7 Tips for Selling Your Home in a Down Market

We have spoken with many real estate agents and learned their secrets to selling your house in a short amount of time without usually having to change the offering price.

1. Get a professional appraisal. 

Getting a professional appraiser to evaluate your home allows you to get a baseline price for about $300 to $400. To start, the appraiser finds a realistic range based on recent home sales which share the same characteristics, so you have realistic expectations about your price. 

The report also provides information on what a home buyer would be paying to purchase your home with a loan. Home appraisals allow you to tailor your price better and use the market to your advantage.

2. Order a home inspection.

Home buyers want to know they are buying a well maintained and high-quality property. By hiring a home inspector to analyze your property for defects thoroughly, you have the ability to fix any problems before the potential home buyers can see it.

Buyer will most likely have their home inspector take a look. Doing this makes them feel confident of your home’s price and less likely to request expensive fixes if you already have your home report. A house pre-inspection also dissuades buyers from trying to use newly found issues to drive down their house offer.

3.  Promote a home warranty.

New owners feel assured when a home warranty backs their property. Home sellers also benefit from home warranties by being able to get additional coverage and benefits even after you have sold your home. Home warranty plans range between $300 and $450 and usually cover large appliances like dryers and refrigerators.

4. Offer cash for future home improvements.

Home buyers can be fickle people and will want to make changes to their new property. Possible changes could include altering the landscaping or repainting the entire house.

Make your home stand out by offering to pay cash for future home improvements. By providing a few thousand dollars, you might be able to make a sale and recover this money from the asking price

5. Offer to pay for buyer’s maintenance services.

Choose to hire a lawn care company to take care of mowing the grass while the new owner is moving in or hire a pool company to keep the pool clean the buyer is focused on taking care of property related paperwork. 

The buyer will appreciate this gesture, and this may tip the scale between them buying your house or someone else’s.

6.  Be flexible with your asking price. 

Many home sellers have a minimum price in their mind and do not want to ever go below this value. This is a bad move since a few thousand dollars could mean the difference between your home being sold or not. In the future, the extra thousand dollars you got from the sale will be unimportant.

Buyers are not thinking of your minimum price when they visit your house for sale. If you receive a lower offer than expected, carefully evaluate it instead of outright dismissing it. 

7. Visit a real estate auction.

Look into using a real estate auction to sell your home. While there are some risks, including paying fees regardless of if your home is sold at auction, auctions are an efficient way to quickly sell your home profitably. 

Auctions are usually more successful when there are a lot of home buyers with limited real estate available. Many times the auctions are not as good when the housing market is flooded with available homes.

Gretchen Wegrich

Gretchen Wegrich is an editor at Lender411. She specializes in mortgage basics, personal finance and green living. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in writing from University of California, San Diego and previously worked at the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Contact her at gretchen@lender411com.