It’s the first week of January 2022 and every year about this time, many people tell me they want to sell their home in the spring. What they don’t realize is, if they truly want to sell in the spring, they should really be meeting with one of my team members right now!
Too many sellers wait until April to call me and are not fully aware of the timeline involved with selling their home. Our typical seller needs some minor repairs made and these things take time. They might need to replace a few dated light fixtures, broken faucets, repaint a couple of rooms, or replace some worn carpet in the basement. If I meet with them today and give them a short list of things to do, it almost always takes four to six weeks to complete these checklist items. If they’ll let me, I can arrange to have vendors come over and give them bids for the work that needs to be done, but too many times they want to do the work themselves. Their lives are busy with work, family, and everyday life. They can’t seem to find one hour to go to Lowe’s and buy the new light fixtures during the week and then they sit there in the garage for another two weeks until they get a Saturday to install them. The same goes for faucets, painting a room, or cleaning out the storage room in the basement. It always takes double the time they think it will take.
After they finally get that done, I then need to send my home stager to their house to help them declutter and stage the home. Quite often this means purging old boxes, furniture, and miscellaneous junk they need to get rid of. It’s also not uncommon they need to rent a short term storage unit and move some of their extra furniture and boxes out of the home. You can pretty much add another two to four weeks for this too.
Finally, we’re getting close to having the home ready to go, but we still need professional photographs. In truth, this doesn’t take long to actually shoot the home, about one hour at the most, but I might have to schedule the photographer a couple days in advance if he’s busy.
Once we have the photos back from the photographer, my real estate team would like a couple of days to market the home to all the top agents in the area. This is prior to going live on the MLS and opening it up to the public.
Many people see our posts on Facebook and hear us talking about how we sold the Johnson’s home in 48 hours with multiple offers and got them $10,000 over their asking price. What they don’t know is that we actually started working with the Johnsons three or four months ago. The sellers called us well in advance of when they actually wanted to sell. They knew there were repairs that needed to be made. They knew they would need to purge their home of all the junk. They didn’t know anything about home staging, but luckily for them, my team has our own home stager that we provide to them at no cost. Most importantly, they made the smart decision to call us early so we could help them through this entire process.
I realize this seems like a lot of work, and it is. But my real estate team will be there with you every step of the way, to advise, offer support, and to ultimately get you the highest sales price possible. If you listen to us and take our advice, you will likely have some great offers to choose from and be on and off the market in 48 hours! If it’s easier, you can even take a short vacation and we’ll handle everything for you while the home is on the market. Many seller clients took us up on this offer this last year and it made the sale much easier on them.
My real estate team can sell a home any time of the year. There is no “best time” to sell a home in my opinion, but if you do have a time that is best for your family, call me now so we can begin planning for that. We can move fast when it’s necessary, but sometimes it just takes more time than you think. Ron Henderson 816-651-9001