There are many ways to list your home for sale. Listing your home is just one step in the process of successfully selling your house for the best price in the shortest amount of time. Here are the most popular ways to list your home for sale;
- Professional Realtor
- FSBO – For Sale by Owner
- Zillow Listing
- Redfin Listing
- OpenDoor Listing
- Street Signs
- Craigslist Ad
- Local Bulletin Board
- Facebook Marketplace
All of these methods will list your home for sale. Listing your home is one logistical step in getting you home sold. For the successful sale of your home at the highest price in the shortest period of time here is the top 3 list of factors.
Market Price
There is just no getting around this one. It doesn’t matter how you list your home or how much marketing you throw at promoting it. If you don’t list within market price it just won’t sell. This is one major reason to hire a professional realtor. Much like a stock broker, a realtor’s job is to know your local housing market.
A great realtor will have their head and boots in the market day after day. They’re aware of the ups and downs, historic trends and current events. Your professional real estate agent will be constantly watching the local housing market data and help you move forward.
You can use tools that help you get a guesstimate. You can then guess yourself at the sale price. However, at the end of the day it’s better to hire a professional to nail down the right price. Taking the guess work out of your most important sale is wise.
Marketing Strategy
Once you have determined the best market sale price for your home it’s time to draw up an effective marketing strategy. You can simply list your home on the many networks available and wait for an offer to roll in on it’s own. However, if you are pushing for top of the market sale price you will need to do much more then that.
Much like launching a website and expecting leads to roll in. A website on it’s own will need draw in leads. Strategic, targeting promotions will draw in leads. Once the leads are draw in it’s time for the marketing of your property to kick in. This leads us to our next step.
Visual Appeal
Your property needs to be visually appealing. You will need to spend some time de-cluttering and cleaning up. After that work has been done professional photos and videos will project the best aspects of your property online to attract the best audiences.
The marketing campaign for your property needs to especially appealing to draw in the largest audience. The better your campaigns are the more people will be aware of your property.
Offer Negotiations
There are quiet a few legal documents that need to be completed in order for a property sale to be legitimate and complete. There are multiple documents that can be prepared and ready for buyers that want to make an offer. This is a critical step. You want the offer flow to be smooth for all parties. The less hiccups at this point the better.
Once one or several offers come in the response is critical. Once again, knowing your local housing market is very important at this stage. For example, if inventory is low then added expense to you can be avoided. If inventory is high then you will want to have budgeted from the beginning a certain percent of sale for repairs. The better planning for this stage the better.
Closing
Arriving at the closing table is no small feat. Many legal logistics must be complete in order to even arrive at your closing. Once there you will want to make sure everything is completed correctly. There are many things that can go wrong at closing.
A title Attorney once shared a story about a lady who bought some property without title insurance. Later, she found out that the title hadn’t really transferred to her. Because she hadn’t purchased title insurance at closing she lost the property. She lost 100% of the money she had paid to purchase it without remedy.
This is just one example of how closing on a property can go south. Make sure you have qualified professionals to help you through the closing process.
Does Listing Houses for Sale by Owner Work?
Results show that only 10% of the For Sale by Owner listings conclude in a sale. This includes those listing on Zillow. 56% of agent assisted home sales result in a sale.
The remaining 34% of home sale listings result in the home sale being postponed and un-listed. This is mostly due to incorrect market positioning. The price was listed too high for the market to bear. Another reason is that it didn’t have the right marketing. In both cases, homeowners are disappointed with offers that come in below what they were thinking they should receive.
These type of owners are not in a hurry to sell. They care more about getting a specific price then obtaining the sale within a specific time frame. These sellers are willing to wait until the equity in their home reaches their sale expectation. They feel confident that if they wait long enough their home value will eventually reach the sale price they want.
If you don’t need to cash out your home quick for a discounted amount you have really great options. The best being to hire a professional Realtor. They work hard for you to get the highest market price in the shortest time frame with the highest security. You get what you pay for. You don’t want to cut corners when it comes to selling one of your highest valued assets.
If you’ve been considering selling your home, invest 45 minutes to sit with a professional real estate agent. Get the most current market positioning information about your property. Then you can make the best decision and determine if now is the time for you to sell.
