So you’ve got a home you want to sell here in Virginia Beach / Hampton Roads. You’ve heard the horror stories of people who’ve been in your position, but have had to come down tens of thousands of dollars, STILL couldn’t find a buyer, and eventually had to arrange a short sale with their mortgage company or even worse: deal with foreclosure.

Let’s be clear: Your competition would love to see you sell incorrectly – they would love for you to help sell their home. They would love to see you price your home out of the market, making their property look like a bargain.

Below we’ll take a close look at how to sell a home. At the outset, here are a few points to consider:

1: Regardless of what you think your house is worth, it WILL NOT SELL if it’s not priced right. Incorrect pricing will cost you thousands of dollars.

2: Interview agents, but be careful of an agent that plays on your emotions by making you believe you have a chance to sell at a higher price. These agents will COST you money…and there are a lot of them out there.

3: Once you’ve settled on an agent to list your home, allow them to do the job for which they were hired. Listen carefully to the advice they give, and if you don’t understand, ask questions until you do understand. Experienced agents work with reasonable clients – clients who will listen to and take to heart the advice they have to give.

PRICING

Pricing your home is not strictly an art or a science. Speaking personally, our team’s success in pricing a home appropriately is based on our experience in the Hampton Roads market, and a few universal truths that will always apply.

In most situations, it’s extremely important to lead the market. If you’re constantly in a position to only react to other market influences (new listings that come onto the market, new price reductions, etc), you’ll be the last house that sells, not the first or second. It’s a fact that buyers only look at a limited number of properties in their price range. They HAVE to narrow it down. Pricing your home above the other comparable properties on the market will only serve to sell your competition, as buyers will look at the least expensive properties first.

In short, you have to have the best price of all the other similar homes a potential buyer is considering. If your agent prices your property too high, it’ll sit on the market and cost you months of extra mortgage payments and valuable time. It’ll become a stale listing, and will prompt questions like “Why has this home been on the market for so long?” and statements like “there’s gotta be something wrong with it.”

Price it right in the beginning and you’ll sell faster, and avoid additional unnecessary price reductions that are simply a response to a pricing mistake when the property was first listed.

CONDITION AND STAGING

In addition having the most attractive price, your home needs to look better than the rest. This means listening to your agent when they give you advice about what repairs and improvements to make. An experienced agent is in the market day in and day out, and is showing homes to buyers all the time….buyers looking at homes just like yours and deciding what to buy. We see what they want, and what appeals to them. This is why we’ll tell you to paint the kitchen and replace the cabinets, or spend a few bucks replacing some switches and wall plates, trim the bushes in the front yard, clean the gutters, and replace that worn carpet.

With most properties, our team will also bring in a staging consultant to take care of the presentation of the property, and help with some final recommendations to get the property ready to market.

To add to my statement awhile back: Your home must have the best price among all comparable homes AND MUST LOOK BETTER THAN SIMILAR PROPERTIES IN ORDER TO SQUEEZE THE MOST PROFIT OUT OF YOUR SALE.

The above being said, there are situations where a seller will not be able to improve the property or make the necessary repairs that we would usually suggest. In these situations, the sale price must be adjusted accordingly. Here’s the above-all, most important universal truth of selling a home: IT’S ALL ABOUT PRICE.

“My home’s great, but it hasn’t sold in 4 months. I can’t figure out why.” – It’s never been priced correctly.

“We haven’t had any showings in weeks. I don’t think our agent is that good.” – Well, you’re half right, kinda. Your agent didn’t price your property correctly in the first place, and perhaps hasn’t told you that you should reduce your price. If your agent HAS told you that you need to reduce your price and you’ve not given them the permission to do so, you’re both at fault: you for not listening to your agent (the person YOU hired to sell your house), and the agent for not explaining the facts in a understandable and reasonable way.

“We have a ton of people coming through, but nobody’s making an offer.” – There’s no incentive for the buyer to make an offer because there are similar properties that are leading the market and priced lower. Price, price, price, price. Make it a no-brainer for the buyer, and you’ll sell. Agents love to see other comparable listings that are unreasonably priced, as it opens up a host of marketing possibilities – all of which will sell THEIR LISTINGS, not yours. Don’t be the owner of the property that helps sell all the others in the neighborhood.

One final note – our real estate team is in the business of selling homes. Specifically homes, condos, and townhomes in the Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Hampton Roads market. This is a business. We succeed because we’re able to help sellers and buyers by telling them what they NEED to hear, not necessarily what they WANT to hear, and we’re passionate about what we do. Essentially this means we don’t accept every listing that comes our way – if we cannot convince a potential seller, with all of our data and experience, that it makes sense to list their property at a certain price and take a few additional steps to make the property marketable, we may not be a good fit for that seller. To list the home anyway, when we have very little confidence that the home will sell, would waste valuable time….time that some sellers don’t have and could hurt them. As in any business, we can’t help everyone, but we do our best in each situation.

Do you have a home in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, or any area of Hampton Roads that you’re thinking of selling? Fill out the form below and we’ll see what we can do together. Zero cost, and no obligation to chat with us.