Prepare For Selling Your Home
There are many factors to consider when you’re thinking about selling a house privately. The first and probably most important thing to consider is how much of the work do you want to do yourself, and furthermore, how much of it are you qualified to do yourself? This may sound strange, but the main point is realizing that selling a home is actually a job that you will need to prepare for in order to do it properly. You will need to prepare your home and also prepare yourself when you are selling your home privately.
Preparing your home means getting it fixed up and cleaned up for showing. A home shows best when it is completely free of clutter of any kind. Think about the homes you see in magazines and you’ll get the idea. It’s somewhat unrealistic to imagine really living without any useful items in sight, and that’s why people generally take photos of their homes to post online after they put a lot of their possessions in short-term storage. I always advise sellers to spend the time and money to pack up items that are not used on a daily basis and take them to storage before taking photos and also before showings. This is a great gift you can give your prospective buyers who came to see the home and imagine their own furnishings in it. They didn’t come to see your stuff at all!
Preparing yourself means that you have a checklist of what needs to be done on a certain timeline, and that you can easily follow it in order to stay on track with your marketing and sales activities. These are the things an agent normally does for his or her clients, but you will be doing them yourself when you’re selling your home privately. Preparing yourself also includes making sure you have the right paperwork, the sales agreement and other required forms such as a seller’s disclosure form and federal and state-required disclosures as well. You don’t want to accidentally break the law by failing to give your buyer any required forms prior to signing a sales contract. You might be surprised to discover what is actually required of all sellers these days. Once again, this is one of a real estate agent’s areas of expertise that you will have to learn in order to take care of your own sale transaction.
And finally, preparing yourself also means taking a deep breath and waiting patiently after your buyer signs the sales agreement and goes to a lender to apply for a mortgage loan. This part of the transaction can be the longest and most frustrating so you just have to be patient.