How to Sell a Home Fast: The Top 6 Things to Do

How to Sell a Home Fast: The Top 6 Things To Do

We are gearing up for spring selling season and one of the topped search terms on Google for real estate is “How to sell a home fast.”

And that makes sense. Once you’ve decided to sell your home, it’s easy to get excited about the next chapter and want to get there as fast as you can. Or maybe financial reasons are moving you to sell fast. Or a job transfer. Or a new baby. Or a marriage. Downsizing. Upsizing.

Whatever your motivation for selling quickly, this post is here to give you the top things you can do to sell your house fast.

So jumping into the first thing you need to do to sell your home fast, and that’s to stage it in some way.

I actually made a 45 minute video where I go room-by-room and tell you want to do to stage your home. I even have a guide to go with it. So check that out if you want to do a deep-dive into staging your home yourself.

Of course, if you can do all of the staging suggestions, I highly recommend that. But if you can only do a few, my top three recommendations are to first, do a deep clean of every surface of your house. Ceiling fans, blinds, windows, baseboards, light fixtures, all those places you don't think about cleaning on a frequent basis, all of that gets clean.

The second recommendation is to declutter and start packing things away. You are going to pack this stuff away anyway, so why not start now? But taking personal items off surfaces and cleaning out closets, cabinets, and drawers, costs you no money and makes a world of difference to buyers.

Then the third and final most important thing you can do is to open up your curtains and blinds. Bring in as much natural light into the home as you can and supplement with artificial lights. So make sure every light bulb in the house works and make sure they're all of matching intensity. The vanity lights should all be the same bulb.

Staging on some level is critical because it makes your home more attractive to the widest possible audience - and that’s what you want. More people saying, “I could live there” about your home than the other one kind of like it that’s for sale down the street or a neighborhood over.

Number Two

Take High-Quality photos and video.

In the latest National Association of Realtors Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report, they noted that ALL home buyers used the internet to search for a home. All. As in every single one of them. This means that the way your home appears online is going to be what makes it or breaks it to getting a showing. So do not settle for iPhone photos. I know the cameras are great. But they don’t cut the mustard when it comes to capturing the attention of buyers against all the other listings that have professional photos.

Now let me unpack this process of positively getting the buyers' attention on property search platforms.

So buyers either set up a search on a platform where they go in and save a search, maybe their Realtor has a search set up for them, or they’re getting emails from a platform of the newest listings.

The user experience is the same every time. Serious buyers look at the first photo, then look at the price, and make a snap judgment call, “Is that home worth that price?” They haven’t seen anything else. But how the serious buyer answers that question based on those two inputs determines how many showings you get. Simple as that. I could run thousands in digital ads, but it's all for nothing if these two pieces aren’t right.

With the prevalence of online video consumption these days, a property video is important. We put this video on the property website in addition to linking to it wherever we can. It’s also part of our advertising spend where we put some of our advertising dollars towards promoting this on YouTube.

A property video allows people to see more parts of the home than flat pictures can convey. It’s also another way to keep serious buyers engaged on your property. When your home takes up more positive mindshare in that serious buyer’s mind, you’ll increase the chances of them coming back for another showing or going ahead and making an offer.

NUMBER 3
Price your home competitively.
Know how the market is trending. If the market is going up, then you can list above the sales price of a recent comparable sale. If it’s going down, then you’ll want to know how much it’s going down to determine if you should list at market value or below market value.

There’s a concept I call chasing the market. It’s where you price high with the thought that you’ll just lower the price later.

Let’s say comps show that a good list price for your house would be $500,000. But, you want to push the market and list for $525,000.

Your first price drop is going to be what puts your house at the recommended list price, if you agree to go that low. Like in this example, you’d have to drop $25,000 to get to the original recommended list price. Most sellers only want to drop $5,000 or MAYBE $10,000 on the first price drop.

At the point you're ready to drop your price, your home has probably already sat a month on the market. The market may have changed and gone down, which is typical with seasonal fluctuations. So now you’re finally at the proper list price but you’ve been on the market for 30 days. That starts to look stale to a lot of buyers.

