sell your house? Potentially.
When you hire Stephens or Donna Clyde of Team Clyde, we will come out to your house with an entire home inventory checklist to review with you. We will then clarify with you nearly all of the variables pertaining to the home that will either help or hinder the home from selling. We will then review with you a punch-list of things that you need to be working on prior to selling your home. We will work with you to make sure that your home looks its very best before we schedule professional photographer to come out to your property to take photos of it. Once everyone agrees that your house is looking its very best, they will then schedule the professional photographer to take great photos of your home. The photographer will then come out and spend 1 hour or more taking great photos of your home's most flattering ammenties. The photographer has a well-trained eye and a high skill level. They are looking to capture the very best features your home has to offer so that your home will look its very best online. The photograher and the agent both know that nearly 85% of all home buyers will be using the internet to search for their potential home before scheduling a time to view any homes. Once the photos are taken, they will then go back to a professional editor who will spend several hours touching up the photos and making sure that they are looking their very best. If you have food on a menu or clothing in a catalog you would want it to look its very best, we believe at the very least, this should be true when marketing your real estate. Once your photos have been edited, they will then be taken down to the videographer team who will be putting together an incredible slideshow of your home. This slideshow is going to look phenomenal. Ths slideshow is going to really encourage buyers to schedule a tour of your home. This slideshow is going to best represent your property in the marketplace. Once your video is completed it will then be uploaded to youtube, tubemogul and a variety of online video portals. The video will then be uploaded directly to realtor.com and various other internet portals. Once these videos are uploaded your file will be passed on to our web-optimization crew. Have you ever wondered how some items come up top in google and some items do not? Well it has to do with web-optimization and the internet gurus who know how to make your property come up top in the list. As these people are working on optimizing your home and getting it in front of as many people as possible via the internet, our newsletter developer will be working on getting your home into our montly newsletter. This newsletter goes out to 15,000 + people each week. As this newsletter is being put together our marketing team will then begin developing a mailer piece that will be going out to 20,000 homes per month in your area. These mailers drive traffic to our website that is professionally managed. As this is all happening your agent will be dropping by to put up your sign. They will be calling other realtors to tell them about your property. They will be networking. They will be dialing and smiling their lists of potential buyers. Your realtor will be showing the house. Your realtor will be handling the phone calls and answering the questions of potential buyers. The realty is your realtor will be working 40 hours per week on behalf of you and other home sellers, but our team will be working nearly 100 hours each week marketing the properties.
At Team Clyde, we want our agents to be experts at home selling and we empower them by providing them with an entire team of marketing and technology professionals so that your house will be sold with as much speed as possible and with our "we will sell your house in 119 days or we will sell it for free guarantee" we have to.
Knock out this punch-list of items before your sell your home:
1) Move out all bulky furniture before you sell your home. Bulky furniture will make your house look small and some buyers will try to negotiate with you to include the furniture. If possible, take this furniture out of the home before you decide to sell it.
2) Make the essential and blatantly noticeable repairs before you attempt to sell your home. If your front door has been kicked in and your wallpaper is peeling you really need to fix these items before you list your house. If your carpet is in horrible condition you really need to replace the carpet before listing your house. If your fixtures are outdated, you really want to fix them before you sell your house. Old fixtures from the 80s will make your house fetch offers for 80% of its value. When it doubt, replace fixtures, carpet and paint.
3) Consider hiring a professional stager. Sometimes we all have to know what we don't know. Sometimes we have to hire an expert who really knows their craft. A professional stager can make your house look great, open, inviting and welcoming. A home that is staged badly can look intimidating, off-putting, polluted, cramped, small or just undesirable to many people. If you know that you are not good at decorating or staging then I would highly-recommend that you would hire a professional stager. At Team Clyde we have several highly-recommend professional stagers in our network that we would be happy to connect you with. Some stagers will work strictly off commission as well. Essentially, they do not get paid until and unless your house sells, just like us realtors.
4) Find a lender that you can trust. At Team Clyde we will be happy to connect you to lenders that we know and have worked with over the years. You might be surprised how many buyers want to buy your home, but sincerely have no idea who to go to for a loan. Sometimes buyers go to the wrong lender and they find themselves getting really taken advantage of with fees and slow response time. This can kill their motivation to buy your house which might ultimately kill the deal for you. This is not good. At Team Clyde we pride ourselves on having a great list of referral sources within our real estate network so that we can recommend quality vendors for you that work in the real estate industry right here in Tulsa.
Make the call to Team Clyde at RE/MAX Connection Realtors:
At Team Clyde we will deliver results for your real estate. Don't just hire an agent; hire a team with proven track record. Call 856-988-1800 ext 117 now.
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