Whether it’s your first time selling a home and putting a property up for Essex real estate listing, the process of selling a house never gets less complicated. It may get a bit easier the second or so time around, but it always carries the same nuances. And, regardless of whether you’re a first-time seller or not, you’re bound to pick up a lesson or two after learning the most common mistakes most home sellers make.
Sellers make mistakes. First-time sellers, even more so. But, it’s not impossible to avoid making them, and the first step is to know exactly what the most common kinds of mistakes are!
1. Thinking There’s Only One Way to Sell a House
There are many ways to sell a property. Listing is just one of the many. Traditional buyers will be glad to buy it directly off your hands. The same goes for investors, such as professional real estate companies.
So, before you go on and find an agent, consider exploring other selling options first and learn more about what each one can offer you.
2. Over-Inflating
A lot of people have this mindset that they’ll just price their property too high since buyers will haggle anyway. Others just do it because that’s what they genuinely believe how much their property should sell for. In some cases, a property is priced high because a real estate agent convinced the owner to do it in hopes of getting a higher commission.
Regardless of what happened, not getting a proper assessment of the value of your home and selling it for more than how much it should make it near-impossible to find a buyer.
A quick and easy way to know how much your property will likely sell for is to take a look at the other similar homes for sale in Essex and see what the going price is.
3. Leaving Things in the Property
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Would you like it if you saw some bottles of vitamins and medicine lying around? Pretty sure you’d feel uncomfortable right there and then.
For buyers to imagine themselves living inside your house, they need to feel like it’s theirs and not like they’re trying to trespass on your personal space.
Give them the opportunity do just that by making sure that you’ve cleared everything from inside your property before putting it up for sale.
4. Underestimating Costs
Selling a house is costly. You’ll have to worry about agent fees and commissions, listing fees, administrative and marketing expenses, repairs and maintenance costs, as well as closing costs, among many others.
5. Not Taking the Time to Repair the Property
If you want your property to sell for a fair price and sell fast, do yourself a favor and invest in sprucing it up a bit and fixing everything that needs fixing.
While not cheap, taking care of everything before the buyers get a chance to point it out will help make sure that your property sells for as much as it should if not higher.
6. Lying or Not Telling Everything
By law, you’ll have to tell the buyer everything, so don’t lie.
Lying will only make things worse, as you’ll soon learn during the inspector, or when the new owners decide to take you to court for lying.
7. Not Cleaning Up
If you can’t exactly clear everything out, do at least try to clean up to make the property feel neutral yet welcoming.
Seeing stuff lying all over the floor or in the creases of the couch, like chew toys and Legos, can make the experience uncomfortable and could possibly make an interested buyer back out.
8. Getting Too Attached
It’s okay to get a little bit sentimental but getting too personal is not good.
If a qualified buyer is willing to buy your property over other houses for sale in Essex only to tear it all down and build something new, that’s okay. Remember, this is business, and you shouldn’t miss out on a chance to close a deal just because you couldn’t deal with what the buyer wanted to do to your old house.
9. Bad Representation
Your agent is the representation of you and your property. They’re the first to communicate with qualified before you and often, houses for sale in Essex are sold without the buyers and sellers ever even meeting each other.
Because of how crucial the real estate agent is to sell your home, you’ll want to make sure that you hire the right one. Look at reviews, do your research, and ask around. Carefully weigh everything first before making the decision, including how comfortable you are working with a particular real estate agent, so you don’t end up with an agent that’s not looking out for your best interests and is only worried about making money off of the commission.
10. Not Calling us First
Minimize the hassle of the already complicated process of selling a house by learning from the mistakes made by other homeowners who’ve also put up homes for sale in Essex.