Walk through this online buyer experience with me. Let’s say a month goes by where you’re testing the market and listed at $525,000. You decide, well, we tried and it didn’t work, so now we’ll drop the price to the recommended list price. Then, a buyer sees your house and it’s listed for $500,000. The front photo looks great and then they say, “Hey! This house looks good for that price.” So they click to get more details. Then they see the house has been on the market for 30 days. What goes through their mind is, “Oh, I thought this house was good for $500k but it’s been on the market for a month and no one wants it. Maybe it’s not such a good buy after all.”


Or, maybe your house did make it through the initial online vetting process. So now they’re walking through your home. When showing a home to a buyer, there’s almost a guarantee this is the series of questions they’re going to ask as they’re walking through:
What’s the square footage of this home?
How old is this home?
How much are they asking for this one?
How long has this been on the market?

And as they’re asking these questions they’re processing if the answer lines up with their expectations.

If your house is priced with the market, which they’ll probably have a sense of what is reasonable at that time if they’ve looked at a few homes, but your house has been sitting for 30 or 60 days, then the next thing a buyer will say is, “I wonder why it has been on the market for so long.”

STOP

This is your first strike if you’ve done everything else right. The buyer just put a mental red flag on your home and will start walking through asking themselves, what did everyone else see that I’m not seeing?

I’m telling you, buying a home is such an emotional purchase. People make up the craziest reasons as to why a home is good or bad.

So since this video is all about selling your home fast, then you’ll want to price your home competitively with the market so that all the other listings like yours help sell your house.
When people look at homes in a neighborhood, they usually look at homes that are similar to yours just so they have a good sense of their options in that area. If your home is priced better, shows better, and feels better than all the others, then your home is the hands-down winner.

When I say priced better, I don’t necessarily mean cheaper. It’s thinking rationally through upgrades and features in a way that a buyer would think through it.

And this is where talking with a Realtor comes in handy. We walk homes with buyers all the time and hear the feedback. So while you may have replaced all the light fixtures with expensive crystal chandeliers everywhere, if that’s not typical or desired in the market for that area, what may be an ‘upgrade’ in your book may have little to no value to the general market.

NUMBER 4
List on the MLS and syndicate the listing details to the major home search platforms such as Zilow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Redfin, etc.

Any agent with a ready, willing, and able buyer is going to see this when it hits. If they have searches set up for their client, the client will see it too.

When we syndicate on the home search platforms, anyone with searches set up that match your home, receives a push or email notification that your listing is live.

This is why having great photos is critical for that MLS search. Just like I mentioned with the buyer example of chasing the market. When a serious buyer is looking at houses online, what they see first is a picture of your house and a price. They make a snap judgment on whether or not they think your house is worth that price from the first photo.

NUMBER 5
Market your property or pick an agent who knows how to market a property

Make a Property Website. This creates a focused experience for buyers to engage with your home without cluttering their search experience with competing listings.

You’ve seen how it works on the property search websites. You pick this house to look at but then as you’re viewing details the website says, “Hey, if you like that listing, you’ll probably like this one too.” And then off the buyer goes looking at something else. No. We don’t want that.

When your property has its own website that’s listed on all the marketing materials and on the sign out front, it allows a serious buyer to get, practically all of their questions answered about your property.

Want the seller’s disclosure? It’s there. Want the survey? It’s there. Forgot some details of the house because all that you’ve seen is blending together and you need a 3-D tour to be reminded? That’s there too.

Because buying a home is such an emotional decision, the fewer blocks or reservations or questions a buyer has about a property, the more comfortable they’ll feel about the idea of yours. And that’s what we want.

Provide Property Brochures.

Yep, we still have traditional property brochures professionally printed for each of our listings. These are in the home for buyers to take.

