Eight Costly Home Seller Mistakes

Homeowners who want to sell their home know they need to get the place spruced up for marketing, but a tougher challenge for some sellers is to get mentally prepared for putting their residence on the market.

After all, if you’ve been happily living in your home for years, it can be emotionally hard to detach yourself from your memories and look at the place as a commodity you’re selling.

For a smoother sales transaction that yields the most possible profit from your sale, avoid these common, yet costly, seller mistakes:

1. Skipping a home inspection. Depending on the age of your home, scheduling a pre-listing home inspection could save you a lot of time and aggravation. You can address issues on your own time and budget before negotiating with a buyer to fix problems.

2. Skimping on your sales prep. While you may be tempted to ‘test the waters’ and put your home on the market without painting it or making minor repairs, your home is likely to languish on the market and get a reputation for having a major problem. A thorough, professional-level cleaning should be your bare minimum seller prep. Your eventual sales price is likely to be lower if you don’t sell within the first few weeks after you list your home.

3. Choosing the wrong REALTOR®. Instead of picking a REALTOR® who’s a friend of a friend, a relative or perhaps someone who’s great at working with buyers, take the time to pick a REALTOR® with an excellent reputation for listing homes. Your payoff will be much larger if you list your home with a REALTOR® with local market knowledge and sales expertise. Three things you need from a listing REALTOR® are a great marketing plan, exceptional negotiation skills, and good communication.

4. Neglecting to ramp up your curb appeal. If you polish and primp inside your home but neglect to pull weeds or paint your front door, you run the risk of potential buyers leaving without ever entering your home. Even though I always use a professional photographer to shoot my listings, if we can’t get great pictures it reduces marketability.

5. Withholding information from buyers. If you hope that the buyers or their inspector won’t find out about the leak under your bathroom sink or the fact that your basement gets flooded every winter, you run the risk of a nasty negotiating period, or worse, a lawsuit after closing.

6. Overpricing your home. If you’ve hired the right REALTOR®, a professional who can give you a strong market analysis and help you determine a reasonable price for your home, then you can avoid overpricing your home. If you don’t listen to your REALTOR® and base your listing price on an inflated view of your home’s value, you’re likely to end up selling after multiple price drops for less than you would have if you priced it right the first time. My marketing plan is to sell your home in the first 45 days on market, our largest window of opportunity and the time we can command top dollar.

7. Being unprepared for your next step. Whether you should buy your next home or sell your current home first is only one part of the preparation you need to make to move. You need a back-up plan in case your transaction on either end takes longer or shorter than you think, and you need to understand your mortgage payoff and the closing costs you must pay. Many seller / buyers these days are arranging bridge loans so they can purchase their new home before they close on the old one.

8. Letting your pets and kids spoil a sale. Part of your emotional detachment from your home is recognizing that while you love Fluffy and your darling children, buyers want to visualize themselves and their own family in your home. Bribe your kids if you have to, but make sure the house is neat and as neutral-looking and neutral-smelling as possible. Take the kids and your pets out (or lock up your pets) when prospective buyers are visiting – you never know if someone who is terrified of dogs or cats will be turned off from making an offer because of your adorable pet.

Selling a home can be challenging, but with the help of a reliable professional REALTOR® you can avoid making mistakes and reap the rewards of your sale.