Selling your home: 7 tips on how to get a good price and complete quickly!
Selling your home can be daunting — it’s a drawn-out process that often requires a lot of work. Whilst finding your new home is the exciting part, selling your current one is often the difficult bit.
Especially after you’ve put a lot of work into making your house a home, selling up can be emotionally draining as well as time-consuming. Whatever the reason you’ve decided to sell up, there are some decisions you can make that will influence how your home is sold.
Whatever the reason you’re selling for, our guide can help you to achieve a quick sale at the price you need.
1. Check your mortgage terms
Before you begin with the sale, it’s important to check your finances. One of the most important things you need to know is whether you are still within your existing mortgage term.
If you find that you are, you may still be liable to pay some fees to your lender (usually between 1-5%). Be sure to check how much it will be.
However, if you’re on an SVR mortgage or a portable mortgage, there shouldn’t be any penalty fees — as long as your new property is approved by your lender.
2. Declutter and clean your home
First impressions count. If you feel that your home is cluttered, it’s likely buyers will too. And it could prevent them from imagining themselves in your home, reducing the chance of them falling in love with the place and making that all-important offer.
To declutter and clean:
- – Remove family photos: help buyers to picture themselves in the home
- – Keep surfaces clean: remove personal items
- – Ensure that the bathroom and kitchen are clean and tidy; they can make or break a house viewing!
- – Invest in good storage to ensure things can easily be tidied away before viewings; it’ll help keep things looking spick and span
- – Remove mould from bath and reseal for freshness, to help your bathroom look sparkling clean
- – Hoover the carpets and mop the floors: help them feel at home
- 3. Redecorate if necessary
To make your home feel like a blank canvas, ready for the buyer to decorate as they wish, you should work towards making your home less personal. This could mean:
- – Decorating in neutral tones: beige, grey and white
- – Laying new carpets or flooring
- – Looking at your home with a buyer’s eye: does the kitchen need redoing, or is the bathroom worse for wear?
- – Painting your kitchen cupboards and replacing handles
However, although a bit of sprucing up is a good idea, you mustn’t spend too much money on doing up your home — you shouldn’t do it up beyond the property’s value, or you may end up losing money.
4. Assess kerb appeal
What does your home look like from the pavement? Is the garden well maintained and the driveway tended to?
Leave your home and look at it from the outside. Compare it to your neighbours’. Perhaps there are some odd jobs you can do to make the property look more presentable. Whether you need to dig out the borders of your front garden, spray some weed killer on the path, or even clean the front door and step, these little things all add up to make a great first impression.
5. Get your home valued
Compare houses of similar sizes and specs to get a realistic idea of the value your home could have. Check sold prices in your area within the last 12 months, available online through Rightmove and Zoopla.
Then, when you have a figure in mind, invite estate agents to value your property — at this stage, you are not committed to using any of them.
Ask different agents: online, local and national to see the difference in quotes – it’s normal for valuations to differ, so take an average of the three before deciding what your asking price will be.
6. Choose your estate agent
Some people prefer to use online estate agents, whilst others prefer high street agents. Others may want to sell their property privately themselves, although this can prove to be a lot of work. All of these options have benefits, but you should be aware of the fees and costs involved before you make a decision.
Online agents are a good way to save money, but you may be required to pay any fees upfront and could be required to pay extra for sale signs or hosted viewings.
High street agents may cost more but the price will cover everything like for sale signs and hosted viewings, and you’ll only need to pay once your home has been sold. You will pay up to 3% of your home’s sale price in fees to the estate agent once sold.
7. Use a conveyancer
Conveyancing is the legal transfer of a property from one person to another. A conveyancing solicitor will handle the legal work that is involved in selling your home.
Conveyancers are specialist property lawyers qualified and insured to handle the sale of property, including looking after legal paperwork, land registry, council searches, draft contracts, and exchange of money.
To speed up the process, choose your conveyancer or solicitor before you put your property on the market. That way, there are no delays between an agreement with a buyer and handing over the keys.
How to sell your home
So whatever your reason for selling, and whatever your type of property, it pays to be thorough. Do your research and seek advice from the experts where possible.
