Home sellers! Are you guilty of the 7 sins of selling houses?
Greed: This is a big problem. It was easy in a vendor’s market to get in touch with your greedy side. Feeling like Midas, everything you asked for from a buyer turned to gold in your hands. Intoxicated with that kind of power, buyers often felt powerless to deliver if they wanted their home. In a balanced market, or even a buyer’s market, many sellers have not kicked the greed habit. Ironically, greed is costing those sellers money. Ask any real estate agent and they will tell you stories of deals blown because of a $300.00 item that couldn’t be settled. They no longer have the upper hand, many sellers refuse to compromise if it means less money in their pockets, but now buyers are free to move on to the next home on their list. A seller may refuse to fix a $500.00 item on the house, or provide an affordable home warranty, but when the buyer moves in with a complacent seller, the greedy seller is forced to wait for another buyer, all while making payments. of the mortgage in the same place. house they cannot sell. Bad move.
Unrealistic expectations: Anyone who has sold a home in a seller’s market will have a hard time understanding the buyer’s market. If you want to sell your house, you should forget everything you remember about selling your house in the past. Chances are your home won’t sell in a week, or receive multiple offers. Unrealistic expectations are the basis for guilt and resentment, and keep you from selling your home. The first few weeks of having your home on the market are filled with hope, anxiety, and irrational exuberance. It’s completely normal to believe that your home is somehow more special than others on the market, and yours will be the exception to the difficult market. Once it’s clear that the bidding war hasn’t materialized and your home still stands alongside the others, the home seller with unrealistic expectations is crushed. Stay positive about your home, but don’t blind yourself to what selling it will entail. A home seller with a realistic view of what it takes to sell a home in a buyer’s or balanced market can easily adapt to changing market conditions, use constructive feedback to improve their home, and sell their home in return. faster.
Pride: If you really want to sell your house, promise yourself right now that you will never utter the following sentence: “I’m going to send that buyer a message.” If you like to send messages, perhaps you can raise homing pigeons. If you want to sell your house, eliminate that phrase from your vocabulary. The message sellers send when they respond to buyers in this way is “I don’t want to sell you my house. You insulted me.” In the end, all you have left is your pride and that house that just won’t sell. As an active Ebayer, I have never witnessed a transaction where the seller of an item was outraged by the lowest bidder. Everything is business. Divorce your emotions from the home-selling process, and you’ll have an advantage over angry sellers in your area, because the buyers they rebuff with their “messages” are going to buy a house, but not theirs! The message to be sent to a buyer must be in the form of a counter offer. Nothing else. Nothing less.
Impatience: He wants this house to be sold. Now! The impatient seller can’t understand why his house hasn’t sold in the first week. By the third week on the market, the impatient seller of the house is furious and wondering how to get out of the listing deal. Are you an impatient home seller? If he handpicked your real estate agent and, when you signed the listing contract, you thought he was up to the job, sit back and let the market work. The impatient seller calls his agent more than once a day for updates, even if there has been no activity in the house. He asks her, “why isn’t it selling?” is alleged regularly by phone. Are you, the impatient seller, doing whatever it takes to sell your home? Have you done what your agent suggested to get your home in salable condition? Did you really listen to the comparable pricing data your agent provided? Or did you have a fixed price in mind and refused to change it when you put the house up for sale? The impatient seller can create a tremendous amount of stress for everyone involved in the home sale, and it’s entirely avoidable. In the end, the timing of your home sale will be a combination of price, condition, and luck. No amount of impatience is going to change that.
Ignoring the market: Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is disaster for a home seller. Yes, we know that his neighbor sold his house for the same price he wants for his house, but that was four months ago. The residential real estate market is more fluid than ever now. Learn about current market conditions, not last year’s market, not even last month’s market. A home seller who ignores the market will interview a few real estate agents, read the data provided by the agent, then ignore the data and make a list with the agent who gives them the slightest argument about the price of their home in an unimportant way. realistic. Real estate agents don’t set the price of houses, sellers do. Agents will provide valuable information and input to help the seller choose a price. Some agents will refuse to accept a listing if they feel the seller is unrealistic about the price, but many others will accept the listing with the caveat that the seller will be willing to lower the price later. With so many other properties on the market, an expensive house will sit there like a deli tray at a gathering of vegetarians. So the seller will be chasing the market by lowering the price after seeing the prices around him fall. Eventually, the house may sell, but the price will be determined by the market, as it always is. If you’re guilty of ignoring the market, you can save yourself a lot of time and headache by scheduling a meeting with your real estate agent to review your current home sales data and set a realistic price now.
Stubbornness: When selling your house, it is better to imagine yourself as a flexible tree that sways gently in the wind, rather than a donkey with its heels planted solidly in the ground that resists all attempts to be moved. Stubbornness can appear in many situations. When you are contacted to schedule a visit, do you leave the house? While it’s a fact that your home has a better chance of selling if you’re not there for the showing, do you refuse to bother leaving? You can tell yourself that shoppers can work around your schedule. They will not. The prospect of a sale often fades because a buyer is uncomfortable with the home owner and is unable to freely evaluate the home. Expect to run into problems when you sell your home. It is part of the process.
Do not cooperate: Are you a partner with your real estate agent when it comes to selling your house? Do you resist all of your real estate agent’s suggestions to make changes to your home that will help it sell faster? I have had this conversation with home sellers many times. Is it fair for people to judge your home based on the things that won’t be in it when you move in? No, probably not. Do buyers judge your home based on those things? Absolutely. I’ve seen buyers lose their enthusiasm for a home based on a decorating theme that didn’t suit them. No matter how many times your real estate agent reminds you that you can decorate in your own style, it’s too late. The house is now known as the “duck house”, the “doll house”, or the “pink house”. Each house is given a nickname when buyers are shopping. Don’t let your refusal to cooperate keep your home from being the “perfect home.”
Selling your home requires the cooperation of countless people, many of whom you will never meet. The key word here is “cooperation”. We, as home sellers, hope that those who are working to complete our sales transaction will cooperate. And you, the seller of the house? Are you willing to meet the buyer halfway through the negotiations? Are you willing to work inside someone else’s schedule to get something signed? Remember, you may be selling property, but in the end, real estate is about humans. Be good.
