Selling your home is not the same as selling a pair of shoes on ebay.
Your home is your castle. It’s probably your most valuable asset. You want to get the most money possible for it. But selling real estate is complicated. It involves cleaning and showings and offers and negotiations and contracts and inspections and repairs and mortgages and moving and your next home, and on and on and on.
If you have a pit in your stomach after just reading the paragraph above, you’re not alone. Selling your home can be a gut wrenching experience. Having a real estate agent on your side when selling can make the process a whole lot easier.
In this video, we talk about 5 common questions we hear from home sellers. There are many more than 5 questions, but these are the most common. We’d like to hear (and answer) your questions too. Contact us here to get all of your questions answered for no cost or obligation.
Enjoy the video…
Audio Transcript
Greg Kurzner
Hi, I’m Greg Kurzner.
Patrick Dees
I’m Patrick Dees.
Greg Kurzner
And we’re with the Kurzner group at ERA Atlantic Realty. And today in this video, we are going to cover five of the most frequent questions that we get from home sellers when we are talking to them about selling their home. So the biggest question that I think starts off that we get almost all the time is when is it the best time to sell your home?
Patrick Dees
Typically what we see is spring and summer. A good time to sell a home that usually follows the school season.
Greg Kurzner
Right. We find that sometimes during the summer is when most people want to move because there’s not a disruption during the school year. But I also think that it somewhat depends upon your life situation because you have to move at certain times, and it may not be ideal, but with regard to the market that we’re in currently, there really isn’t a bad time, right?
Patrick Dees
Correct.
Greg Kurzner
And unless you are only selling and not buying, again, if your concern is, well, the market’s not real good right now, or the market is so hot right now, you may do better selling your home, but you’re going to have to pay more for the home you purchase. Or if the market’s not real good, you might not be able to sell it as much as you could have last year, but you may be able to buy a home that you’re wanting to move into for less than it was worth last year as well. So it just depends. But generally, when you want to sell your home is the best time to sell, right?
Patrick Dees
Right.
Greg Kurzner
The next question I think we get a lot is how much should I ask for my home? And that’s a little two-part in that obviously we want to give you a value range that you’re going to be successful selling in. But from there, how much more maybe over what you think you’ll sell it for should you price it at? How much for negotiation in the market? So a lot of that changes depending on where we are. But what would you suggest?
Patrick Dees
First, start off by getting a CMA, which we do here all the time.
Greg Kurzner
And a CMA for those who don’t know what that means, is what?
Patrick Dees
Comparative market analysis.
Greg Kurzner
Comparative market analysis, okay. So you get that, and the Kurzner Group, we provide a professional…
Patrick Dees
We do. We do. Ultimately, we’d like to come out to the home to give you the best market value for it, to see all the details of your home that you’re trying to sell. But we can do it from here as well.
Greg Kurzner
Right. We can come up with a range of value based on just the numbers. We can look at the tax records and comparable sales to your home, and that’ll give us a pretty solid range. But like you said, in order to really dial it in, we need to see the home because there may be things about the home that aren’t evident based on just looking at the numbers or the information online. If you’ve done improvements, if your home has certain special features that aren’t visible, those are things that we need to take into account so that we know how to best price the home as it compares to others in the market. Right?
Patrick Dees
Correct.
Greg Kurzner
So on top of when to sell and how much should I price my home for, we get a lot of questions about what do I need to do to get my home ready for sale? And I know you can talk a lot on this. I’m only going to say that I think it’s better to take the time to get the home ready than to try to get it ready while you have it on the market. Because you’re rarely going to be able to make a best second impression. The first impression is the one that’s going to catch the most buyers. And so you really want your home ready if you can have it ready before you have to put it on the market.
Patrick Dees
And always include curb appeal on that too. I think that’s one of the biggest things that people miss. People don’t get the chance to see the front of the home, their home, their new home a second time. So inside, cleaning up is definitely you want to do and tuck away things and declutter. But curb appeal is also something that we advise you to pay close attention to.
Greg Kurzner
It is because it’s the first impression. And we always say that if they don’t like what the house looks like on the outside, they’re not going to go into the inside, so you have to get them at the front door.
Greg Kurzner
Okay, so the fourth question that we get a lot is how should I respond to lowball offensive offers? And in markets like we’re in, even in a hot market like we’re in right now, it is frequent where we’ll get offers on our clients’ properties that are what the client would consider to be offensively low. “I don’t even respond to that. Who do they think they are? Why are they offering so low? My house is worth so much more.” And they really get very defensive about it, right?
Patrick Dees
Yeah.
Greg Kurzner
Because you’re proud of your home and you have a feel for what it’s worth. And when somebody doesn’t offer you what you think is even a reasonable range, you’re going to react a little defensively. Right.
Patrick Dees
It’s easy to get offended with a lowball offer, but that’s what you hire an agent for is, let us negotiate. Negotiation is a process. We want to respond to every single offer and see the capabilities of that offer.
Greg Kurzner
And I always say, “It’s not where we start, but it’s where we finish.” Right? So there are cases where a buyer will come in with a low offer, and when we negotiate that and have communications back and forth with their agent, we can often get that buyer to the offer that my client’s willing to accept. And it works that way out in the wash. So while it is an emotional response and you want to just sort of say, no, forget it, being proactive about negotiating often gets us to where we need to be more often than, I say, not
Patrick Dees
Correct.
Greg Kurzner
Right?
Greg Kurzner
Okay. So the fifth question that we get a lot that we’re going to talk about today is, should I sell my house and then look to buy a new house, or should I look to buy my next house before selling the home that I’m in?
Patrick Dees
What are you telling your clients right now?
Greg Kurzner
Well, I’m saying it’s really market dependent. So in a hot market, you do want to look to try to find your next home before selling the home you’re in. And in a cold market, it’s the reverse. So the thing about a hot market is that if houses are selling in days or hours and you put your home on the market, it might sell in days or hours, and in which case, you’re going to be homeless. Right? You’re going to be staying in your friend’s basement or having to rent a hotel room or something. And that’s not ideal. So you would want to then try to find a home to move into and get in control of that before you look to sell your home. Obviously, in a cold market, where there’s lots of homes to pick and your home may not sell quickly, you don’t want to go ahead and commit to another house that you have to buy, and then you have two mortgage payments while you’re trying to sell your home. And you also pointed out that it’s somewhat dependent on people’s financial abilities and their timelines. But in an ideal market, if you could potentially afford to negotiate and get a new home under contract and purchased before or in front of selling the home that you’re in, in a hot market, that really makes sense. And that’s what I’m telling our clients to do or to consider doing now.
Greg Kurzner
Okay, so that covers the top five questions that we typically get from potential home sellers who are thinking about putting their homes on the market. But there are a lot of other questions that we get as well, right?
Patrick Dees
Correct.
Greg Kurzner
So we’ll have some more videos rolling out to answer those questions. For now. I’m Greg Kurzner.
Patrick Dees
Patrick.
Greg Kurzner
And we’re with ERA Atlantic Realty. If you want to know more about the Kurzner Group or you want to talk to us about potentially selling your home, reach out to us. You can reach us KurznerGroup.com, or you can call us or text us at 678-869-9000. And we’d love to talk with you. We’d love to answer any questions you have. We’ll come out and look at your home, give you a free and no obligation comparative market analysis and see if we can get your home sold. So take care and we’ll talk to you soon.
