Five common traps we can all fall into:
Let emotion drive your decisions
– A home is a place where everyday life unfolds in all its rich emotional variety. Children are born and grow up there, pets die there and get buried in the garden – over time a home almost becomes part of your DNA. On the other hand selling a property is all about business. As you can imagine, the two don’t always go together. You need less emotion, more logic. It might be tough, but it’ll benefit you to steadily, gently and firmly detach yourself emotionally from your home before putting it on the market, and carry on the good work throughout the selling process. Then all the decisions you make will be suitably business-focused.
Price your home too high
– You might have paid ten grand for your home, or ten million quid. But buyers don’t care what you paid for your place. They only care about buying it from you for a decent, fair and reasonable price. If you set your price too high, nobody will want to view the property. Yes, you need to leave some room for manoeuvre. But keeping your asking price realistic and appropriate will bring the potential buyers flooding in, giving you a much better chance of selling quickly.
Letting your interior and exterior slide
– Just because you’re moving, it doesn’t mean you can let the place go to the dogs etc. While a percentage of buyers will be happy to carry out redecoration, even maintenance or renovation, most people tend to want somewhere they can move into straight away. That means clean, fresh décor and well-lit rooms. It also means clarity, and it makes a lot of sense to clear any clutter so people can get an accurate idea of the building’s potential. There’s no need to go the whole hog and ‘stage’ your home professionally, but dirt, clutter and tatty décor tend to put a lot of people right off.
Refusing to budge on price
– If there’s no rush and you’re happy to hang around for months or even years until someone finally pays your asking price, that’s fine. But if you want to sell quickly, within a reasonable timescale, you need to be flexible. We advise setting a price that includes the wriggle-room you need to drop a few thousand pounds off the asking price and still get the return you want. Refusing to haggle is no way to sell a property.
Fib about issues
– In Britain we’re nowhere near as litigious as the Americans. But if you fib about the condition of your home, for example trying to hide the beginnings of a subsidence problem, you could face long, expensive legal action. You might want to sell fast, but trying to hide things like dry rot, woodworm or a leaking roof could easily come back and bite you on the backside later. If problems are found during the home inspection stage your buyers might either pull out of the deal altogether or demand you pay to fix the issue. Be straight and honest for a quicker sale, a happier buyer and no long-term legal nightmares.
It’s our job to make the entire property survey and valuation process as simple, clear and stress-free as we can. And we have an awful lot of experience doing exactly that, delivering top class services to banks, solicitors, housing associations, investors and, of course, private individuals.