Thinking Of Selling Your Home Privately?
So you are putting your home up for sale and thinking of selling your home privately.
Often people who are looking at selling their home think that selling privately will save them money – this is a misconception.
Buyers, and particularly investors, who see a private sale are thinking that this is a great opportunity to strike up a deal.
You end up with investors preying on what they perceive as a weaker opposition in the negotiation process with inferior market knowledge looking to really clinch a deal they know will be profitable for them.
Not all, but many vendors are vulnerable in this situation where selling your home privately can lead to selling significantly below the market value price.
The Language of a Seller
Are you aware that agents are actually trained in how to sell?
Often vendors selling their own home privately can put a buyer off by telling them too much, too little, or by telling them the wrong information altogether.
Look at it this way – agents are a little bit like shepherds blowing their whistle to herd buyers onto paper in the shortest time possible; blow that whistle the wrong way and the whole thing can end up chasing the buyers away.
Getting it right and having many buyers in the right place at one time will get you to your desired outcome in a very short time frame.
Know the Numbers
When selling your home privately how do you really know the market value of your property?
Having up-to-date data on surrounding sales is of massive importance when knowing how to price it on the market. Get this wrong and you will either sell way undervalue or you over price and your listing goes cold right from the get-go.
Agents, by real estate law, must provide an appraisal price for the property based on comparative sales around the area.
The key thing here is comparative, for example:
Trev’s house down the road sold for $1.4m.
Your property has slightly bigger land but one less bedroom. Trev has a garage and you only have a carport. Your house was built in the 1960’s, Trev’s was 1990.
How would you find a comparative price point to make sure you’re spot on with your pricing?
You could pay a valuer to do so, or you could use an agent – somebody who is in the market day in and day out and knows it well.
Target Market
We agents run thousands of open homes and see what types of buyers walk through the doors on a daily basis.
We are constantly collecting data on what buyers come to specific homes.
Often they will walk into a property and know exactly what type of buyer they are going to target before you even have the chance to shake their hand and say hello.
Knowing who you’re selling to and what buyers to work and engage with is a very powerful thing.
Locating that right buyer and knowing it as soon as they start talking is a skill you only get by talking with buyers on a regular basis.
When you are selling your home privately you may spend hours communicating with a buyer who may never be committed to buying and miss that one buyer who walks out and buys the property next door.
Marketing
Real estate is not as simple as merely listing a property and waiting for the buyers to come.
What a lot of sellers aren’t aware of is the amount of money and time real estate companies invest in order to make sure their marketing campaigns are attracting the right buyers.
Immediately capturing your buyers with great photos and really showcasing your home in its best light is the first step of a successful campaign.
Agents use their own professional photographers who they can call on at any point. Day shots, evening shots, and correct lenses to showcase room size or to give a small area
the feel of more space.
Photos taken by vendors themselves on their iPhone 4 with their reflection in the mirror in a pixelated photo with poor lighting is not what gets people through the doors to buy.
Drones are also used to give impressive aerial shots to showcase land size and locality to amenities.
All of these marketing tools are paramount in today’s tech-savvy buyers market.
Being in front of your buyers is paramount, but only if you are there with the right marketing images.
We hope that after reading this information you have found some value in the work we do as agents to give our clients peace of mind.
If you are thinking of selling privately we are still more than happy to assist you, free of charge of course. We want to support all of our clients regardless of their decisions of who they wish to list or sell with.
Lisa and Steve Stone
Elite Agents for Ray White