Sell Your Home in Any Market: 50 Surprisingly Simple Strategies for Getting Top Dollar Fast

240 Pages·2008·2.32 MB·English

by  Jim Remley

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SELL
Your
HOME
A
NY
in
MARKET
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SELL
Your
HOME
A
NY
in
MARKET
50
Surprisingly Simple Strategies for
Getting Top Dollar Fast
JIM REMLEY,
ABR, ALHS
American Management Association
New York • Atlanta • Brussels • Chicago • Mexico City • San Francisco
Shanghai • Tokyo • Toronto • Washington, D.C.
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Special discounts on bulk quantities of AMACOM books are
available to corporations, professional associations, and other
organizations. For details, contact Special Sales Department,
AMACOM, a division of American Management Association,
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
Tel.: [phone]. Fax: [phone].
Web Site: www.amacombooks.org
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative
information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with
the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering
legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or
other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent
professional person should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Remley, Jim, 1969–
Sell your home in any market : 50 surprisingly simple strategies for getting
top dollar fast / Jim Remley.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-0028-9
ISBN-10: 0-8144-0028-0
1. House selling. 2. Real estate business. 3. Real property. I. Title.
HD1379.R46 2008
643'.12—dc22
2007043681
© 2008 Jim Remley.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
REALTOR® is a registered collective membership mark that identifies a real
estate professional who is a member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF
REALTORS® and subscribes to its strict code of ethics.
This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Association,
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1 The Big Decision—Is This the Right Time to
Sell Your Home? 3
CHAPTER 2 Setting the Right Price 27
CHAPTER 3 Promotion—Fishing for Buyers 49
CHAPTER 4 Web Marketing 79
CHAPTER 5 Positioning—The Power of Incentives 101
CHAPTER 6 Preparing Your Home for Showings 119
CHAPTER 7 Showing Your Home to Potential Buyers 127
CHAPTER 8 Extremely Motivated Sellers—When You Have
to Sell Now! 157
CHAPTER 9 Evaluating Offers and Managing Transactions 179
APPENDIX Stagnation—What to Do When Nothing Happens! 203
Index 225
v
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Introduction
Congratulations! You have decided to sell your home. But it’s a little
scary, right?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Selling a home is a life-changing
event, and no matter how expensive or inexpensive your home might
be, to you, the homeowner, it’s a huge financial decision. It doesn’t
matter whether you own a cottage in a small town or a luxury apart-
ment in Chicago; when it comes time to sell, every seller wants to find
a buyer who is ready, willing, and able to purchase his home at a fair
price and on fair terms.
Of course, from the outside looking in, selling a home can seem
pretty straightforward: Just put a sign in the lawn, throw a few ads in
the local paper, and bingo, there should be a line of potential buyers
lined up down the street, right? Well, probably not. The truth is, in to-
day’s hypercompetitive and Internet-enabled real estate market, buy-
ers have access to hundreds or even thousands of homes to preview
prior to making a purchase. For a seller, this means that you will have
to compete for a buyer’s attention, and today the competition is fierce.
The good news is that every home has a buyer. Yes, the person
who will eventually purchase your home is alive and well and is to-
day walking the earth just waiting for the opportunity to write an of-
fer on your home. The challenge is to position your home in such a
way that this particular buyer finds it and, more importantly, finds it
attractive enough to actually complete a purchase. This is important
because as a seller, you probably have three distinct goals. First, you
want to sell your home for the largest amount of money possible;
1
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2 Introduction
second, you want to sell within your own time frame; and finally,
you want the least amount of hassles possible. This book is designed
to provide you with the best information, strategies, and techniques
for achieving all of these goals regardless of the market conditions.
Good or bad, up or down, buyer’s market or seller’s market, you can
sell your home!
Now you might ask: “How can you say that with confidence? After
all, you’ve never even seen my home.” As a real estate professional for
the last 18 years and the owner of 11 real estate offices, I’ve discovered
that successful sellers, the ones who sell their homes 100 percent of
the time despite the market conditions, have leveraged their ability to
sell by using powerful tools that are available to anyone. Contained in
these pages are more than 50 of these time-tested techniques that you
can begin using to get your home sold today.
So are you ready to find out how to sell your home in any market?
Let’s get started.
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C H A P T E R 1
The Big Decision: Is This the
Right Time to Sell Your Home?
As you think back over your life, you can probably remember all of the
homes that you or your parents have lived in. If you’re like me, you
might even remember the rooms—the places where you slept, ate,
fought, played, and laughed. A home is a special place. It’s more than
just four walls and a roof; a home, your home, is a reflection of where
you are in your life. It’s a reflection of your lifestyle.
This may be one reason why today nearly 70 percent of American
families own a home, more than at any other time in the nation’s his-
tory. What’s more, according to the most recent data from the Na-
tional Association of REALTORs, on average these same families will
sell their current home and buy a new one in the next two to six years.
Imagine that: The entire country will be selling their homes and buy-
ing new ones in the next 24 to 72 months.
Why so often? For first-time homeowners, a first home, like a first
car, is a temporary stop on the way to bigger and better things. The
cute cottage that was once cozy, even romantic with a blushing bride,
can now seem cramped with two kids climbing the walls and a re-
triever doing laps down the hall. Then there’s the fact that as we be-
come more successful, what we want in our home often grows with
3