Problems Selling Your Home by Yourself

Problems Selling Your Home by Yourself?

What went wrong? If you’re like most other people whose property does not sell, you’re probably pretty disgusted with your Realtor. Your plight may or may not be completely your agent’s fault, we don’t know, but what we can tell you is that it is time for a careful and objective look at your property. This isn’t always easy. Over the years we have met some people who simply couldn’t view their home as a product for sale. We even had one older lady who stated that she wanted $20,000 more than the market said the home was worth, because she had lots of memories tied up in the property.

Just as you wouldn’t pay her $20,000 for her memories (unless they were in manuscript form and very interesting and you were a book publisher), most people won’t pay you more than the market value for your home. Look, we’re professional Realtors, we sell between 60 to 100 homes a year, we’ve been in business a collective 25 years+, and we can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we found a buyer who got so emotional about a home that he paid too much. The point is that there are a certain number of factors that contribute to the salability of a home. What are they? Well, you’re in luck because we’re going to enumerate them right now.

1. Price. This is the most important factor. So important that we once had an old Realtor tell us that it was the only thing that matters. This is kind of true, because no matter how bad the location or how poor the condition, any house will sell if the price is low enough. But, that’s not what you want, is it? Nor, is it what we want. No one wants to price their home so low that they loose money. Of course, sometimes it just happens, for example in a down market such as we’ve been experiencing since 2005.

You might think that Realtors believe that if they can get the house price low enough it will sell quickly and so they beat sellers up until the price is lowered. Sometimes that happens. However, the smart agent knows that if they get a house priced too low, it will adversely impact the appraisal values of all other homes in that neighborhood. An agent who dominates the listings in a neighborhood might actually lower the overall neighborhood values that way. This is not a good thing.

Our position is that you normally should get what the market says your house is worth. That’s why we do very careful market analyses on our listings. As a general rule of thumb, the market will not give you what you want, what you need or how much you have in the property. It will only give you what it’s worth. The average buyer in our market looks at all the available property. You’re not usually going to find a buyer who can be fooled. So, the question here is, “Is your house priced too high?” Is it? If it hasn’t sold, the chances are that it is.

Do you want to know what it’s worth on today’s market? Contact us for a free price analysis. You can go to our main site (see the link at the bottom of this page) and fill out the Free Price Analysis form.

2. Location. It’s an old saying that the only important thing in real estate is “Location, location, location.” This is true in that you usually can’t move a poorly located property. If you’ve bought on a busy street, backing up to large power lines, next door to a shopping center, adjacent to a power plant, by a biker-bar, or in some other bad location, you have no alternative but to lower the price until the property sells. If you’ve bought in a good location, then it must be something else which is stopping your home from selling.

3. Agent. Yes, the agent does have an effect. They’re not all equal. Good agents work hard to get showings. If all else is equal, a good agent will sell more homes than a poor one. However, agents do not sell homes. They make homes available for buyers to see and they get buyers through the door. If you’re getting lots of showings, then the agent is successful at that part of the job. We often see sellers who are getting showings change agents and change agents and change agents and etc. The agent isn’t the problem here. It’s the seller’s failure to meet the real problem head on and overcome it. Fixing problems is usually easy; it’s the identifying them and actually admitting to yourself that your home has a problem (can’t have any ego getting in the way here) that’s hard.

Once the agent has attracted a buyer and the buyer is through the front door and into the foyer, the home has to compete shoulder-to-shoulder against all the other homes in its price range (if it’s priced too high, you can see that it’s competing against the big boys and it’s going to loose). Most buyers make the decision that a house won’t work for them within the first 3 minutes of entry. If you’re not ready, you loose. And, this brings us to the next factor.

4. Condition. Condition is curable or not depending on your finances and motivation. A good agent will counsel you about what needs to be done to prepare the home for sale. Listen closely because that’s often where the sale is made or lost. Let us tell you about the last house we lived in and sold. The driveway had some severe cracks; we put in a new driveway. The lawn was in poor shape; we put in new sod. The pool needed resurfacing; we put in diamond-bright. The showers were in poor condition; we rebuilt them. The interior needed painting; we painted. The porch needed painting; we painted. We had a high quality carpet that, although old, was not in bad shape. It showed very few signs of wear. But the color was one we liked even though we knew it wasn’t popular in the market at that time. Guess what; we put in new carpet. The landscaping needed cleanup; we cleaned it. The closet doors in the bedrooms needed work; we refinished and changed out some. Our daughter’s room looked like she had used a nail machine gun to hang pictures everywhere; we pulled nails, filled holes, and painted the room. Did all this work cost too much? No, we sold the home to some lucky buyers who got a great home in good shape for a reasonable price, and we made some money also.

You’ve got to do the work. A general rule of thumb is that for every dollar of repairs that you fail to do, you’ll have to lower the price of the house five dollars. So you need new paint for $2,000 and you won’t do it? Just lower the price $10,000 and maybe it’ll sell. If you need $2,500 worth of new carpet and you can’t afford it, use a credit card and do it anyway. It’ll hurt less in the long run than the $12,500 you’ll have to lower in order to compensate. Bite the bullet and do the work! If you don’t know what to do, ask your agent. If your agent can’t or won’t tell you (and it’s easy to avoid telling if the agent thinks that you’ll be offended), get another agent.

5. Terms. Sometimes owner financing or some other creative concept will make a home sell more quickly, but in our market, nearly everyone wants to cash out at the closing so terms are not much of a factor. Incidentally, avoid lease-purchase terms. There’s too much that can go wrong, leaving you with a potential and difficult problem.

6. Ease of Viewing. This is the last factor. Obviously, a home won’t sell if the buyer can’t see it. “Ha,” you say, “That’s obvious.” Yes, but we’ve met sellers who were cranky, difficult, and even downright obnoxious about showing their home. The easiest occupied home to show is one where the agent can make a courtesy call and use a lock-box for access. The hardest is one where the agent has to be met by the listing agent. No matter how great the listing agent, they’re not always available. All of the advertising done by the listing agent goes to generate showings. If one showing is missed, that buyer may not ever come back and that may have been the one buyer who would have paid a premium for the home. So, show the house, make it easy to see, get out of the way, don’t conduct your own tour, and, by the way, turn on all the lights prior to a showing (even the closet lights and even in the daytime).

Well, that’s it. There aren’t any other common factors. If you read this and one of these categories clicked for you so that you are able to say, “That’s my problem.” Good! If you didn’t get a clear idea of your problem, then did any one of the categories make you anxious or angry? If it did, that’s a pretty good sign that it may be related to your problem. You see, most sellers know, in the back of their mind, what’s wrong. It’s just that they usually don’t want to face the problem.

Believe us, if all of the above categories are faced and dealt with successfully, your property will sell. It may take 1 day (we once sold a home in 2 hours) or it may take eighteen months (we’ve done that too). No one can predict when the right buyer will come through the door. If you’re getting buyers through the door, then it’s just a matter of time, so buckle your seat belt and grit your teeth and wait. We know that this is the hardest part of the whole job, but you’ve got to do it. So, get busy and good luck!