Selling a House
What to Expect
A great agent will be an expert in every one of these steps in the process.
The most accurate market value
Should you get a pre-sale inspection?
What repairs and/or preparations need to be completed before listing
What are you doing about replacement housing?
The most effective marketing strategy including:
- The best pricing strategy
- The best time / season to list your home (if you have the flexibility)
- How to best incentivize the highest number of qualified buyers to see your home
What potential tax ramifications should you consider, including:
Tools & Resources
Here are some tools to help you through the various stages of the process:
Your Home Value
Home Sellers Guide
Choosing A Listing Agent
It may seem like a lot you have to know for a successful sale, right? If you’re not an expert in ALL these areas, give us a call and let us guide you through the process.
Choosing A Listing Agent
You have so many options when it comes to choosing a real estate broker to represent you in the sale or purchase of your home. What it boils down to is picking someone that you can trust. And when you think about it, TRUST is made up of two critical elements — competence and character. Find an experienced broker of high character and unsurpassed levels of competence and you’ve found the right guy!
Competence
Does your broker have two+ decades and hundreds of transactions of experience under his belt?
We do. A veteran broker once said to me early in my career, “You don’t even know what you don’t know”. It turns out, she was right! The cryptic message she was trying to tell me way back then was that until you have a couple decades of full-time experience behind you, you just haven’t run into enough of the issues that will always come up in your real estate career. Knowing how to avoid and/or handle those issues in the best interests of your client only comes with experience. And there are many ways that our experience now translates into real dollars for you, our clients.
Does your broker have an appraisal background and intimately understand the valuation and economics of real property?
We do. We started our career in real estate working on the appraisal side of the industry. Gaining that strong, practical education in the economics and valuation of real property is knowledge that comes into play during every single real estate transaction. Being able to formulate a strong, defendable value opinion on behalf of our clients is a critical part of the negotiations. How can you negotiate on behalf of your client if you can’t defend your own position? You can’t. We constantly tap in to this skill set to better serve our clients. It helps us negotiate better terms for you every time and is one of the many ways you benefit in the end.
Does your broker have a construction background? Has he ever built anything? Does he know how to look out for you when it comes to the physical aspects of the home you are considering selling?
There is so much to learn and know about the construction of your home. Having someone on your side that has in-depth experience and understanding of construction components and techniques helps you avoid dozens of potential pitfalls and can save you tens of thousands. We have that experience. We have purchased, built, renovated, subdivided, developed hundreds of properties for our own account over a span of several decades. When a buyer asks for a substantial credit during your transaction based on some inspector’s report, are you going to know if its really an issue or not? Are you going to know if its a $5k issue or a $50k issue? We will. And we will guide through the maze of construction and repairs issues that come up in every transaction.
Character
Odds are poor that you meet an agent that admits they are of poor character. So instead of us praising ourselves, let’s see what so many other people are saying about our character and the experiences they had with us…
Your Home Value
The wrong way… We can give you a value for your home based on an AVM (Automated Valuation Model) just like most of the websites on the internet do these days. This method uses algorithms to look at all the public data available like size, general location, year built, bedroom and bathroom count, pools and compares your property to recent comparable sales in the area that match that same criteria. Sometimes this method is accurate but frequently its not. Here’s why… those algorithms don’t take some very critical information in to consideration like: condition, views, upgrades, topography, floor plan, outdoor decks, landscape and functionality. We think you might agree that these are some pretty critical elements of your house that should be considered. So if you don’t mind about a 30% margin of error, this method might be ok for you.
If you do want quick value opinion, this tool, unlike all the others takes your input into consideration and allows you to “tune” your home’s value based on your purchase date, purchase price and the changes in the market since that time. This the best automated valuation tool we’ve seen yet. Or better still…
The right way… Valuation is not an exact science. That’s why an algorithm programmed into a computer rarely does a good job… and frequently does a horrible job. Hard to believe but taking the human element out of every task in this world isn’t always best thing to do. We use a bulletproof, 4-step process to formulate our value opinions on your home. And we confidently defend that value opinion when it comes time to negotiate the sale of your property. Our value opinion is determined by considering four different approaches and coming to a confident value after assessing them all. Those approaches include:
The AVM value described above
The Case-Shiller Index value (we determine your value based on the S&P leading housing index data)
A desk top appraisal
A field appraisal
Of course this method takes much knowledge, experience and time to complete… around 6 hours instead of 6 seconds. We are happy to provide this service free of charge to our clients.
Our 20 years of experience will take into account all of the right factors that must be considered to come up with an accurate AVM.
We have yet to find another real estate brokerage that knows how to or does this work for their clients!
Ready to talk next steps?
Let us help you get the most out of your investment.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and learn more about how we can help you sell your home quickly and for top dollar.