How to Sell a House #101 - the blog

If you are wondering how to sell a house just now then the information in this article will help you to develop the right attitude to make a successful sale. When the real estate market starts to slow down then it is time for property sellers to re-evaluate their attitude. You need a radically different approach when the market is in recession in order to sell your home successfully, which means: at a profit. During recent years it has been a good market for sellers, and they had it pretty easy, but sadly things have changed if you’re selling just now then you too need to make some adjustments..

Real estate has been a booming industry in the last few years. the only real concern for home-sellers was just when to get the sale boards up, knowing that in all likelihood they’d be ‘done and dusted’ within two or three months. All that seemed necessary was to get the house on the market and offers would soon start flooding in.

Sellers got accustomed to having the upper-hand because buyers knew there would be competition for a good property and so they were willing forgo the wrangling over price to be sure of securing a property they wanted. Since mortgage rates had been way down at almost all-time lows and this also led to rapid appreciation of real estate values, so typical buyers naturally thought that even after paying a premium themselves, they would soon make up for it on the property value upswing.

Things have now changed, as they always eventually do, and the cooling down of the real estate market means that it is turning into a buyer’s market. The implication for sellers is that they can no longer continue the way they have been doing during the ‘good times’. Although this is unfortunate for sellers, it is hardly a surprise for the real estate market, like any other, goes in cycles and it would be foolhardy to have expected anything else after such a protracted ‘positive run’ on prices..

The major factor to take note of is that although the market is increasingly favoring buyers, many sellers do not want to ‘give in easily’ or accept that ‘times are a-changing’. Most home sellers are still operating as if the market was still on a roll. They get their property appraised and then set the asking price that bit higher than other comparable properties in their area. Naturally, as the property just sits there for months on end, with out a single offer coming in, their hopes are soon dashed.

If you are one of these sellers, right now, with a house that has ’suck’ on the market for a while and beginning to look ’stale’ on the realtor’s lists, then perhaps you need to take a hard look at you sales tactics. It is just not possible to list the property and wait for buyers any longer, and though the ‘good times’ may ‘cycle back’ eventually, as this is the early phase of recession it won’t be any time soon! So, it may be time to ‘bit-the-bullet’ an start putting in some extra work at selling your property because it’s simply not going to fly off the shelf like it might have done a year or two back.

So a part of the answer to the question of how to sell your house is that you should re-evaluate your current selling price by taking a look again at what is happening locally. Take another look at the appraised value of your home alongside these other properties, and take the psychological initiative by making your price more competitive.

You should also consider that it doesn’t end there because, depending on the urgency to sell, you should also decide on the minimum offer you will accept for your home (how much less will you take than your new, already lower price point). Having a clear bottom line figure in mind will help to overcome the ’shock’ when a lower offer comes in! Of course, if you are also going on to ‘buy again’ elsewhere, you can console yourself that you too will have a potentially positive bargaining position when you are the buyer - so the ‘real’ loss will not be as great as it may seem.

If you insist on asking a higher price than similar properties in your neighborhood, then a quick sale will be more a matter of luck than judgment in the current climate. No sensible buyer will pay markedly more than similar properties, and all will expecting some ‘give’ on any price they see just now. They will also be aware that buying the over-priced property has a seriously negative effects on appreciation, and with the possibility of the market falling further they would be stupid to agree the purchase.

When the dollar signs have rung-up in your eyeballs, having been under the impression your house is worth more than it ma now be, it can be hard to make this ‘backward step’. But for most sellers who have owned a property for the typical minimum time of three years or more, they will still be well in front of what they paid for the place when they bought it. So getting real about price is more a matter of overcoming a bit of ‘greed’.

All other things being equal, when you are wondering just how to sell a house, in part it is a simple adjustment in your thinking and attitude, about your asking price for your home that may well be all you need to catch the interest of a buyer with cash in their pocket.