10 Fatal Mistakes Home Sellers Make

Ten Fatal Mistakes Sellers Make

Hey everybody, John Herman, PropertyUp, and today I’m making a video about ten fatal mistakes home sellers make and how to avoid them.

1. Picking the wrong real estate agent – In the state of Illinois there are 44000 real estate agents and did you know that out of the 44000 that 80% sell 1 home per year or less? If you choose one of those agents, that is going to make your home selling experience a complete and utter disaster. You want to make sure that your agent is experienced and knows what they are doing. I obviously want you to use me, but I understand if you don’t.

2. Working with unqualified prospects – This is something your Realtor needs to address. Your Realtor can reach out to the buyer’s agent who scheduled the showing on your house and ask a couple of questions. It’s amazing what a couple of questions will do and how much time it can save you having showings on your home.

3. Incorrect pricing – When you are pricing your home, and your agent comes to you with a market analysis, and they spent a good 2 hours going through the sales in the area and looking at everything that’s in there, inside the houses and everything else, and then you decide you want to put it up for $30000 more because you want to leave room for negotiation. That is going to make your home sit on the market for a long time and obviously is not going to sell your house at all.

4. The belief, “if we wait, we’ll get more money” – If an offer comes in and it doesn’t seem like the right price to you and you decide “I want to wait a little while longer because we might get more money down the road.” Actually, it’s the exact opposite of that, what happens is that if your house sits on the market for a long time, you don’t get MORE money, you actually get LESS. Everybody will ask, “Why has it been on the market so long?” “Why didn’t it sell?” and you just want to keep away from that discussion

5. Incorrect interpretation of the real estate market – so this is something that gets back to number 1, which is picking the right real estate agent. So if you have the wrong agent, and that wrong agent just has that one listing, they’re just going to ignore the facts of interpreting the real estate market, and they are just going to keep it on the market forever, which is really going to make it difficult for the next agent to sell it for you. So just make sure that your agent fully understands the market and that they can explain it to you, so you don’t sit on the market forever.

6. Letting emotions get in the way – Obviously you’ve lived in that house 5, 10, 15, maybe 20 years and you’ve seen your children grow up, or you have so many memories that you attach to the house. You just want to make sure that those memories stay with you, but understand that this is a business transaction you just want to get it done, sell it, and keep those emotions in your heart and out of the deal.

7. Not giving ready access – I’ll give two examples of sellers, A and B. Here’s A – The Realtor calls the seller and lets them know there’s a request for a showing in about 2 hours. Seller A is all hung up on 48 hours notice, and if they’re a minute late, they can’t see the house. That seller is uncooperative. Now, Seller B. The realtor calls and says there’s a request for a showing in 2 hours. Seller B is excited and thinks that’s great, they offer to turn all the lights on, turn on some light music, they’ll make sure they’re out of the house 15-20 minutes before the showing and they hope for success. Seller B is always going to sell the house faster than A, and the faster you sell your house, and less market time you have, the more money you’ll make.

8. An unclean house – So as the buyers walk through the house and think the home is lovely and they put their hand on the kitchen counter and it’s sticky. That is going to turn off a buyer and that seller isn’t going to sell their house fast that way. If a seller makes sure everything’s clean it makes a big difference when people are walking through the house.

9. Insisting on outdated marketing techniques – A lot of the time when we run into sellers that have specific requirements for marketing, I just want to make sure that everybody understands that newspapers, magazines and things of that nature are a thing of the past and if a seller demands some of those things, it’s going to pull the agent away from doing the online marketing and adding it to other web sites and spending the time and researching where to advertise online instead of putting it in a magazine. If you pull the agent’s time away toward the wrong marketing it’s going to hurt you in the long run.

10. Ignoring needed maintenance – This is the huge one! If you know you have something that is definitely wrong with your house, and you’ve just been putting it off, and putting it off, and putting it off, this is the thing that’s really going to hurt you in the sale in the end. Whatever is wrong will be found in the home inspection and when the home inspection comes up it’s actually going to cost you more money to fix it during that time. If you just fix it when you know about it, it will save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

So those are the 10 fatal mistakes that home sellers make and these are ideas to avoid them. Hopefully this was helpful, have a great day!