Selling Your Home: The Essential Guide from Listing to Sold

When you’re ready to sell your home, you may be wondering where to start. In this guide, you’ll learn the steps to take to make selling your home as easy (and profitable) as possible. 

We’ll cover the factors that go into how quickly your home will sell, what to expect once you have an offer on the table, and everything you need to know to close out the transaction. 

In this article:

1 – Factors that Determine if a Home Will Sell

1. Price
   • How to price your home
2. Marketing
   • Photographing your home
3. Showing
   • Preparing your home to show
     • Exterior & interior fixes
   • How showings work
   • Tips for successful home showings

2 – Handling Offers on Your Home

• How negotiations work

3 – The Home Inspection Process

• What’s included in an inspection

4 – Closing the Sale

5 – Final Steps

3 Factors that Determine if a Home Will Sell

There are three main factors that determine if a home sells or not. This is true whether it’s a seller’s market, a buyer’s market, or somewhere in between. 

These factors are:

1. Your home’s price
2. How you market your home
3. How potential buyers experience your home during showings

Factor 1: Pricing Your Home for Sale

When it comes time to decide how to price your home to sell, you need to carefully consider several factors. Pricing a home correctly is one of the main benefits of working with a real estate agent. Agents have access to competitive market analysis tools which gives an experienced agent the big picture of fair market value. 

What is the right price for your home?  

Using a market analysis in your area, we like to price your home correctly the first time so that it will sell quickly. If your home is priced at fair market value, it will attract the largest number of potential buyers in the first few weeks. 

If a home is overpriced it will attract the fewest number of buyers looking to purchase a home. This is due to the fact that the majority of home buyers look at a lot of homes, and they quickly get a feel for the price range the homes sell for in a given condition in a location. 

When pricing your home it is important to carefully consider top market value. Using my competitive market analysis tool, I will suggest your homes’ best listing price. I sell homes higher than the market average because I list homes at the correct price from the start.

Factor 2: Marketing Your Home for Sale

Once you’ve decided on the price of your home, it’s time to hawk your wares! This is another key area where it pays (literally) to work with an agent. With a real estate agent’s wide reach of social media, email, and print marketing, your home can get seen by a huge number of potential buyers. 

Working with an agent who is part of an agent network is a great opportunity for connecting buyers with your home. After all, 88% of residential sales involve real estate agents and in many cases those sales come because of agents communicating with each other about homes and buyers they’re currently working with. 

Tactics for successful marketing include:

• Social media marketing including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
• Email marketing
• Real estate networking
• Local MLS sites (Multiple Listing Services)
• Third-party real estate sites, such as Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, and Realtor.com
• Yard and neighborhood signage: 
• Property fliers
• Open houses

Photographing for Your Home for Sale

In today’s market, home buyers search online first. Most buyers expect to be able to virtually walk through a home before they decide if they want to see it in person. That’s why having high-quality photos of your home is essential. Studies have shown that online buyers disregard homes with limited or low-quality photos.

In addition to setting up a professional photoshoot for your home, you can also consider including a floor plan, a video/virtual walkthrough, and drone footage to entice potential buyers.

Factor 3: Showing Your Home for Sale

With pricing nailed down and your marketing plan in place, now it’s time to open your home to showings. Wondering how that works? 

Preparing to Show Your Home

Before you open the front door to gobs of potential buyers, you’ll want to make sure your home looks as good as it can. We all know how important first impressions are, and that’s just as true for homes as it is for people. 

The easiest and most effective way to make your home appealing to buyers is to give a thorough reset to the home. Buyers want to walk through your home and be able to picture it as somewhere they’d like to live. When there are excessive personal touches in your home, it can make it hard for buyers to see themselves living there. Providing a relatively neutral palette will put buyers at ease.

Maximize your home’s potential with these tasks:

How Showings Work

Once your home is listed for sale, it’s entered into an online showing service that your real estate agent has access to. This service allows your agent to review requests for showings, which they’ll coordinate the timing of with you. 

For example, your agent could get a notification saying someone would like to see your home tomorrow at 2pm. If that time works for you (as in, you can plan to be out of the home for at least 30 minutes during that time), your agent will approve the showing request. Lockboxes are a key aspect of efficiency and security for home showings.

Tips for Successful Home Showings

• Be flexible with timing
  • We want to avoid missed opportunities because a buyer wasn’t able to get in to see your home.
• Be communicative
  • Keep everyone in your home informed about when showings will be happening, so there’s a group effort to keep spaces clean and orderly.
• Clean daily
  • Keep up with daily messes. Wipe down kitchen and bathroom counters before you leave for the day. 
• Be mindful of odors
  • Avoid strong-smelling foods that will linger. Keep meal prep as neutral and simple as possible. 
• Keep furry friends in check
  • Clean and tidy any areas your pets frequent. Hide pet food and litter boxes. 
• Keep it bright
  • Open blinds and curtains to let in as much natural light as possible and leave interior lights on as well.
• Take out the trash
  • Empty trash cans before you leave for the day to avoid odors and keep the home smelling fresh.
• Keep the temperature comfortable
  • Buyers will notice an overly hot or cold home. Let them know the HVAC works properly by setting a comfortable temperature. Disable any auto presets that may alter the temperature during times when typically no one is home.
• Remove your personal items…and yourself!
  • Keep all valuables, sensitive mail/documents, and prescriptions out of sight. Vacate the premises during all showings; buyers tend to feel awkward having the home seller present. We want buyers to feel as at home and at ease as possible.

