4 Ways to Sell Your House Faster
by Joanne Cleaver | Apr 19, 2010 | Comments
Home sellers, buckle up: Spring selling season is here, and it's going to be a bumpy ride.
For now, the April 30 deadline for closing on a house to claim the home buyer tax credit is boosting sales. But with mortgage rates edging up, deals are fragile and lenders are on edge. “Last-minute glitches are holding up things far longer than we have ever seen before,” says Michael Onorato, president of the Illinois Association of Realtors.
Just because you have a real estate agent, that doesn’t mean you can sit back and let the pro sell your house. To get top dollar, you’ll need to take control of the relationship and micro-manage like nobody’s business. Follow these four steps to sell your house fast.
1. Keep Your Agent on a Tight Leash
Make sure your agent pre-qualifies potential buyers before wasting your time with pointless house showings, says Jack LeRose, president of Southeast Wisconsin Mortgage Corp. “Make your agent find out what the buyers will list their own house for,” he says.
Insist your agent confirm that the buyer’s loan prequalification is from a real, live, bricks-and-mortar lender. Quick preapprovals from online lenders typically are based only on the buyer’s credit score and may not stick, says LeRose.
2. Prove Your Home’s Value
To help your pro convince would-be buyers that your asking price is fair, arm your agent with documentation of anything and everything supporting it: receipts for home improvements, new appliances and maintenance, as well as low crime statistics for your neighborhood and top rankings for area schools. (Your mayor’s office, Chamber of Commerce or real estate agent’s firm may offer that data for free. If not, neighborhoodscout.com offers crime and school data for $29 with a one-month subscription.)
Ask your agent to show you three recent sales prices of comparable homes to yours, too.
3. Get a Fair Appraisal
Ridiculously low faulty appraisals are poisoning countless deals these days. You and your agent should do what you can to ensure that the appraisal from the buyer’s lender is reasonable.
The less an appraiser knows about your neighborhood, the shakier the analysis and the greater the chance the appraiser will undervalue your house. Then, if the appraisal doesn’t square with the buyer’s offer, the lender won’t provide the mortgage. Result? No sale.
Some lenders and agents hide behind the 2009 Home Valuation Code of Conduct (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rules regulating appraisers) to avoid the extra work of dealing directly with appraisers. Don’t let them, says Leslie Sellers, president of the Appraisal Institute and a Knoxville, Tenn., appraiser. “You can’t specify a particular person, but you can specify competency,” says Sellers. “And put it in writing.”
You need Javascript enabled to view the video player.Ask the buyer’s lender for a “senior residential appraiser” who can provide proof that he is competent to evaluate sales locally. Otherwise, the lender will be free to hire the cheapest appraiser it can find, even if the appraiser wouldn’t know your neighborhood from one 50 miles away.
Have your agent meet the appraiser at your house armed with evidence supporting the sale price. And watch out: Appraisers sometimes wind up low-balling their estimates because they include foreclosures in their mix of comparable sales. The best way to avoid this is with a pre-emptive strike: Ask your agent to give the appraiser a list of recent local foreclosures and distress sales to be sure they’re not included in the comparables. (That said, if distressed properties make up a significant share of the sales in your neighborhood, they may have to be factored into the comps.)
And finally, ask the lender to send you the appraisal, so you can review it for accuracy.
4. Get Your Home Staged
Staging — making your house more appealing by removing knick-knacks and moving furniture around — can help you sell your home. Just keep in mind that in today’s sluggish housing market, you may end up living in your staged house for months. So you could find yourself wondering when the Pottery Barn poltergeist took possession as you furiously hunt for your toaster.
Some agents include staging in the cost of marketing. If yours doesn’t, you may want to hire a professional stager and work with your agent as a three-person team. (See if your agent will provide a rebate on the staging fee at the closing, especially if the agent recommended hiring the stager.)
Expect to pay $200 to $350 for a consultation with a stager, diagnosing the problems and recommending solutions. You and your agent could take it from there. Or, you might want to hire the stager to do the actual work, for another $500 to $1,200, says Barb Schwarz, founder and president of the International Association of Home Staging Professionals.
If you’re a ruthless declutterer, you could try to stage your house on your own by following these tips:
- Look at before-and-after photos on stagers’ Web sites. See how the stagers arrange furniture to draw the eye to a room’s focal points and then do the same in your house.
- Move accent lamps away from bedside tables and desks. Instead, put them where they brighten shadowy corners and draw attention to special features.
- Position something intriguing to entice buyers into each room. It might be something like a mirror or a drawn-back curtain that frames a pretty view.
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As a professional home stager, I would like to point out that, although we do move furniture around and remove a lot of knick knacks, the placement of every item is carefully thought out to create the greatest impact with the buyers. We don't just move them randomly. We'll show you where we put the toaster before we leave. And if the Pottery Barn look sells the house, then you'll thank the Poltergeist, won't you? I'm not sure where you got the tip about removing lamps from night tables and desks. I'll rent you some extras for the dark corners. Unsufficient nice lamps are the most often missed accessory in even the nicest homes.
But thanks for mentioning staging. It does work.This post could be reduced to THE ONE and ONLY Way to Sell Your
House Faster, and it works in any market regardless of property
condition or market climate. First, all real estate is local so it doesn't
matter what's happening nationally or even regionally.The "secret"? Price correctly, period, either AT current market value or
1 percent below. The house will sell. The caveat is you need to price
"ahead of the market" so, if the market is falling, try to figure out how
fast it's falling (by dollars or percents) and start there. In other words,
you cannot be in the middle of the pack in a falling market, you're
getting left behind by the day.As for staging? I'll allow that it can help a little but is otherwise fluff.
Price can overcome any defect. For example, take a run down shack,
priced correctly it's a diamond to someone (maybe a builder who sees
potential). Point is price can cure any problem.re hawkins point--
sure, lowering price below market will lead to quicker sale, but if carrying cost is low, seller is just "giving away money". patience is key to real estate investing. If buyer needs to sell, then high transaction costs make real estate very poor investment. agents emphasize price because their commission changes little with a price reduction--seller takes the hit. Seller can't rely on agent for conflict free advice on price. And in rapidly changing market, "comps" hard to assess. Wish it were all easier.No offense, but it's OK Bear because you are what we call an unmotivated seller. Motivated sellers don't have time to wait out the market. They worship the time value of money more than they do the sales price or the commission. They NEED fast. And not only is pricing the property 1% below market value not about fast, it's far from being about increased commissions. After all, a 1% reduction paying 3% on a $200,000 single side transaction amounts to $60 less! Besides, a property priced there won't sell fast anyway, unless it is the best house on the block and it's lucky...there are too many short sales and foreclosures on the market. In fact, depending on that market a motivated seller with little to no offers 30 days down the road needs to be considering a 10% reduction just to attract a different pool of buyers, if they want fast.
My two sense (sic)...
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