- Ideally, you should be absent so buyers feel comfortable making comments
- Make sure your home highlight sheets are easily visible
- Open all drapes and shades during daylight hours to let in as much light as possible, but screen out unappealing views
- Light the whole house, especially dark corners and hallways
- Light (or turn on) the fireplace
- Showcase your home’s best features
- Turn off the television, Play quiet background music
- If you’ve repainted in neutral tones, add bold splashes of color (with throw pillows, crockery, pictures, etc.)
- Place fresh flowers where they’ll stand out
- Open all doors between rooms to give an inviting feeling
- If possible, open windows beforehand to circulate fresh air
- Pick up toys, remove all clutter, ensure beds are made, clothes put away
- Floors should be clean, carpets and rugs vacuumed
- Trash and recycling bins should be tidy and odor-free
- The kitchen & bathrooms should sparkle If possible, bake cookies or put a pan of cinnamon in the oven to create a warm and inviting aroma
- Ideally, pets should be unseen.
- Pet areas should be clean and odor-free.
- Not everyone may share your love of animals, and some may be allergic to them
- Lock away and hide all cash, jewelry and small valuables
Home Sellers Guide
Selling your home should be exciting! Let's take a look at the keystones of a successful home sales experience.
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Find an Awesome Agent
Real estate professionals, must complete a variety of courses and regularly update their professional education. Finding a well-equipped real estate agent to market and sell your home is the most important part of the selling process.
It's important to find someone who you feel you can trust, that they are willing to sell your home with your best interest at heart. Real Estate brokers should never view you as a potential payday, but rather as a dynamic human being with needs, desires and concerns.
AllenWay Agents, Creative and Passionate
Real estate agents provide you with comprehensive, high-quality service. So when you decide to sell your home be sure to take advantage of the knowledge, experience and professionalism of a real estate professional.
An AllenWay Agent will:
Outline Responsibilities
Complete disclosure, loyalty, confidentiality, obedience and accountability.
Broker Price Opinion
Don't sweat the pricing of your home. We'll help you determine the best asking price with an awesome presentation of comparable properties.
Market Your Home, Masterfully
Extensively market your home in order to maximize the number of buyers who know about it, request showings and make offers.
Advice from Experience
We'll offer proven advice on how to prepare and show your property so you get top market value for it.
Home Service Coordination
We keep contractors and vendors in the loop with what's going on with your property.
Communication
Regularly communicate with you to keep you fully informed of everything we do to sell your home.
Property Showing Management
Feedback is key in making adjustments to your home's presentation. AllenWay agents handle all showings and feedback, while you're kept in the loop.
Offer Handling
We promptly present and evaluate each offer with you. AllenWay Agents are expert negotiators and have the experience to make wise, strategic negotiations.
Home Preparation
First Impressions are Crucial
When presenting your home to prospective buyers, first impressions are crucial. Buyers begin judging your home the moment they see it and, unless they’re looking for a deal on a fixer-upper, they prefer homes that are well-maintained, clean and clutter-free.
Improvements and Renovations
There are three kinds of improvements that will impress buyers and help you sell for top market value: renovations, upgrades and repairs. Reorganization and maintenance are equally important. Keep in mind, an experienced real estate agent knows what today’s buyers are looking for and can provide more ideas that will maximize your home’s appeal.
Renovation Ideas
The two most important things to remember about renovation are:
1. Don't Over Do it, and 2. Make renovations that will appeal to the widest possible audience. An AllenWay agent will be able to counsel you on which renovations are likely to be good investments in terms of your overall plan.
Kitchen Renovations
Are Kitchen Renovations Worth It?
New flooring, cabinets, counter tops, appliances and lighting can be costly, but buyers typically look for updated kitchens, and you’ll recover a large percentage of your expenses on resale.
Key Takeaways
Even a minor facelift – for instance, new paint, floor covering, cabinet doors and hardware – can pay off in a faster sale at a better price.
Bathroom Renovations
Are Bathroom Renovations Worth It?
As with the kitchen, renovating bathrooms can pay off in terms of both value and marketability, especially in an older house.
Key Takeaways
Opt for good lighting, large mirrors, attractive fixtures and materials, plenty of storage and neutral colors.
Energy Efficient Improvements
Are Energy Efficient Improvements Worth it?
With everyone “going green” these days, energy-saving upgrades and repairs that reduce fuel bills can be a selling point. For example: sought-after double or triple-pane windows and storm doors tha t keep indoor temperatures comfortable year round.
Key Takeaways
There are many options, so do some research and talk to a home products professional to find those improvements that best fit your plans and budget.
Strategically Price Your Home
A Balancing Act
You don’t want to set a price that’s so high that it discourages showings and serious offers from the very qualified, motivated buyers who would ultimately determine your property’s top market value.
