Why isn’t your house selling?
There are a lot of steps in-between the decision to sell a house and the final closing. There are just as many potential obstacles.
Melissa has had first-hand experience with these obstacles, as a stager, a home seller, and even as a realtor. In this week’s radio show, Melissa covers some of the biggest problems you can encounter as a seller or someone helping sell a home.
Price
Home staging can help you sell at or above your ideal price—within limits. The range of prices you can give your house is largely fixed by where you live. Going even 10% above that range can make you lose 50% of potential buyers.
Emotional attachment
You’re not selling your home. You’re selling a house. A property.
If you still think of it as your home, it’s going to be very hard to sell. It’s going to be even harder for your prospective buyers to come in and see it as their new home. The less attached you are to your house when it goes on the market, the easier it will be to make level-headed decisions about the property and how best to stage it.
Permits
While rare, open permits on your home will keep it from selling. If you’ve had any unpermitted work on the property—even if you were just building a bigger porch with your own hands—you need to get the paperwork sorted before you can sell.
Roof problems
This is a fairly obvious one, but remember; if you leave major issues like a bad roof unresolved, you’re not just looking at a price reduction. There’s an opportunity cost in losing buyers who see a leaky or poorly maintained roof and immediately feel turned off of your property.
You should try to address any roof issues before your house goes on the market. If you can’t, you absolutely need to disclose them and price the house accordingly.
Tenants
We generally do not stage tenant-occupied homes. Why? The tenants have no interest in the house selling; in fact, they have a material interest in it NOT selling. They’re also much less likely to take care of our staging pieces than the owner themselves would be, which could lead to significant damages. All of these factors make it difficult to sell tenant-occupied homes too.
Appraisals
A low appraisal always hurts. It’s important to know that FHA appraisals stay with the house for at least 6 months. So if you get a low FHA appraisal, you need to look for a non-FHA buyer if you want to sell the house for more within the next 6 months. Staging usually helps with securing a higher appraisal since it increases the perceived value of the home.
Selling a house is hard! There are so many moving parts. But it doesn’t have to be an ordeal. Home staging is just one way to make the burden on sellers and realtors a little lighter.
For the full video, click here. And be sure to follow us on YouTube and Facebook for more tips and tricks!
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