Top Tips for Selling your Home

Selling a building and the land it sits on can involve a tremendously frought process. Unlike selling an appliance or a vehicle, you’ll have to follow a very specific legal procedure. What’s more, since the value of the asset in question will be considerable, any small variation in price might turn out to be significant when the final sale is agreed.

In other words, if you’ve elected to sell a house, you’ll want to pay attention to the factors which have the greatest influence on the final price of the property, and which will make your life as a seller as easy as possible.

Decide when to sell

The property market is in flux at the moment. After years of price inflation, driven by rock-bottom interest rates, the price of property may be falling for the first time. These variations have an impact on when the best time to sell is. On the other hand, it’s difficult to predict the future, and your personal circumstances might dictate a specific approach.

For example, your mortgage might stipulate penalty fees for those who move. Specifically, you want to establish whether your mortgage is ‘portable’. If it isn’t, then you might need to pay an early repayment charge when you make the move.

Enlist professional services

While it’s possible to get aspects of your move done yourself, there are others which are certainly best left to professionals. The conveyancing, for example, should be entrusted to a reputable solicitor. Go online and you’re likely to find the services you need at a reasonable price – but if you look for a local solicitor instead, then you might gain access to specific local knowledge. The same applies to your estate agent or mortgage broker.

Depersonalise and present your home

You’ll want your home to appeal to a range of different home buyers. If you have particular tastes when it comes to interior design, then you might have chosen to paint your hallway luminous orange – but that might be a turn-off for the people you show the home to. Instead, go for neutral shades wherever possible. That way, everyone who walks through the front door will be able to imagine putting their own personal stamp on the place.

Generally, it’s a good idea to present the property when it’s clean and tidy, and to make sure that it smells good. It’s a cliché to bake bread on the day that your home is due to receive visitors, but it tends to work nicely. Other smells, like last night’s takeaway, might have the opposite effect.

Get your admin in order

It pays to do the maths early on in the process, and have all of your paperwork organised and to hand. You don’t want to be scrambling around the living room in search of a letter from your bank that you received months earlier. Have a filing system in place – or at the very least put all of your house-related correspondence in the same box.