Why? Well, after a day of looking at homes, they start to blend together. Most agents don’t have flyers for people to take anymore. So the serious buyer has to go back to the search site they’ve been using, type in the address, and refresh their memory from the pictures in the listing. But remember, on that search site, they’re getting inundated with other listings that are like your home, but the goal of that search site is to keep your buyer on their site, flipping through more and more properties. Because the more time they spend on that site, the more ads they serve your buyer and the more money they make.

Those property search sites are all about keeping your buyer there. They’re not there to sell your home. So we want to pull the serious buyer away from that experience and into a captive experience where they’re just engaging with your home.

This is where the nice brochure comes in. Not the flimsy inkjet printout from the office printer on regular paper that ends up crumbled on the floor of the car after a day of showing.

No, your sturdy brochure gets prime placement in the pile. And with your property website easy to find and go to, that serious buyer goes there for deep dive for more info on your home.

And we have found that presentation is everything. When we showcase your home using professional materials and custom touches, it increases the ‘quality’ factor of your home.

It’s like if you go out to eat and restaurant A has plasticware and throw-away plates to eat from but restaurant B has fresh table linens, silverware, and fine china to eat from. Well, the thought of most is that the restaurant with the nicer accouterments is going to be of better quality. Now what if you found out both restaurants charged the same for their food? Then you’d choose the place where you think the quality of food is better. Presentation matters!
Another element of marketing your home is to Invest in a 3-D Tour

With so many people relocating from out of the area, a 3-D tour helps a buyer get a better sense of your home than what they can get from a flat picture. Also, as I mentioned before, after a day of looking at homes, they start to blend together. Investing in a 3-D tour helps your property stand out from the rest and further increases the comfort level a buyer has with your home.

So there’s a regular 3-D tour that we can put on the MLS and on your property website, and then there’s Zillow’s 3-D tour. While we don’t have actual statistics to provide, we have found that more often than not, when we use Zillow’s platform to create a 3-d tour, your listing will tend to rank higher in Zillow’s search results for an area. So for our clients, we actually do a second 3-d tour of the home using Zillow’s platform to make sure we’re leaving no stone unturned when it comes to getting the most exposure on your home.

Now that the marketing elements are in place, it’s time to push them out. So we implement a media ad spend to further increase the online impressions your property receives.

So we’ll push out a social media campaign for your listing, heavily leveraging Facebook and YouTube.

In addition to social media, we also push out a direct mail campaign to your surrounding neighbors. Neighbors often have friends or family who might be interested in living in the area. This is a great way to let them know your house is available since they don’t likely have an online home search set up for your home. I recommend using a larger mailing size than a typical postcard as a postcard can easily get lost in the pile of grocery store circulars.

And now, for number 6, that last tip I said will save you thousands? It’s repeating something you have maybe already heard and that’s the fact that your first offer is often your best.

This doesn’t mean you have to accept the first offer as-is. You can still negotiate, and more often than not, that buyer is the one who will negotiate the best terms with you.

Why?

Buyers who act quickly are often highly motivated and have done their research on the market. Their offer reflects their genuine interest and understanding of the property's value.

Early buyers haven't seen multiple similar properties, so they might be less likely to lowball compared to later entrants who compare options extensively. And if they do lowball, it’s time to be honest with yourself and consider if it’s possible your list price is not in line with the current market conditions.

————-

Thinking of buying or selling a home in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex? When you work with our group, you get a dedicated team of experienced professionals. We thrive on understanding the nuances of selling, from market analysis and pricing strategies to negotiations and closing the deal. This means you can rest assured that every detail is being meticulously considered and handled by experts.

You'll get a team with a proven track record of success in navigating any market condition, ensuring your home gets the most qualified exposure and sells for the best possible price. Connect with us: EMAIL - jshannon@kw.com PHONE/TEXT - 214-803-4444

If you’re not in the DFW area, when you allow us to connect you to one of the top Realtors in our international network of real estate agents, you’ll get a personally vetted, top-performing agent to make sure you’re working with a savvy professional wherever you are. CLICK HERE to get started.

Jennifer Shannon is a licensed real estate agent and broker associate with Keller Williams. Licensed in Texas since 2006. License no.0550951