Handling Offers When Selling Your Home

Of course, the first thing you’ll discuss when comparing offers is the price. When selling your home, you want to get as much as you can for it. But if a high offer comes with lots of contingencies, repair requests, or a timeline that doesn’t work for you, it’s ultimately not the best offer.

Here are other factors to consider considerations when comparing offers: 

Contingencies: The fewer the better, and shorter time to close is always best. 

All-Cash Offers: A buyer coming with all cash instead of financing is usually more appealing. With cash buyers, sellers don’t need to wonder about or wait on bank approvals for the buyer’s loan.

Pre-approval: Buyers coming pre-approved by their loan servicer assures home sellers that their financing is already secured.

Loan Types: If your home is a type that can sell under all loan types, it’s a great idea to allow not only conventional and cash offers, but also FHA, VA, etc.

Closing Timeline: If you’re buying a new home while selling your current one, you’ll want to match your timelines so you can more easily move on to your next adventure. There are ways to shorten or extend a standard closing period, if needed. But it’s often easier to choose an offer with a closing time that already fits your needs.

Closing Costs: Sometimes an offer will come in high only to have the buyer request that sellers pay a percentage of their closing costs. This can effectively reduce the amount of cash you’ll end up with in the end, so it’s important to review all aspects of an offer closely. 

Repair Requests: If the home needs repairs but you don’t have time or money to do them, a buyer may offer to do some repairs themselves after they own the home. This often means they’ll offer less cash or request a credit at closing, but then it’s one less thing for you to worry about.

How Do Home Selling Negotiations Work?

As part of considering offers on your home, you’ll go through some negotiations, with guidance from your agent. 

Once an offer is submitted, you can: 

1. Accept the offer. Hooray!
2. Decline the offer. An offer that isn’t close enough to meet your expectations, there is no need for further negotiations.
3. Counter offer. Sellers make counter offers when an offer is close to their expectations, but not quite. This is where negotiations begin. 

With your counter offer in hand, the buyer can: 

1. Accept the counter offer. Hooray!
2. Decline the counter offer. Either party can walk away at this point. 
3. Counter the counter offer. At this point, sellers and buyers can negotiate back and forth as many times as needed, fine tuning the agreement until it meets both parties’ needs, or someone decides to walk away. 

When an offer is accepted, you will sign the purchase agreement and you’re now officially under contract! This period of time is called the contingency period. Now inspections, appraisals, and anything else built into your purchase agreement take place. 

The Home Inspection Process

Home inspections can be nerve-wracking for buyers and sellers alike. Both parties want to make sure they’re dealing with a happy, healthy structure and that any repairs needed are quick, easy, and cheap. 

There is no cost to the seller for a home inspection. The buyer will choose and purchase the inspection to be done by an inspector of their choice. The outcome of an inspection will often return a list of issues to address and repairs needed to ensure the home is safe and livable. Potential repairs are one of the top reasons a buyer will walk away from a home. 

Inspections are typically performed 3-7 business days after the purchase agreement has been signed. Once complete, a buyer can accept the home as-is, offer to renegotiate, or cancel the contract.

What’s included in a home inspection?

• Roof and components
• Exterior and siding
• Basement
• Foundation
• Crawlspace
• Overall structure
• Heating and cooling system
• Plumbing
• Electrical
• Attic and insulation
• Doors, windows, and lighting
• Some appliances
• Attached garages, including garage doors
• Property grading and drainage
• Mold and radon testing
• All stairs

Closing the Sale

During closing, funds and documents are transferred in order to transfer ownership of the property to the buyer. 

The escrow officer will review the contract, figure out what payments are owned by who, prepare documents for closing, perform the closing, make sure all payoffs are completed and the buyer’s title is recorded, and finally ensure the seller receives payoffs that are due. 

The seller’s costs during closing typically include: 

• Mortgage balance and penalties if applicable
• Any claims against your property
• Unpaid assessments on your property
• Both buyer and seller real estate agents’ commissions
• Title insurance policy
• Home warranty
• Portion of property taxes due for the time you own the home

Final Steps For Selling Your Home

Following the closing, there are a few final steps to round out the process of selling your home. 

1. Cancel your home insurance policy so you can receive a refund of any prepaid premiums
2. Cancel and close out utility services. Keep a list of service providers for each in case you need to follow-up. 
3. Complete your change of address form to ensure your mail gets to the right place. 
4.  Secure all closing documents, contracts, and closing documents and keep them in a safe place. 
5. Collect appliance manuals and warranties for appliances you’re leaving behind, as well as house keys, remotes, gate keys, pool keys, and mailbox keys and place them where the new owners can find them. 
6. When it’s time for your final move out, clear out all drawers, cabinets, and closets completely. Ensure the home is cleaned and schedule a trash pick up.