Advice for home sellers

August 7, 2013

Help yourself to make selling your home a more straightforward process.

As summer is at last well upon us now is a time for people to embark upon the moving process in the hopeful expectation in having everything completed before the onset of winter.

With the advent of websites such as Rightmove it is now so easy to search the whole property market for potential purchases and there is certainly no need for the slog round the local agents to register on half a dozen mailing lists. Estate agents are not always the most popular of people and we are well aware that clients will often choose to avoid us until absolutely necessary, in the hope of avoiding all those unwanted prospecting calls and offers of free valuations.

If you really are keen to move you will need a valuation or two on your property. Before you even get to that stage however it is a good idea to have a search around the market to see how much you are likely to have to pay for the property you hope to purchase. The same applies whether you are looking for something larger or smaller or just a change of area. It is so much easier to move forward with confidence if you can see that the type of property that suits you is available at an affordable figure.

Only at this stage is it usually worthwhile calling in the services of the local agents to establish where the value of your own property might lie and to see how to go about selling process. It may surprise you to learn that the there are numerous options available to you and you do not have to go down the route of just planting a “for sale” board and hoping the buyers will appear. While most houses will sell in the usual way through a local agent there are plenty of occasions when a sale by auction or tender will be most appropriate and with a special or unusual property it can sometimes be worthwhile linking up with two agents, one local and one more national.

Whatever you do, don’t worry too much about tidying up for your agents but do make sure that the house looks at its very best when they come to take the photographs. All too often you will see internal photographs of a house that do it no justice, with unmade beds, rooms full of rubbish and toys and a kitchen looking as if a small bomb has gone off in it. Definitely best avoided!

Please do remember that the real point here is that if you clear everything out now, it will most certainly help you sell the property but if you leave it until the day you move, it will not and will, almost certainly, make your moving day very difficult. In other words if it can be done, get it done.

Don’t forget the garden. You won’t be able to transform it but a good tidy up and getting the lawn cut can work wonders for the agent’s photos. In this day and age it is very common for buyers to only view properties on the internet and you may only have 5 or 10 seconds to impress them. You really do have to make sure every image shows your home in the very best possible light.

The final issue to think about is whether it is worth carrying out any major works to the property before you put it on the market. Almost certainly the answer is no, but if one particular part of the property such as a scruffy hall, poor front garden or such like that particularly lets the house down it is always worthwhile bringing that particular part of the property up to scratch and to the same condition as the rest of the property. There is very little point in spending a lot of money on kitchens, bathrooms and windows, as at the very best you are only likely to get most of the money back and in some cases may get no return at all. Do listen to the advice of your agent who will a very good understanding of which jobs are really worth getting done.

In conclusion, please do remember that this doesn’t have to be an unpleasant process full of stress but can, in many ways, be rather exciting. Yes, you will have to keep the house tidy, make sure the children don’t leave toys everywhere and the dog doesn’t dig up the lawn, but with a little care and forethought the whole process can be quite straightforward and of course with the improving market, it can be certainly be a great deal easier than in the past.

Richard Hair.

Hair & Son have offices on the corner of Thames Drive, Leigh Broadway, and London Road, Westcliff.

www.hairandson.co.uk