Selling your home can be an emotionally taxing process, but it helps to know what to expect before the for sale sign is posted in your front yard.
Unless you were a amenable neat freak to begin with, your habits towards your home will have to change for the duration of the sale.
Below are a few common questions that people have in mind when they are getting ready to work with an agent.
How Long Does The Process Last
The steps to selling a house from posting to closing take between 2 to 3 months, longer if the market is slow towards sellers. You must keep in mind that it will be a marathon rather than a sprint, and putting in all your energy into the work for an extended period of time can wear you out quickly. If you do not have 2 months of time to showcase and sell your home, and you need to sell your house quickly, consider talking to a real estate investor.
What Happens After I Sign The Listing Agreement?
These steps don’t always fall in the same order but here is what you should expect, in general, after you sign the listing agreement. By signing the contract you are agreeing to keep your house in showing condition at all time and to work with your agent to try and get your house sold. To go a little bit further this means keeping your house clean, be flexible with your time for showings, doing minor repairs, etc.
One of the big steps to getting your house ready is to declutter it and get rid of your personal items. But because the process can usually take at least 2-3 months you will have to keep your house in this condition for the entire time you are trying to sell it. Even though the people looking might not be the cleanest people in the world or that you don’t think that some dirty dishes or toys in the yard are a good reason to not buy a house, but your opinion does not matter you have to keep the house ready at all time. If you want to make sure that your house is sold you need to always make a good first impression and that the house is always clean and ready to be showed off to prospective buyers. This can be very difficult especially if you have kids and/or pets living with you.
What is better then making a good impression? Making a GREAT first impression, that’s what. So as soon as you know you are going to list your house you need to start the process of cleaning, decluttering, and getting the house ready to show off. Your agent can help you with this process but you have to make sure you don’t wait till the last minute because you will run out of time trying to do it this way. The greatest amount of traffic that most houses get is during the first week or two of having it listed. Once you sign the listing agreement the agent should be putting your house into the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS. This is when other agents, and people using the system, to find out that your house is on the market and is ready to be viewed. After this your agent should usually start planning for an open house and talk to you about putting a lock box on the front door.
The lockbox is actually very important since it allows other agents to showcase your home without you. This greatly simplifies the process of conducting showings since the buyer’s agents do not need to track you down indirectly through your agent.
Your life for a short while will then become a routine of leaving for showings, hearing offers, and then negotiating terms. If it has been 6 weeks already and there hasn’t been progress, then you may need to sit down with your agent and discuss new marketing strategies.
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