Top tips for preparing to sell

Four tips for preparing to sell

When you're gearing up to put your home onto the market, there are loads of things you are thinking about. But what are the things that you should be focusing on? What's important? 
Having bought and sold myself, you can find that it's all a bit overwhelming at first but once you break it all down it becomes much easier to invest your time in what actually will make a difference in the long run.

First impressions for viewings

One of the quickest and easiest ways of ensuring that your home has the best opportunity of selling, is to ensure that its looking at its best throughout. Before your agent comes and does the details/ photos and certainly before any viewings, it would be time well spent giving your home a good clean and declutter from top to bottom. There is always a limit to how much decluttering you do and you still want to make the home look and feel lived in with some personality. The difference a good spring clean and tidy up can make is massive and will certainly give off the right vibe to any potential buyers to show that it's been looked after. Spending a bit of time touching up on any painting or small jobs that you've been meaning to get around to are worth doing but don't let it run away with you and start spending lots of money.

Price

It seems like a silly and pretty obvious one but ensuring that you have had the right advice on the pricing of your home is one of the easiest places to go wrong. Unfortunately there are some agents out there that will give you what you want to hear in telling you that your property is worth more than you think in order to secure the business from you, this is a trap that many people have fallen into and will inevitably end up reducing the price which never looks good. You only get one chance to launch it to the market and it is key that it looks competitive and attractive enough that buyers will enquire in the first two weeks. Did your agent go through other comparables that have sold and exactly what is your direct competition on the market for?

Solicitors 

Choosing a solicitor should be pretty straight forward? They all do the same thing? There are some things to bear in mind before you make a decision. Do some research and take a look at their most recent reviews as this will reveal how good their service has been to their clients, it's easy for a good solicitor to become a not so good one when they get busy and have a big workload. In my experience you do get what you pay for with a solicitor and it's worth paying that bit more for someone who is competent and who is a conveyancing specialist, not just a generic solicitor who you can't get hold of when you need them. Instructing a solicitor right from the get go and not waiting until you have a buyer is a good idea, as this will save a lot of time with initial paperwork in the first few weeks and will reduce the overall time that the transaction takes. If you are selling a leasehold property it's worth asking your solicitor to start ordering things like your management pack or sellers pack as soon as you have a buyer as it can take from 2 - 4 weeks to arrive after being ordered.

Making sure your agent is prepared

 Your agent is going to be fully responsible for finding you a suitable buyer, so making sure that they have all of the information that they need about your home and move is crucial. There are many questions that potential buyers ask on viewings, some of them are easy enough to answer but some do require having that information to hand. Ensure that your agent is fully clued up on your move, for example things like timescales, is there a chain? When was the boiler installed / last serviced? Does the loft have a ladder / boarded? are all frequently asked questions. If there is a sales team, make sure that all of the agents that will be doing viewings have got this sort of information with them and perhaps make a crib sheet that you can email over. Another thing to bear in mind is, has the agent that is doing the viewing actually been to your home before? Do they know the property? Too many times there are agents that have not actually been to a property before and then have to blag their way through a viewing with a potential buyer! Not what you would expect as a seller or a buyer.

If you're thinking of moving and need some advice click here to speak to an Avocado agent, we'd be more than happy to help!