There is no way to tip toe around the fact that selling a property in the 21st century is a big task and if done correctly, there is a lot involved that needs to be unpacked. Here are some of Vivian’s Real Estate’s hot tips and even if some of these seem like old news, they still remain important to add to your ‘to-do’ list before you sell.
Its not just in the real estate industry that you hear about small problems becoming big ones. Maintenance is one of these topics that continually needs to be discussed and to stress that owners are highly encouraged to put on their buyers hat on and look at their property as if they were going to buy it off themselves, but there is one condition when doing this and that is you have to be tough on yourself and make sure that everything is addressed from loose screws to broken appliances around the house. Here at Vivian’s we have a full maintenance PDF that can help make sure everything has been addressed and potentially increase you $1000’s on your offer. We can send you a copy upon enquiry below.
Before you put anything up for sale, you must think about how your property is positioned in the eyes of a buyer. First impressions are not recoverable and in some instances can make or break a buyer’s interest from putting in an offer. Our hottest tip at Vivian’s around presentation is to start by looking at your home from the street; as its very common for buyers to go for a drive past before coming to the home open so make sure you drive past and identify anything that doesn’t look right to you. If all of your maintenance items are done this can also go a long way for your presentation being correct. If your property doesn’t have street frontage then you have to take the first impression conversation in the immediate lead up to the front door and the first 10 seconds of what your buyer will see when they enter your front door.
There is a good old saying “you can’t sell a secret”. Promotion needs to be viewed in a light of how well can I market my home for sale and not how cheaply can I market it for sale. Whilst it is obvious that in recent years, the best way to market almost anything for sale is the internet please do understand there are very important factors that need to be understood about internet advertising such as page positioning and retention rate of the average buyer. Following from this, there is no point spending money for online advertising without putting up quality photos or videos, this is where an agents advice can make or break the sale of your property from getting an average price, to a premium top dollar price.
Offline options also still grab large audiences such as the local paper and letterbox drops as quite often it is those who are close to you that know someone who is interested in buying in the area. Studying the demographic in your area may give you a better understanding in what media forms to partake in, often the more forms of media you appear in should mean the more potential buyers who view your property and this can only lead to increased demand.
Different homes, apartments, locations, styles require different strategies to be considered. There is a variety of private treaty forms of sale but also a variety of Auctions (both online and offline) available to choose from. When considering these options from an agent to what strategy they best recommend, we do encourage their strong points of reason to be demonstrated and even role played to you so that you can make sure there is 100% full confidence that this is the right way forward for you, as if you cannot understand how the process of the proposed strategy works then you must test the theory on how some of the buyers would perceive it in the marketplace. Overall strategy is extremely important and can have a huge influence on the timeframe of how long your property can take to sell.
Price is normally 75% of the reason why a property will not sell. Despite all of the points above, the reason why this percentage is so high is because even most of our crucial points above are not followed, most properties will sell for a certain price with the understanding it may just not be maximised to its full potential. It is encouraged you have the price discussion early and come up with a definitive plan about what you are going to do if the response to putting the property on the market is not as high as what you anticipated. Stay ahead of the market at all times and not chasing it by being slow in your decisions to adjust your price. It is also recommended that you have these meetings pre booked with your agent.