A 6-Step Guide to Selling for Top Dollar

These six tips will lead to a quick and lucrative home sale.

While the market is great for home sellers right now, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of just putting a sign in your yard and hoping a sale comes. Here are six simple (but, unfortunately, often forgotten) tips you should remember when listing your home if you want it to sell for top dollar:

1. Neutralize, depersonalize, and declutter. People like clean spaces. You don’t necessarily have to have your home professionally staged, but you should declutter, move things out of the way, and make everything clean. Also, make sure you don’t have too many personal photos up. Potential buyers should be able to picture themselves living in your home, but that can be difficult when there are a lot of your personal photos sitting around. 

2. Make sure the house smells decent. A poor smell can hit buyers like a brick wall once they walk through your front door—whether it’s a pet odor, the stench of cigarette smoke, etc. There’s no bigger turnoff than this. I love pets, but not everyone does, so if you have pets, neutralize their smell with scented candles, Glade plug-ins, or something else along those lines. 

3. Take quality professional photos. You’d be shocked by how many listings come on the market with simple iPhone photos attached. Professional photographers aren’t that expensive ($100 to $300, depending on the size of the home), so they’re a small investment you want to make—even if you’re listing your home by yourself. Professional photos will drive more people to your listing and potentially create a bidding war, which is exactly what you want.

4. Be flexible. In a seller’s market like this, people will want to see your home at all hours of the day. If you keep saying no to people trying to get into your house, you’ll limit the number of people who can make offers. Before you list, consider telling your agent to allow as many people as possible into the home for the first 48 or 72 hours. That should ultimately lead to the highest and best offer. 

5. Price the home correctly. You may think you can price your home however you want considering how hot the market is, but that’s simply not the case. To be competitive in this market, you have to price your home correctly. If a home is overpriced and sits on the market for 21 days or more, people will start wondering what’s wrong with it. I prefer the strategy of underpricing the home so it creates more demand and drives the price back up. 

6. Talk to a real estate professional (even if you’re listing your home on your own). Most Realtors will give you free advice even if they’re not representing you. Our goal is to serve the community at large. We may not give you everything, but we can point you in the right direction. Lean on someone you trust, is successful in the business, and is well-experienced. 

If you have questions about this topic or have any other real estate needs, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you.