Buyer’s Guide

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SELLERS GUIDE

The Home Seller’s Guide

Whether you are planning to sell your home in the next few months or just studying up for that eventuality, there’s no time like now to prepare. If buying a house seems complicated, selling involves even more responsibilities and expenses.

STEP 1

Prepare Your Home for Sale

Well before you are ready to plant that For Sale sign in your front yard, there is work to be done to prepare your home for sale.

Remember how keen your eye was to every small detail and defect in the houses you saw as a buyer? Now that door to your bedroom that never quite closed properly or that leaky faucet that you never got around to fixing will be seen by a potential buyer with that same keen eye.

Start making the obvious repairs today even if you don’t plan to sell until a year from now. These repairs can cost money and take time. Plus fixing it now will allow you to enjoy the results before it’s time to move out.

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STEP 2

Find a Real Estate Professional

If you have been through the home-buying process, you already know how complicated the real estate business can be. While you can opt to sell your home yourself, it can be time-consuming and often not worth the money saved on commissions.

However, if you do hire a real estate professional as your selling agent, do your homework. Ask friends and family for recommendations, interview several candidates, attend a few open houses and watch the professional in action. Do you think this person would present your house well to potential clients?

STEP 3

Get Your Paperwork Together

After you sign the Listing Agreement with me she will need a lot of documents from you to prepare your home for sale. Among the things she will want to see are:


  • Pay-off Notice: A letter to the lender stating intention to payoff the mortgage.
  • Assessments or Easements: If there is a tax assessment or easement on the property, documents stating such will have to be included in the purchase contract.
  • Property Taxes: Proof of property taxes paid.
  • Utilities: Provide a record of the past 12 months utility bills.
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A woman in a blue jacket is sitting at a desk using a calculator.

STEP 4

Price Your Home

There are a number of factors that will affect the success of your home sale. They include: location of the home, interest rates, economic conditions, time of year, condition of the home, marketing the home, terms of the sale and accessibility to the home.

Some of these are not within your or my control: location of the home, interest rates, economic conditions. The other factors are items you should discuss with me to determine what would benefit the sale of this property most.

For example, marketing your property in more innovative ways, such as on an Internet site like this one, may broaden the pool of potential buyers. If you can, waiting for a good time to sell your home spring or fall, the most popularly home buying times“ also may help it sell faster except in this Seller’s market, anytime is a good time. And pricing the home properly can make a huge difference in whether a house is snapped up within the first several weeks of listing or sits on the market for more than a year.