Selling a home can be a lot of work, but if you put a little effort into getting the house ready to sell, you can get a much better return on your investment. Whether you are selling because you are moving on to a new phase of your life or you are selling because the home just doesn’t fit your family anymore there are many things to think about when you are getting a house ready to sell. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about selling a home and some tips to make it easier to get your home ready to be sold:
When Is The Best Time To Sell A Home?
Most people think that the best time to sell a home is in the spring. This is generally true, but that doesn’t mean that your house won’t sell quickly during other times of the year. There are a lot of different factors that impact the speed at which a home sells. Including the neighborhood the house is in, the price of the home, the upgrades in the home, and the condition of the home all have an impact on how quickly the home sells. But, if you are ready to sell your home another season of the year don’t feel like you need to wait.
This is especially true if you have a specialty home that has a niche market of buyers who are always looking for homes like yours. Historical homes, particularly Craftsman homes and Mid-Century Modern homes are in high demand year-round.
What Is The Best Way To Add Value To My Home?
Homeowners don’t want to have to put a lot of money into their homes to sell them. If you don’t have the budget to do a full renovation of the house before selling it or you don’t want to spend the money renovating the home, there are affordable things that you can do to increase the value. Things like painting the walls a neutral color, replacing the carpets in the home, or updating the bathroom fixtures and the lighting fixtures throughout the house. All of these small tasks will help add value to the house before you put it on the market.
What Is My Home Worth?
Often homeowners are very disappointed to find out that their home isn’t worth what they thought it would be worth. That’s because they depend on inaccurate online calculators to figure out the worth of their homes. However, to get a truly accurate estimation of the value of your home you need to have your home appraised by a real estate agent. Only an agent can give you the most precise value of your home based on the neighborhood, the school district, the age of the house, the condition of the home, and other factors.
A real estate agent can also give you valuable advice about what things you need to fix on the home to increase the value of your home and get the value up to what you think it should be.
How Much Will Selling My Home Cost?
Of course, you don’t want to pay any more than you needed to sell your home. However, there will be some costs that you will have to factor in to sell the house. You may want to offer to pay for the closing fees if you are looking for a quick sale. There will probably be some necessary repairs and fixing up that needs to be done to make the house more attractive or more functional. Alternatively, you might need to pay more for staging to get people interested in buying the house because it’s an older house. A real estate agent can give you the most accurate breakdown of the costs involved in selling your home. But, in general, you can plan on spending about 1% of the selling price on things like:
- Realtor’s commission
- Staging and home preparation costs
- Seller concessions
- Repair costs
- Homeownership and overlap costs
- Closing costs
What Do I Need To Disclose?
If you are selling a home, you must disclose any massive potential problems with the house. If you know that your home is going to need a new roof or new siding or new windows you don’t have to fix those issues, although it can raise the purchase price if you do. However, you do have to tell potential buyers about them.
With newer construction homes disclosures are not often an issue because very often the homes are still under warranty and don’t have any significant defects or issues. But, when you are trying to sell an older home,disclosures about potential problems can be critical. If you are worried about issues with the house and making sure that you disclose all the potential problems a smart thing to do is to have the home inspected by an independent and experienced inspector. That way you can give potential buyers a copy of the inspection findings, and they can see for themselves what things will need to be repaired soon.
Providing an inspection to potential buyers may cost a couple of hundred dollars, but the investment is worth it in the long run because it will make buyers much more likely to put an offer on the house. If there is something that needs to be fixed, and you don’t want to pay to have it fixed, you may need to offer a concession on the price as a way to attract more buyers.
