Four Steps To Help You Sell Your House in 30 Days Or Less
MOTIVATION--The first question you need to ask yourself is how motivated are you to sell your house? Are you willing to go out of your way and sacrifice your time and schedule? Are you willing to keep your house cleaned and organized all of the time? Are you willing to pack away anything you haven't used in the last 6 months?
If you said no to any of those questions, then you are probably not going to get your house sold in 30 days. It can be a very humbling experience to sell a house. Frankly your attitude, as much as it goes against your grain, you have to picture buyers as a bunch of snobs that roam around your house inspecting things Ouch!
CURB APPEAL--More and more Realtors are hiring professional photographers to take the photos of your house. Pictures can be deceiving--let's make that grass a little greener. The first thing you need to do is walk around your neighborhood two or three blocks and look at your neighbor's curb appeal. Now critically on a scale of 1-10 compare it to yours.
Your yard should be clutter free. Be extremely careful with benches, and knick knacks. Do they add curb appeal or distract? If your have sprinklers, run them. Keep your grass thick and green and manicured. Unless you are really good at this and have the time, hire a landscaper for a month to mow, edge, and make it look really nice.
Even someone without a green thumb can go to Home Depot and buy some petunias and tastefully plant them. If you don't feel like you would do a good job at that, hire someone that has a green thumb and knows how to plant flowers in a way that they don't look like someone just stuck some petunias in the yard.
Don't be a plain Jane. The worst thing that you want to hear is that they loved the inside of your house but the outside wasn't remarkable in any way,
Let me just mention, too, that once they love the front of your house, you want them to love the backyard, too. Prepare to do the same things in the back yard. And if you have dogs, be sure that you DAILY pick up any dog bombs.
One more detail. As your Realtor is fiddling with the key box trying to get the key out, what is your buyer doing? They are looking at your outside entry way. Keep all of the cob webs and other bug evidence cleaned up.
MARKETING--What good is it going to do to get your house ready to sell and no one knows it is for sale? Why do you think so many small businesses fail? Nobody knows they are there. On the other hand, I know of another business in town, Amarillo Hut, that is a little building not on anyone's main route but their successful marketing plan has made them a huge success.
Sticking a sign in the lawn and putting it in the MLS is not marketing. That is like the first business that went out of business. To properly market a house you need a major marketing blast. For instance, my marketing plan is first a press release and all the way down to classified ads. My goal is that after the first 7 days of listing a house is if you type in the address you are the entire first page. I call that my blast.
PRICING--I was saving the best to last. The buyer runs the show. We have done our part by putting forth our best interest, making it beautiful from the outside and marketing it to death. The only thing that is left is pricing.
Take a look at the chart above. You will see that if you have your property listed at a fair market value 60% of buyers (looking in your range) will look at your house. If your house if priced just 10% higher than market value you have cut your population in half. On the other end if you are 10% below market value you increased your buyer pool to 75%. And if you are 15% below market you will probably have a bidding war.
In your view, if you want to sell your house in 30 days where do you need to be priced? The average day on market is a consideration, too.
That information is based on price range but something I can easily get for you.
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