On the other hand, you don’t want to set a price that’s so low that it attracts lots of interest, but sets the stage for offers and negotiations that could result in your getting less than the market would actually support if you were a little more aggressive.
Try to Be Impartial
Unfortunately, the market is not interested in what you originally paid for your home, or how much you need to sell it for to buy your next home and meet your financial goals. In addition, your home may have features that you highly value, but which might actually reduce its market value by limiting the number of potential buyers.
Learn MoreWhy are you selling?
Do you want to sell? Or do you need to sell? The current conditions of the market have a huge impact on the sale price of a home. Unfortunately your personal situation may dictate that you take less money than the market would otherwise be willing to give you if you had more time.
Learn MoreResearch
You can find out a lot about your local market through research at websites like AllenWay, as well as by going to open houses in your area and making comparisons with your home in terms of location, size, features and condition.
Learn MoreGet a CMA from an AllenWay Agent
A Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) is a document, drawn from a local Multiple Listings Service (MLS) database, that presents pricing information, property details and photos of homes similar to yours (termed “comparables”) that recently sold, failed to sell, or are currently on the market in your area.
Generally, studying what has worked in your area – and what hasn’t – will help you to strategically price, position and stage your property so that it sells for top dollar in a reasonable time frame, with the least inconvenience for you.
Timing is everything
Price your home to sell when its market exposure and buyer interest are highest
In a purely numbers sense, how you price your home will directly impact how many buyers, showings and offers you attract, as well as how easily it sells, as depicted in the Pricing Pyramid diagram below.
Masterful Marketing
The successful marketing of a home is a multi-faceted process that includes nearly every activity involved in getting it sold.
In fact, marketing encompasses just about every topic covered in this Guide – home preparation, pricing, presentation and even negotiation, as well as strategic advertising and networking.
Utilizing Technology
The internet is revolutionizing real estate advertising. Clearly, your real estate professional needs to have an internet marketing strategy in place to target these desirable and more market-informed internet buyers.
Here’s what discriminating internet buyers look for most on real estate websites:*
98% – Property photos (plenty of them)
Gorgeous photographs of a well staged home are key to gaining interest on your home. AllenWay Photographers are on stand by to present your home in the best light.
98% – Detailed information about properties
Painting a picture of your home verbally is vital for prospective buyers. Detailing your home's information online help search engines find your home, meaning buyers find it easier.
78% – Virtual tours
Virtual tour popularity has increased dramatically in the past 5 years. Give buyers the option to view your home in a "first person experience" before they see it in person.
78% – Real estate agent contact information
A well regarded listing agent tied to your property can inspire confidence in a smooth transaction.
78% – Neighborhood information
Like your home's information, detailing the surrounding neighborhoods information gives a prospective buyer a snapshot of what their lives will look like living in their new home.
Marketing your community as well as your home
Real estate industry surveys have repeatedly found that neighborhood quality is the most important reason why home buyers choose where to live. In fact, experience shows that buyers usually “buy” an area first, and are often willing to pay a premium for homes there.
That’s why it’s crucial to highlight your community’s amenities – like proximity to quality schools, restaurants and shopping, local parks and attractions, as well as other benefits that impact lifestyle.
Real estate professionals have access to the kinds of detailed community and school information that today’s buyers are looking for, and they are highly capable of portraying the relationship between the value and benefits of your community and home together.
According to the National Association of REALTORS® most buyers searched for homes and home information on multiple websites
Make sure that your home will be well represented on the most popular websites in your area including realtor.com® and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). This representation enables potential buyers to find your home and potentially make an offer to purchase.
Setting the Stage to Sell
Open Houses and Showings
Having invested in some of the effort and expense of preparing your home to sell, you’ll certainly want it to take full advantage of it when you open up your property to prospective buyers and other agents during open houses, agent tours and showings.
Learn More »Time-Proven Tips For Showing Your Home
Here are a few ideas that will help you maximize your home’s attractiveness to buyers:
Important: keep your home available — and ready — for showings
Particularly during the first weeks after you list your property, real estate agents from many firms will want to show it to their buyer clients. It is especially important during this window of opportunity, when interest will be at its highest, that you make your home available for showings, preferably at the time requested by the buyers’ agents.
Negotiating the Deal
With rare exception, negotiating the transaction is the most complex part of selling a home. At the same time, it’s the one that can involve the most creativity.
That’s why it’s important to have an experienced and savvy real estate professional who has successfully worked through many different transaction scenarios.
Overview
What follows is a brief description of the negotiation process and a few strategies for negotiating the best possible deal you can. This includes: keeping in mind your situation, priorities and needs, not giving your situation away to the buyer and buyer’s agent, trying to understand and respect the priorities of the buyer, being creative and, where necessary, willing to compromise to get the deal done.
