Selling your home

Selling your home is never an easy task. Inevitably there are pressures to sell your home quickly and with the least amount of interruption to your all ready hectic lifestyle. And, of course, there is that nagging question of what is your home really worth anyway?

Long before you are ready to list your home for sale you should take a long hard look at your home. You need to look at it through the eyes of a buyer and look to improve all the little deficiencies you see. Your motto at this stage should be: clean up, clear out, fix and repair.

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In the cleaning and clearing stages you have to pack it away, give it away or throw it away! Clutter is the enemy and should be eliminated at all cost. Clean the garage, your closets and even the crawl space under the stairs in the basement. If you have too much stuff that you just can't part with, rent a storage space until you are able to sell your home. Try to remove items that seem to decrease the size of a room. The less clutter there is in your home, the more spacious it will appear.

Curb appeal is a hugely important when selling your home. If your house doesn't look good from the outside a lot of potential buyers won't even bother looking on the inside. Make sure you clean the outside of your house, too. Get rid of that antique car you have been meaning to fix up for the last 10 years (translation: the rusting piece of metal in the driveway that your spouse has been bugging you to get rid of for years). Get rid of the junk behind the garage, clean up the wood pile and pick up the dog doo doo on a daily basis. Make sure you take the time to keep the yard looking like it has been cared for. Pull the weeds, mow the lawn, rake the leaves and/or shovel the driveway and walkways. Depending on the season, take the time to add some colourful flowers to the gardens or add a few festive decorations to the porch.

The next step is to look for items that should be fixed or repaired. A lot of these should be obvious. They are the small jobs you have meant to do for the last year or two but never found the time for. Fix the leaky faucet, the broken window, the ripped window screens, change the broken light bulbs and replace the caulking around the bathtub. You know what's wrong with your house, now fix it!

Don't forget to look at the major mechanical components of your house: the furnace, air conditioner and even the appliances. Be sure to keep the furnace filter clean. Any potential buyer will eventually look at your furnace and if the filter is dirty or the furnace area is covered with two inches of dust the buyer will question how well you have maintained it.

These days most buyers ask for the appliances to be included in the sale of the house, so make sure they are clean and in good working order. There is nothing more disgusting than looking in someone's fridge and seeing what they ate for dinner three years ago!

A new coat of paint to the inside or outside of your house may be a good investment, but try to keep the colors neutral. Stick to minor improvements. Even cleaning the windows can brighten up a house.

At this stage you should start to identify major deficiencies in your house: leaking roof or basement, furnace in need of replacement, structural problems, etc. Most buyers will have a home inspection done so these items will be identified at some point. It's always better to identify and deal with them first to not risk an offer falling through because of a poor home inspection. Many sellers now hire their own home inspector to look at the property before they list their home. This ensures an unbiased opinion of what condition your house is really in. Don't feel you have to fix everything; every home has some minor issues. Fix what you can and maybe even make the home inspection report available to potential purchasers. By being up front about deficiencies you will help a buyer feel more comfortable with their new purchase and chances are they would find out about the problem during their home inspection anyway.

Now that your house is ready to be sold you have to find an agent and decide upon a listing price. Do your homework: look at homes that are for sale in your area; visit open houses and talk to the listing agents; talk to friends about realtors they have dealt with. Ideally you will want to interview at least three agents formally to decide whom you trust, whom you can work with, and who will negotiate the best price for you.

Be wary about the agent who suggests your house could sell for significantly more than the prices suggested by the other agents you are talking to. This is a sales technique that plays on the greed factor. Usually, the high price is a tactic to get you to sign with the realtor. The realtor knows you will lower your price when there is no activity on your home but they also know that they have a contract with you that may last 90 to 120 days, or even longer. I have seen some listing agreements that are signed for up to 6 months or more. I suggest you keep the listing period as short as possible. Thirty or 60 days should be all a realtor needs to sell your home. If it takes longer than this you are likely doing something wrong.

Be sure to pick a realistic listing price for your home. There is nothing like a well-priced home to generate a lot of activity on a house. The more activity there is, the better your chance to get your asking price or, if you are lucky, to create a bidding war that drives your sale price above the asking price. Conversely, an overpriced home will see little activity and the longer it is on the market, the less likely a price reduction will help to generate interest.

Now that you have picked a realtor and decided on a list price you need to deal with showing your home to prospective buyers. Assuming you have cleaned and kept your home tidy, the next best thing you can do to sell your home is to make sure you are not there when a prospective buyer is viewing your home. Even if you just take the kids and dog for a walk as soon as the potential buyers arrive, the buyers will feel more at ease. Most people don't feel comfortable poking around someone's home when they know the owners are in the next room listening to everything they are saying. You want a buyer to feel comfortable and you want them to feel like "this could be their house". If you are in the next room they will usually rush through the house and not spend the time to visualize how they would turn your house into their home.

Another nice touch is to provide pictures of the house and yard during various seasons of the year. You might have the best yard on the block, but in the middle of winter no one will know it unless you show them!

For those cost conscious buyers, it might make sense to provide copies of utility bills to show what the cost of maintaining the house will be.

All of this sounds like a lot of work, but if you sell your home quickly and at a good price it should all be worth it!

Andy MacDonald (BA Econ.) is president of MortgageBroker Inc. He has more than two decades of financial services experience and has long been an advocate for consumers within the mortgage industry. Visit his Web site at MortgagesInCanada.com.