How to Market Your House for Sale?

The Fix Is In

Let’s begin with functional. Is everything working as it should? Loose doorknobs, a leaky roof, peeling wallpaper and poor water pressure, for example, are items that the seller should see to before releasing any house for sale advertisement. Of course, looking out for that all-important bottom line of the financial settlement statement could tempt you to skimp on these matters, but it is best not to. People do not want to spend much on a house that they will only have to spend more on after closing.

Cleanliness Is Next to Affluence

Well, maybe not affluence…but better offers are made on houses that are free of clutter and debris. Buyers have trouble imagining themselves occupying space that is filled up with your excess belongings. Sellers should remove some of their personal property, for example clothes, books, electronics, wall decorations etc., in order to convey a spacious and open atmosphere to prospective purchasers. Let the imagination of your prospects help do the selling for you.

Plain Old Plain

For the same reason you want to eliminate clutter and thereby open space up, it also serves you to minimize those personal touches that make the house your home. Potential buyers not only want to envision how they would furnish the dwelling, they also want to identify with it. This might sound irrational, but it is not uncommon. Too many family photos, heirlooms, trophies or religious articles make it hard for buyers to feel that your house could be theirs. So, as many hours as it took to bring down that white-tail deer, taking its stuffed head down is advisable. Books on erotica should likewise be packed up. The aim is to make the house attractive AND generic.

Exterior and Landscape

Attending to the lawn and shrubbery does not mean creating spectacular panoramas of greenery. Simply keeping the grass cut and hedges trimmed improves the external appearance of a house considerably. Similarly, a fresh coat of paint can restore charm and appeal to a dwelling that is looking weather-beaten. These are low-cost maintenance measures that tell passers-by that the house is well cared for and, perhaps, worth a look.

All the Home Is a Stage

Having repaired, put in order and spruced up the house and surroundings, you have one more task in making the property presentable: staging. Now that you have the space, the functionality and the appearance that interested shoppers like, optimizing these elements helps to close the deal. This means arranging furniture, wall décor and surface objects in a manner that helps prospects see their own belongings adorning the rooms. Staging is often performed by professionals, as budgets can bear, but a little research can assist the DIY stager as well. However, investing in a professional may pay big dividends if his or her services attract a lot of buyers and more bidders to your house.

Listing on the MLS?

You can and should be on the MLS! There are over 600 MLSs in the United States, these are private databases used by real estate professionals to collaborate on what properties are on the market. The MLS is the main portal and source of information agents use inform each other of their listings.

The use of an MLS is ONLY available to real estate professionals. The public cannot post a property in their local MLS without first going through one of its members. Once a property is placed in the MLS it then gets syndicated out to dozens of other public web sites such as Realtor, Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, etc.

Full Service real estate agents all offer access to the MLS, but will often charge you up to 7% of the sales price for access. Discount and Flat Fee companies like ByOwner.com also offer MLS listings for a nominal fee, in many areas for as low as $99.

Worth a Thousand Words

Visuals are of primary importance because most people think visually. Take plenty of pictures…. Most MLS’s online listing sites allow up to 50 photos. Quantity counts, according to the latest research, so post as many photos as needed to highlight the features of your home. You further enhance your visitor numbers if you employ video as part of the presentation, also knows as a “virtual tour”. Quality photos are helpful. A real estate photographer is a professional who, while collecting a fee, also will help capture the best angles and lighting.

Setting the Sale Price

Even in a sellers’ market, buyers have a limit to their financial tolerance. Too high a sale price will put off many otherwise interested purchasers, no matter how much work you put in on the house and no matter how professional your pictures look. Of course, owners are looking to walk away with a decent amount of money. Getting an appraisal is one way to obtain a benchmark figure. Less expensive are online calculators that take into account all kinds of property factors. They cannot, at any rate, gauge market conditions, which can change very quickly.

Words Matter, Too

As important as photos and videos are, a textual description of the property is where you can highlight your favorite aspects of the house. As with all writing in this information age, keywords advance your description and listing in the search engines. Real estate promotion hinges on persuasive words like “smart home technology” and “marble counters.” Make the appeal…appealing. Make sure to mention items such as the, the view, appliances, upgrades, neighborhood, etc.

Social Media

Other ways to utilize technology when marketing a house is to announce its availability to your friends and networks on social media. The great thing about friends and followers is that they, too, have friends and followers. Advertising a house for sale on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or SnapChat, for example, can send your videos, pics and description far and wide. Linking your home to social media posts adds substantial content to a posting announcing the home’s availability or the next open house. All that hard work and expense of a photographer or videographer reaches even more people in the market to buy a house.

Develop an E-Mail Strategy

No, you do not want to inundate your friends’ mailboxes with spam. Still, there is nothing wrong, and everything right, with letting them know that you have a property for sale. Such an e-mail can extend beyond your own circles to people unmet, a motivated buyer among them. Again, use discretion with frequency and avoid salesy language. Any e-mail should convey the sense of one friend updating another about a big event.

Classified Advertising

Recognizing the fact that a wider net is better that a smaller one, consider creating a blurb about the house on a classified site where one-on-one commerce is the focus. Craigslist, Facebook Market Place, and Offerup are such platforms among many. There are buyers just beyond the boundaries of your social reach and website visitors who might be willing to entertain your asking price. Meanwhile, the investment for such home marketing is minimal.