Selling a home requires a lot of you. Keeping your home clean while living in it, frequent or last minute showings and not having a perfect timeline in sight can all lead to feelings of stress and even negativity. Knowing what to expect, having a good plan in place to follow and having a great real estate agent on your team will help you maintain a positive attitude.
Here are some tips to help you stay positive and stress free while selling your home:
Have a plan
Showings, even last minute showings, don’t have to be chaotic or disrupt your life. Having a plan in place that you execute with ease before every showing allows you to just follow a list of steps before each showing and worry less about if you may be missing something. You should also have a plan for where you and your family will go when a showing comes up. If you have pets, decide ahead of time if you will take them out of the house, where you will bring them, and what items you’ll need to bring with you to keep your pets happy. Where you choose to go during showings should be welcoming on short notice in the case that a showing is booked last minute. A good realtor will keep inconveniences to a minimum by setting up reasonable boundaries for showings which respect your time and family dynamic. It’s important to be flexible when selling your home, but cut-off times for showings when you have young children that go to bed early is an example of a reasonable boundary your realtor can respect.
Keep it clean
While your house is on the market you shouldn’t have to continuously do deep cleaning to make it presentable. One really good deep clean before you list your house is often a great idea and enough. Moving forward, diligently maintaining a clean home will save you time and make it easy for you to get the house ready for a showing. If you maintain a clean home, you won’t feel stressed when you find out you have potential buyers coming through last minute. Get in the habit of making all the beds first thing in the morning, washing dishes and putting them away after you use them and wiping down surfaces in the kitchen and bathrooms after using the space. Keeping up with laundry may seem daunting, but it will be so much easier than hiding dirty or unorganized laundry right before showing your home. Get your family on board with putting things away after they use them, this will keep your home decluttered and allow potential buyers to envision themselves in the house as if it were their own.
Don’t take it personal
Feedback is an important part of the selling process. Buyer feedback along with input from the buyer’s agent will convey what real, interested people feel about your home. Don’t take feedback from potential buyers as a personal attack. Rather than taking feedback personal, do something about it. Most of the feedback you will receive will be founded on aspects of your home that you can change. Feedback on things such as listing price and the condition of your home are so valuable and give you insight into things you might not be able to see yourself as a biased owner. The more objective you remain during the selling process, the less stress you will experience when you receive a low offer. Rather than take offence, seek more information from the potential buyer to find out why they feel your home is worth what they offered. Some feedback can reflect your marketing and help you make improvements to your listing. For example, if you receive feedback that your home appears smaller than it does in the listing images, you should adjust your listing to be more accurate. You can embellish all you want in your listing but you can’t trick potential buyers once they step foot in your home and you don’t want people to feel deceived.
Work with an experienced real estate agent
Real estate agents not only take on the responsibility of managing all the aspects of the sale you don’t understand, they also make the selling process significantly easier and less stressful for you. An agent who will have clear, open and frequent communication with you will make you feel at ease during one of the most important purchases of your life. Having a lot of experience and having a proven track record are very valuable qualities you want to look for in a real estate agent. The more experience an agent has, the more they will understand the unique dynamics of sellers and how to keep them stress free and positive during the process of selling their home.
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If you are seeking advice on selling a home in the Ottawa area, or have more questions for us, we are happy to provide you with helpful guidance and support. Email us at info@buyandsellottawa.ca or call us at 613-590-3036.