Have you decided to sell your house but aren’t sure where to start? In this video, I’m going to walk you through the three stages of the home selling process so you can begin planning. I’ll also simplify the timeline so you know exactly what to expect when selling.
Preparing Your Home For Sale
A lot of people think selling your home is a big, long, complicated process. However, it doesn’t have to be. The first step we’re going to take is preparing your home for sale.
Before we can start marketing your house, we need to make it look good. Oftentimes, this is going to involve going through things, decluttering, and rearranging your home to make sure it shows in its best light. It is during this prelisting stage that we begin preparing your house for sale.
This is a crucial step to handle before we take pictures and video. The first showing will happen online, so it’s essential to make a good first impression with potential buyers as they are more motivated to schedule showings.
Making Improvements
It’s during this time you might also look for areas in your home that you may be able to improve and get a positive return on investment. There are many simple tricks you can use to improve your property and sell it faster and for more money. For example, if painting a room for $250 allows us to sell the house for $2,500 more, it might be worth it to you.
There are probably several areas in your house that could use some sprucing up and allow you to maximize your home selling price. That being said, before you bring the paintbrush out, make sure that we’re able to get your goals accomplished within the right amount of time. For example, don’t start painting if we need your house sold next week.
The Active Process
The next stage is the active process. Before we get to this, we just have to take care of some simple paperwork to get the house listed. While we’re getting the paperwork together, we will order the photos and video from our photo-video team.
When you hire a real estate agent, our most important job is marketing and advertising the house. We can’t do any of this without great photos and videos, so it’s crucial that you allow us to do our job here. We’ll make sure we’re hiring the best photo and video team to get everything perfect. This is especially important since all of the marketing and advertising that comes later will be a direct result of those photos and videos.
The Listing Timeline
This is what the timing looks like at this stage. Once we’re ready to sign paperwork and get the house listed, it usually takes two to three days for our photo and video team to get out to your home. We want to do this on a nice weather day, so if we have rains and storms it’s going to take a little bit longer. If it’s nice weather, we can usually get them there a little bit sooner.
The photo and video team probably won’t be at your house for more than a couple of hours. After that, it’s going to take them another one to two days to get their photos and video edited and returned to us. Once we get the photos and videos back, we can send you a preliminary listing to review. We’ll jump on a phone call to review everything and make sure it all looks great to you.
When you give us the thumbs up, we can go live with the listing in the MLS. That means that anywhere between one and seven days, we’re going to have the listing live on the MLS—where you can go online and search for your property. Of course, our job doesn’t stop there.
That’s when we really get started with all of our marketing and advertising. If we’re doing open houses, an online marketing blitz makes sure that we’re getting the most exposure possible for you and your home. We’ll plan for showings to start right away.
The Pending Stage
Phase three is the pending stage or under contract stage. Eventually, your property will receive an offer that you’d like to accept. Typically speaking, this will usually happen within the first two weeks on the market. From there, our average time to close right now is between 30 and 45 days.
This is all going to be part of an offer. Some buyers want to settle sooner and some want to settle longer. Once you’ve accepted that offer, regardless of the closing date, it’s usually going to take about two weeks for the buyer to get through their inspection period.
If they’re getting a mortgage, it’ll take up to 30 days for them to get their mortgage approval. Once they have that mortgage approval, then you’re really going to want to start packing up your belongings and preparing to get out of the house.
Moving On To Your Next Chapter
I hope this gave you a glimpse of what goes on during the home selling process. Of course, there are many specific details we have not covered. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have I would be glad to connect. I help people just like you sell their properties every day, and I’d be happy to assist you too.
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