Are you doing enough to sell your home
Think back to 2003, 2004 or 2005. Those were wonderful times to be selling a house.
If you can’t remember, it went something like this: You’d put your house on the market. Potential buyers would swarm. They’d make multiple offers, often times agreeing to your original asking price. You’d sell your house in a week, and you wouldn’t have to make any repairs or lop anything off its asking price.
Things are different today. In 2009, it’s the buyers who are in charge. Today, sellers have to be willing to lower their asking price. They have to be willing to make the repairs demanded by picky buyers. And they have to be willing to move out when these buyers want.
I wrote about how truly in control buyers are in this Washington Post story. Read the story and you’ll see how one couple almost walked away from what would have been their ideal home all because an outdoor water spigot didn’t work.
You can bet that the owners of that home caved and fixed the spigot. And because the repair job required busting through a wall, the work cost thousands of dollars.
The point is that sellers today have to do anything they can to please buyers. Sometimes this means making repairs that you might think are unnecessary. But remember, if a broken outdoor water spigot is serious enough to nearly scuttle a deal, anything that’s not in perfect repair can do the same.
So before you put your house on the market, pay for a home inspection. The inspector can give you a detailed — perhaps too detailed list — of what’s wrong with your residence. This allows you to be proactive: You can fix the most serious problems before the home inspector hired by a potential buyer finds them.
