Selling your home can be an exciting and stressful time. It can be even more stressful when you don’t know how to sell your home fast, but need to make a quick sale. Keeping the buyer’s perspective in mind can help you make small updates and changes in order to make a good impression on potential buyers. Choosing the right real estate agent will make staging, listing, showing, and selling your home easier on you. Knowing the ideal time frame and lowest acceptable sale price will help you make decisions when you receive offers. If you truly need to sell as quickly as possible and the sell price doesn’t matter as much, you do have other options.
1. Make A Good Impression
To appeal to a buyer, you have to think like a buyer. Would you want to see a stranger’s clutter or personal items all over the place? Probably not. Tidy up, declutter, and put your personal items like photos away. Consider renting a small storage locker while your house is on the market so that these things are out of the way. If you aren’t using something every day, store it. It will be easier for potential buyers to imagine their items in the house.
If buyers see your closets crammed full of stuff, they might think that their own clothes won’t fit. Your home should look tidy, inviting, and spacious. Remember to look at the areas you use often, such as where you throw your keys, where you empty your pockets, and where you put mail. These catch-all areas should be empty when you are listing your house.
Once the clutter is gone, start cleaning. Deep clean your house or hire a professional cleaning service to get into all those little spots that often get missed during regular routine housework. Have your carpets steam cleaned. Make sure your windows are spotless, tile grout is scrubbed, and ceiling fans are dusted. Wipe any little handprints off the walls. Pressure wash your house, driveway, and walkways, and tidy up the yard to increase the curb appeal of your home and entice buyers inside.
2. It’s Time For A Few Small Repairs
Before listing your house, you might need to make some small updates. Brighten up your home by using the highest wattage light bulbs you can in your light fixtures. Light paint colours make your home feel bright and clean, and buyers can easily paint over the light colours with their own paint choice if they feel the need to change the colours.
Don’t spend too much on upgrades and repairs, but focus on the kitchen, bathroom, and what can be seen from the curb. Faucets, cabinet hardware, matching appliances, and some fresh mulch for the front garden can make a huge difference in the mind of potential buyers. Bring in some fresh flowers, throw open the curtains or blinds, and turn on all the lights to make your home seem bright and inviting.
3. Choose A Good Real Estate Agent
Make sure you pick a good real estate agent. You want to find someone who will promote your home listing on social media to potential buyers, and someone who has experience selling your type of home or selling in your neighbourhood. Finding such an agent is what Zenmatch can help you with – our data-driven matching engine recommends agents that have a track record of performance.
Selling a home can be a very stressful time. Selling your home quickly can be even more stressful, and when you consider the potential reasons for selling fast - divorce, death of a spouse, new baby - you are going to want to find a real estate agent who is compassionate, trustworthy, and patient with you. Ideally, the real estate agent you choose will be someone you trust and get along with well.
4. Money vs. Time: Know Your Limits And Your Options
You want to know how to sell your home fast, but are you also expecting top dollar for the sale? The faster you want your home to sell, the more comfortable you will have to be with lower offers. Decide what an acceptable time frame would be for your home to sell, and what would be the lowest possible offer you’d accept from someone willing to buy in that time frame. Once you have these numbers in mind, it will be easier for you to move forward with offers. If you know you have three months to sell, you’re more likely to turn down low offers and hold out for something more acceptable closer to your deadline.
If you really need to sell fast, you can always choose to sell to an investor or at an auction. Be aware that the purchase price for both of these options will be fairly low. Selling your home to an investor can be a very quick way to get your home sold, but you will lose out on potential profit. Investors will buy your home as-is, and may offer a lump sum cash payout, but you will get nowhere near market value for the house. Investors do this so that they can quickly make some upgrades to the home and then sell it for a much better price, making a profit on your home.
Auctions could be a better option for you. Typically bidding starts at 10-15% lower than current market value. You might have to accept minimum bid, or you might get higher than market value. Selling your home this way means you have to handle closing documents yourself, and the entire process can take up to two months. If you don’t have a lot of equity in your home, it’s unlikely that you will see any cash from the sale.
When you don’t know how to sell your home fast but need to make a quick sale, it can seem like an overwhelmingly difficult process. Cleaning and decluttering your home and making small updates will make it seem tidy and inviting to prospective buyers. A good real estate agent can advise you on any other changes to make to appeal to buyers. Have your desired sale deadline in mind when you are considering offers; the closer you get to the date you need to sell by, the lower the offers are that you will need to accept, even if that means choosing an investor or selling at an auction.