Thinking about selling your house? Look no further. Here’s our checklist of steps to help you get organized and get started.
1. Before you take any action, meet with your Team North Star Broker for a walkthrough of your home. Once we have a better feel for the property, we can can begin discussing a market analysis and determining a potential price of your home. Knowing if the estimated prices meets your financial needs will help you better plan you next steps.
2. If the price is right, you’ll then want to consider where you’ll be moving. Our current market has a relatively quick turnaround rate. We would expect your property to sell within 30-90 days, so you need to know where you will go once your home sells.
Whether you’re staying local or moving away, consider a few options for how to approach your move:
- You can pre-rent a place to move within 60-90 days. We can help you find this!
- You might also qualify to get a bridge loan which would let you buy, move and then sell your current home, making the timeline less stressful.
- You can also get a storage unit and begin moving smaller personal items out of the home. This will give you have a headstart on the moving process later, and make it much less stressful. (This also makes decluttering and staging much easier).
3. Start decluttering! It’s time to think of your house as a product rather than a home! Detach yourself and look at it with a fresh eye. Maybe start packing up boxes and storing those personal items you want to keep. Take whatever is left and start donating or posting it for sale online.
4. Consider paying for a pre-inspection. This can help identify a list of actions you need to take and items to repair before listing your home. Alternatively, if you don’t have the time or resources to fix everything, this list can act as a disclosure of items the potential buyer will need to address. A pre-inspection can minimize surprises during the Contract process.
5. Make any small repairs you know about whether from that pre-inspection list, or just your own knowledge of the home. This includes tasks such as freshening up the paint, fixing a broken latch or repairing the sprinkler system, etc.
6. Stage your home to sell! You can either hire a professional or do it yourself. We encourage you to reach out to us at Team North Star and we’ll make a courtesy visit to share advice. We’ve had lots of experience with other local homes and we can let you know what we have seen work to help a Buyer “see” your home and appreciate it. Whether accurate or not, buyers often assume that if a house is well organized, then it has also been well maintained.
A few things to consider:
- Organize your closets (If a potential buyer sees that your belongings don’t quite fit, they may assume theirs won’t either)
- Clean up that junk drawer
- Liven up the outside porches with some freshly potted plants
- Add vases of fresh flowers to different rooms in your house
- Make sure all of your light bulbs work
- Straighten up the garage.
7. Plan for walk-throughs. When selling a home, there is a period when people will be visiting the property to get a feel for the space. Here are a few questions to ask yourself before opening your doors to the public
- Do you need to plan to remove pets?
- Do you have a home security system that may go off?
- Do you have copies of your keys?
- Do you want a Team North Star agent to accompany showings if they are available?
- Do you have a place to lock up valuables?
8. When you are ready, meet with Team North Star again to sign your listing agreement and finalize your Contract to Sell. This is also when we’ll create a schedule for putting your home online in the MLS, Realtor.com, and other appropriate sites.
9. Consider a professional clean (courtesy of Team North Star) before the photographer comes. You’ve gone to a lot of work to make sure your house is neat and ready for the market, and this last touch will really make it shine.
10. Be ready for the professional Photographer (courtesy of Team North Star) to visit your home. Go back through your decluttering steps and tidy up anything you may have overlooked.
Here are a few items to help you get started:
- Make the bed(s)
- Clean and put away the dishes
- Add some fresh flowers
- Open the curtains/blinds and let in the natural lighting
- Turn the lights on in the house
- Sweep and neaten the exterior
- Go back over it and generally make sure everything is picture perfect!
That’s it! Once the photos are taken and your house is published to the MLS, you can take a breath and know that Team North Star is here and ready to help you through the next steps once someone is interested in buying.