Three Reasons Why Your Home is Not Selling in a Hot Market
You decided to sell your Waterloo Region home. You know the market has been very good to sellers recently. Your home is in a good location and it is certainly comparable with other homes in your area. In fact, in your opinion, it’s actually somewhat superior. After all, you did have that new deck put on last year.
Yet you have had your home on the market for longer now than the advice columns said you should have done. This is supposed to be a seller’s market! What is going wrong? What are you doing wrong?
While there are many reasons homes even in the most desirable areas and ‘hottest’ markets don’t sell some are more common than others. Here’s a look at the top three reasons for homes don’t sell. Do any of them apply to your home?
Overpricing
The number one reason any house fails to sell when others around it are is that it is overpriced. There are a number of reasons why people overprice their home but the main one is that they simply did not do enough research before coming up with a final figure.
Area comparables need to be researched and obtaining a good property value report can help as well. And yes, you need to listen to your real estate agent. Some people tend to fail to do that, often because they just don’t like what they are saying. They feel their unique home is worth more.
But the fact is your real estate agent has a vested interest in pricing your home to receive the best possible offers (they do work on commission after all) But they are also realistic. They can take their experience, remove emotion from the equation (which is very hard for a seller to do) and come up with a price they believe the home can be sold at. So do yourself a favour, listen to their advice.
Your Home Shows Badly
Home sellers hear it time and time again but some still fail to understand the importance of preparing their home for sale the right way.
Everything you can do to improve your home’s showability will be worth the effort. So that means taking the time to evaluate your home from an outsider’s point of view and making the necessary changes to make it more appealing to potential buyers.
No, you may not want to spend money on a home you will be moving out of soon anyway but things like repainting faded paintwork or refacing old and worn cabinets can make the difference between your home selling in a timely fashion or not.
Advertising Photos are Subpar
It’s said that you have seven seconds to make a first impression — and the same goes for your house: 90% of buyers start their search online and make a decision about whether to come see your house based on a quick skim of your listing photos.
If there are few or no photos, or if the photos look bad because they weren’t professionally taken, or because the house is cluttered (which shows in the photos), many buyers will move on to the next listing. Ensure your real estate agent helps you get the best imagery possible taken of your home, in terms of both still photography and a video, as video tours are increasingly becoming just what buyers expect to see.