Your REALTOR®'s marketing efforts will include advertisings, showing your home, how long your home has been on the market, and if you're buying another home. Your home will be listed through a Multiple Listing Service (MLS).
Properties are commonly advertised through real estate websites, internet home search/listing services, classified advertising, and real estate guides. Promotion efforts through office and MLS tours are a good way of getting buyers and agents to view your home.
Despite these advertising avenues, "For Sale" signs on front lawns are remarkably effective. Many REALTORS® promote their websites on the sign and use brochure boxes with the signs to market the property. When appropriate, and with your permission, your REALTOR® may send a mailing about your property to neighbors. Sometimes one of them has a friend or relative who always wanted to live near them. You never know how far reaching the benefits of word-of-mouth advertising by friends, relatives, and neighbors can be.
To prepare your home for viewing, make it as bright, clean, cheerful, and serene as possible. Always look at your home from the buyer’s point of view. It helps if you and your family are not on the premises because your presence will inhibit their actions and conversations.
If your REALTOR® has scheduled an open house, you may want to notify the neighbors and assure them that they’ll be welcome. Sometimes they can turn up a buyer among their friends.
Quick tips for showings and open houses:
Professional appraisers sum up their entire body of knowledge in three words: "Buyers make value." Your home is worth as much as a buyer will pay for it.
If your home has been on the market for months, it’s a clear message that the property may not be worth what you’re asking for it. This is particularly true if there haven’t been many prospects coming to see it. What you do at that point depends on whether you really need to sell, and whether you’re working with a time limit.
If you’re not motivated to move soon, you can always wait – years if necessary – and hope inflation will catch up with the price you want. The problem is that in that time, your home begins to feel shopworn. Buyers become suspicious of a house that’s been for sale for a long time.
If you really do need to sell, discuss a schedule with your REALTOR® for gradually dropping your price until you find a level that attracts buyers. There’s no point in saying, "We simply can’t sell our house." Anything will sell if the price is right.
You may wonder what will happen when you’re selling one home and buying another – how will all the details work out? This is a common situation and REALTORS®, lawyers, and title and escrow companies have plenty of experience in arranging contracts and loans so that the two transactions dovetail smoothly.
Should you sell your home first then buy or buy first then sell? Ideally, it’s best to find a home you like and make an offer subject to selling your current home. This generally works in a normal market. However, in a “hot” market most sellers will not accept a “subject to sale” offer. In this case you need to sell your home first and then buy a new home in the interim period between selling and vacating your house.
If you find that you need to buy the next house before you’ve received the proceeds from the present one, lending institutions can sometimes make you a short-term ” bridge” loan to tide you over between the two transactions. Make sure you fully understand the exposure and emotional investment before proceeding with this type of loan.
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