The Basic Process
When a buyer, typically with the help of a real estate professional, makes an offer on your home they’ll do so using a contract that has been developed by your local real estate association in conjunction with legal counsel. These contracts enable the buyer to set a sale price, and also include many clauses for specifying various terms of purchase, such as the closing and possession dates, the deposit amount, and a variety of other conditions.
The buyer’s real estate professional will then deliver the offer to your real estate professional, who’ll present it to you. You should closely review every detail of the offer with your real estate professional, who’ll be happy to address all your questions about the offer and the process itself.
You can then accept the offer, reject it, or counter it to initiate the negotiation process. Successive counter-offers, with deadlines for responding and meeting various contingencies and special conditions (e.g. a home inspection, the buyer securing financing), will be exchanged between you and the buyer until a mutually-satisfactory pending agreement is reached or the negotiations collapse.
Don’t show your hand
Even in a buyers’ market, it’s crucial to keep certain aspects of your selling situation (e.g. your finances, why you’re selling, how urgent you are) as concealed as possible from the buyer and buyer’s agent. Remember, it’s the job of the buyer’s agent to get the best deal they can for their client, so any vulnerability you show could end up compromising your position and costing you thousands of dollars.
Learn More »Found the right buyer? Make the Deal Happen
Particularly in a market where reasonable offers can be hard to come by, once a buyer makes one you should be willing to make a few compromises to seal the deal. You just never know when the next serious offer will come along – or what it will cost you to wait for it.
That said, here are a few basic principles of successful negotiation to consider if you’re committed to completing your sale:
Remember your priorities and respect the buyer’s.
Don’t let small things get in the way of your better judgment.
Disclose everything
Smart sellers proactively go above and beyond legal necessity to disclose all known defects to their buyers. Most states have property disclosure forms. Use them. If the buyer knows about a problem, they can’t sue you later.
Ask questions
Offers may contain complicated terminology, sometimes three or more addenda. Your real estate professional can help clarify everything for you.
Respond quickly
When buyers make an offer, they are in the mood to buy. But moods change, and buyers are known to get buyers’ remorse. Don’t delay if you want the sale.
Stay calm and be patient.
At all times keep communication civil and agreeable, even if the buyer gets tense, or you might loose your sale.
If necessary, defer until later
If small issues get in the way of big ones, focus on and consolidate your agreement on the big issues and come back to the small ones later.
Meet halfway
At the end of the day, if there are disagreements about relative small expenses, split the difference and smile.
Take care with contingencies
When you’ve landed your buyer, your signed acceptance of a written offer becomes your sales contract. Except for removing any contingencies, this document is the binding basis for the sale.
Rely on your real estate professional.
It’s your agent’s responsibility to represent your best interests every step of the way. Your success is their success.
The reality is that most negotiations proceed without much problem. In the event that there are difficulties but you’re still committed to selling, remember:
where there’s a will there’s a way.
Closing the Deal
If you and your buyer have both efficiently taken care of your respective contractual obligations associated with finalizing the sale, the process of completing the transaction – known variously as the “closing”, “escrow” or “settlement” – will go smoothly with no surprises.
Contingencies and Conditions
A pending sales agreement nearly always includes contingencies and special conditions that have to be fulfilled by the buyer and seller by the closing date, which usually falls 30 to 60 days after both parties signed the agreement
Typical contingencies and conditions may include:
The buyer’s securing of financing
A stray document could hold up the funding process.
Title Searches
A historical review of all legal documents relating to ownership of the property to ensure that there are no claims against the title of the property.
Title Insurance
The purchasing of Title Insurance in case the records contain errors or there are mistakes in the review process
Final Walk Throughs
The buyer is given the chance to look a t the home to make sure that it’s in the same condition as when the sale agreement was signed
It’s important to review the sales agreement with your real estate professional so you understand your obligations. Any shortfalls or mistakes at this point can be very costly.
Your real estate professional can discuss and remind you of these obligations, as well as help arrange for their fulfillment and prepare you for the closing.
Completing the Transaction
While different areas handle the final settlement in slightly different ways, generally the closing agent – a third-party professional, often a lawyer, who conducts the proceedings – reviews the sales agreement and does the following:
Learn More »Most often, a Lawyer will complete the following:
- Determines the total amount due from buyer and collects the check
- Determines all the adjustments (e.g. seller prepayment of taxes, utilities, etc.) and ensures that they’re factored into the transaction
- Assures that the transaction costs (closing, legal fees, etc.) are paid
- Determines the seller’s payments, credits and adjusted net proceeds
- Witnesses the seller’s signing of the property title and all other documentation associated with the transaction
- Collects the keys and any other necessary items from the seller
- Provides the seller with the net proceeds as well as copies of the documentation pertaining to the sale
- Ensures that buyer’s title is properly recorded in the local records office along with any mortgage liens
In most cases, the buyer’s Possession Date will fall within a couple days of the Closing Date, at which point your former beloved home will have a new occupant.
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