Eddie Y. Ramirez Blog: Selling my house: 7 Things for Getting Ready To Sell Your House

Getting Ready To Sell Your House: Here are seven things you are going to want to do to ensure you get top dollar and sell your house quickly.

Hire a great agent. Sure I say that I am a real estate agent. This is important though. If you hire the wrong agent, like a low flat fee agent, you may not be doing everything you need to sell your house quickly and for top dollar. A good agent is going to have a plan to get feet through the door. While people look at houses online, houses are sold when people walk through the door.
If you are still unsure if the agent matters, check out this short video I did on what happens when you hire hour ‘homie’ to sell your house and not an executive.
You need to price it right. I would rather underprice my house by 10% than overprice it by 10%. If I were selling my house there is a better chance I would underprice my house a little than overprice it at all. When I underprice my house I will cause a bidding war. When I overprice, I kill the feet through the door which is what I am looking for. Overpricing also causes the house to sit on the market much longer than you want. And ask yourself as a home buyer, when you see a house has been on the market for a few months what are you thinking? I bet it is something like, “I bet I can get a good deal on this one.”
The best strategy is to price your house where it should be. Pricing your house where it should be is going to help get it sold.
Take care of the cosmetic work. Last week I talked about if you should be doing paint and carpet when selling your house. Besides those, you need to do take care of all the cosmetic issues in your house. The more things that are wrong with the house, the more the buyer is going to question how well the house was taken care of. Take care of the small cosmetic issues to put the buyer’s mind at ease.
Take care of the 3-De’s. Declutter, depersonalize and de-pet. Start by getting everything out of the house you can. Make the house feel bigger by having less stuff in the house. Get a short-term storage unit if you must. There are some storage places around that will even give you the first month at a discount rate. Keep only the bare essentials.
You want to depersonalize by getting out anything that is personal and identifies the house as ‘your house’ such as family photos. When a buyer comes through the door we want them to be able to see themselves in the house, and when the pictures of your family are all over the walls and bookcases, they have a hard time doing that.

The last de is de-pet. We know, you love Fido and Whiskers and they are part of your family. But the Jones may not have the same attachment to furry pets. Get all the animal toys out when you declutter and make sure the pets are not there during showings.
Next, you are going to want to deep clean the house. Clean the house like you are in military boot camp. If you have not been in the military, the Drill Sargent is going to come through your area and pick it over with a fine tooth comb. Make sure your house will pass the inspection. If you need to, hire a professional cleaning crew to come in and let them spend a few hours cleaning the place for you.
Have your friends do a smell test. Invite your family and friends over o do a smell test. You are used to how your house smells. Invite them over and have them be the judge. Make sure you tell them to be honest. After the cleaning and fresh paint hopefully, the house smells fantastic. If not, identify where the odor may be coming from and fix it.
Hire a stager. The final thing you will want to consider is either hiring a stager to stage the house or bring in a stager to do a consultation. Many stagers will come over with tape and spend an hour with you walking around and marking things with tape. They will tell you what to move, what to get rid of and what to add. Take their advice. A good stager is easily worth their fee.

There you go. When you are getting ready to sell your house follow these seven things as a good place to start.

Originally posted on Phoenix Real Estate Guy. If you are reading this anywhere but inside your RSS feed reader or your email client, the site you are on is guilty of stealing content.