Tips on Showing Your Home for Sale
Showing a home for sale can be a tiring process, since it involves keeping your home in tip top shape and clean at all times, just in case you get a short notice looker wanting to see your home.
The following tips will help you effectively show your home for sale.
One important step is to list your home with a real estate broker. A real estate broker is professionally trained and very knowledgeable about selling homes. While trying the “For Sale by Owner” (or FSBO) method seems tempting in order to avoid paying a commission, most “FSBO” homes are eventually listed with real estate brokers anyway.
Hire a real estate broker to list your home for sale, and then follow their professional tips to move your home through the process as quickly as possible.
Your real estate broker will want your home available for showing at all times. While this can be quite inconvenient for you and your family (especially if you have children and pets), it is important. Real estate brokers need to have access to your home via a lock box on your door.
Ignoring this advice will only make your real estate broker’s job more difficult, since they will have to call you to make an appointment to show the house, and coordinate a time that works for you and the potential buyer wanting to see your home. This can actually make a potential buyer just skip your home altogether, opting to just see homes that are convenient for them to see on short notice.
Most brokers will give you as much notice as possible that they may be showing your home, but you should try to have your home available at all times.
When your real estate broker brings a potential buyer to see your home, do your best not to be there. If you’re home, the potential buyers will feel like they are intruding, and will not look things over the way they will if you’re not there.
You want potential home buyers to feel welcome in the home–not that they are interrupting your day. Do you have errands to run? Can you take the kids to a park or the library? If not, at least stay out of the way of the buyer and your real estate broker. Most real estate brokers will recommend that you not offer any information or “chit chat” with the potential buyer; instead, just allow your broker to answer the questions they may ask. That’s what you hired them for.
When you know your home is going to be shown, go around and “tidy up”. Empty the trash, turn on lights, make sure beds are all made, dishes clean and put away, junk mail and magazines put in their place. Keep the counter tops in the kitchen free of clutter. Do what you can to make the home show well, not look like a storm just hit.
Above all, follow the advice of your real estate broker, and you’ll be on your way to selling your home.