Homeowner Decides To Sell Their Home

Many, if not most, homeowners make one or more of these mistakes when it comes to selling their house and boy, can it cost them in the long run.

1. Selling Their "Home" - Wait a minute, they ARE trying to sell their home, right? So how can "selling their home" be a mistake?

From the very moment a homeowner decides to sell their home, they must stop thinking of it as their home, and start thinking of it as a product they are trying to sell. A house on the market is not a cherished, personal item. It is a product, plain and simple. Unless and until a homeowner begins to see their home as a product, they are going to be fighting an uphill battle that will be fraught with emotional and financial turmoil and heartache.

Sellers must take the personal out of the equation, literally and emotionally. They need to de-personalize the house itself...that means removing any obvious, highly personalized choices in their decorating (wall colors, wallpaper, family photo collections, etc). And sellers need to de-personalize their mental attachment to the house. Remember, it's a product, not the place you brought your first-born home to, or whatever.

2. Planning to Give "Credits" - So often, a home seller knows there is work that needs to be done to their house to repair or upgrade it to current standards, yet they don't want to shell out the money to do the work before they list their house. Whether they have a very dated kitchen and stainless steel and granite is the norm in their neighborhood, or they just have wallpaper they don't want to remove, they think, "oh, I'll just give the buyer a 'credit' for that." Nice idea, right? Nope! Generally speaking, a buyer is going to estimate any given job at two, three, even four times the actual cost to do the work, and their offer is going to reflect that. As an example, the seller can buy on sale and might be able to upgrade the kitchen for $5,000, but a buyer is going to ask for $15,000-20,0000 to do the same work. The home seller needs to look at "credits" and realize that saving money in the short-term (by not spending on upgrades themselves) will cost them far more in the long-term.

3. Pricing Mistakes - Sellers need to understand that their home is worth what the market will bear, not what they want it to be worth, or even what their neighbors' houses are worth. Experienced Realtors® and real estate agents know how to use comparables (comps) to estimate the appropriate price for a house. By all means, home sellers should interview a few different agents before listing their house, but price should NOT be the deciding factor on which agent gets the job.

The Bottom Line: Take your emotions out of the process and price and prep your house appropriately and stand back and watch the offers come in!

Caroline Fitzgerald is the founder of Real Estate Client Prep, an automated, agent-branded system that educates home sellers on all aspects of prepping their house for sale using entertaining emails and videos delivered right to the home seller's in-box each day for seven days. Covering topics from Curb Appeal to Storage Areas and Pricing, Real Estate Client Prep provides real estate agents and REALTORS an easy way to give their sellers a full education on preparing a house for sale. Visit http://www.reclientprep.com to learn how to get your listings prepped effortlessly!