Selling a home is a complicated process. Under normal circumstances, it involves hiring a real estate agent, working with a lawyer, and spending weeks or even months playing a waiting game. And more to the point, selling your home has the potential to be expensive – but it doesn’t have to be. Savvy sellers, or those who simply don’t have money to commit to the process, can minimize the costs involved in selling a home.
So, how do you reduce the costs involved in selling a home? It can be tricky, and has the potential to also reduce your profits, but these 3 strategies can all benefit your bottom line when selling a home on a budget.
Stage With What You Have
Staging plays a key role in selling your home – if it doesn’t look appealing, it will be much harder to sell. When discussing the staging process, though, many real estate agents will recommend a few purchases or improvements to pull your space together. This may help, but it’s not technically necessary. Instead, if you’re on a tight budget, you can opt to stage your space with what you have. Try rearranging some things, clear the clutter, and clean thoroughly and you’ll be well on your way.
In addition to minimizing expenditures on internal staging, you can often save on improvement costs by targeting a few external aspects. Upgrade your home’s curb appeal by mowing the lawn and adding a few potted plants and you’ll get more potential buyers through the door.
Skip The Agent
Suggesting you sell your home without a real estate agent goes against mainstream advice, but it’s important to recognize that such advice is designed with very particular goals in mind. If you want to sell your home quickly, and with few added costs, rather than taking your time and maximizing the final sale price, choosing to sell without an agent is a legitimate choice. This is particularly true if you’re interested in selling your home to a cash buying company. Such companies specialize in direct sales, allowing you to avoid agents and their commission fees and generally speeding up the sales process.
Tackle Any Hazards
If you’re trying to sell your home on a budget, one of the worst things you can do is get caught up in pricing out improvements to see what low-cost changes will drive up the sales price. Instead, it’s better to focus on making critical repairs because if you’re selling to a buyer, and not a cash buying company or a developer, you’ll have to contend with the inspection report. While you don’t have to make improvements preemptively, you’ll ultimately have to choose between paying for repairs identified in the inspection report or cutting the sale price significantly. Inspection issues are one of the best negotiation tools buyers have at their disposal.
In typical sales scenarios, a lot of time and energy go into selling a home, but there’s more than one path to closing on your property. As you evaluate your financial needs, as well as your timeline for selling your home, you can make decisions about what factors you can compromise on – listing and sale price, hiring an agent, making improvements – and where you need to stand firm.
